Reviews

The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield

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ohlordhealthisbike's review against another edition

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emotional reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

mintomillk's review against another edition

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4.0

4 stars. Mansfield is often overlooked due to the sheer volume of brilliant writers writing around the same time as her -- Lawrence, Woolf, Kafka; the modernist movement is one of my favourite time periods simply due to the amount of fantastic work that has come out during then. it is a shame, then, that Katherine Mansfield is sometimes overlooked due to the fact she primarily wrote shorter, half-developed pieces that have more to do with capturing a single fleeting moment in time, expressing a single artistic thought, than any complete telling of an event in its entirety that even the stream-of-consciousness modernists like Woolf had mastered during their time. regardless, her work is insightfully human and consequently haunting, where the conclusion of a short story stays with you afterwards as a reminder of its impact. The Garden Party is one of my favourite short stories due to its ability to capture human suffering and move on quickly simultaneously, in the true spirit of the modernists.

thaurisil's review against another edition

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3.0

These short stories feel like vignettes of everyday life. They start in the middle of the action, and we only find out who the characters are and how they relate to each other from hints casually dropped along the way as the stories progress. You feel like you're passing by characters, catching a glimpse of their life, some at more momentous occasions than others, then passing on before conflicts are resolved, as often occurs in real life.

Though the stories are unrelated, each feels like a part of a cohesive whole, because of the common motifs and themes and run through them. All are set in either New Zealand or England, the two places where Katherine Mansfield lived, and contain beautiful descriptions of flowers, gardens, sunrises, sunsets, mist, and the sea. They are atmospheric, and they have a detached, hazy wistful poignancy.

Katherine Mansfield grew up in New Zealand with three sisters and a brother. Her parents were somewhat neglectful and left her largely in the care of her grandmother. She moved to England but never truly settled down in the literary circles there. Virginia Woolf was a close friend, but while the two respected and enjoyed each other's company, there were also jealous of each other and occasionally bad-mouthed each other behind their backs. Her marriage was happy on the outside but tempestuous in reality. In her last years, she contracted tuberculosis, and while fighting death wrote several books, including this one.

These themes from Mansfield's life replay in the stories in the book. Neglectful mothers let their children grow up pampered and with little direct parental supervision. Young, pretty girls from upper class families, navigate the reality of the outside world. Some, with scornful attitudes, bully men and their own parents. Some struggle with social hierarchies, outwardly doing what is "right" and befitting of their social status (i.e. disdaining the lower classes), but inwardly yearning for the freedom and innocence of their childhood. People struggle with their inner soft feelings of love, sensitivity and sentimentality, and with the need to appear cool, unfeeling and even coarse. Many characters are lonely, insecure and nervous, and their insecurity carries them on flights of imagination that Mansfield interlays in the text, combining the characters' internal monologues with the third-person narration. And there is death. Death appears in every story, sometimes as a central theme in the story, sometimes as a touch that darkens the frivolity of the characters' lives. Love is never pure and innocent, but is rather something that happens despite the power struggles and tensions that occur in every relationship between characters.

It's difficult for me to choose stories that I like or dislike. They are all parts of a whole, illustrating similar themes that occur at different points in the characters' lives, at different ages, different circumstances and different places, with largely similar facets touching the lives of the vastly different characters.

andrewharron's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious reflective relaxing slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

spenkevich's review against another edition

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5.0

I often think of the best short stories as being perfectly fine tuned machines. Like in old cartoons where the watchmaker opens the back of some golden timepiece that counts the heartbeats of life with impeccable precision to reveal the intricate innards of gears that must be adjusted to nearly impossible standards, the best classic stories make every word count, every word ricochet off each other towards an amalgamated effect of themes and ideas that make the small collections of words resonate far beyond the sum of their parts. And, like a cartoon watch, accurately assess the heartbeats of life. Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party is such a story. Based on her own extravagant childhood home in Wellington, New Zealand, The Garden Party juxtaposes the frivolities and festivities of wealthy society with the harsh realism of death and destitution as symbolized in the poorer families living just outside the Sheridan’s garden gates. With a bold examination of class consciousness and a sharp critique of upper class snobbishness where their extravagant gates secure them from needing to feel empathy as much as securing their property, The Garden Party is an extraordinary piece that brilliantly balances the darkness and light of life into its tiny package of prose.

Having recently finished [a:Ali Smith|68992|Ali Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1620558954p2/68992.jpg]’s Spring in which Katherine Mansfield figures prominently, with Smith having also provided an introduction to her collected stories, I was eager to give Mansfield a read. I’d long been fascinated by her tumultuous friendship and rivalry with [a:Virginia Woolf|6765|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1419596619p2/6765.jpg] and while Woolf may have said Mansfield ‘stinks like a civet cat that had taken to street walking,’ she also admitted ‘I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ As we plunge into the warm, idyllic days of summer, what better story to try than one which begins ‘And after all the weather was ideal.’

This is a powerhouse of a short story that lulls you into its depiction of warm, slow joy amidst the happy anticipation of a garden party before it abruptly bashes you into a wall of death and the cold insensitivity of the wealthy for the lower classes. The story places us alongside Laura as she navigates the day, from her empathy and idolization of the working class aiding in the set-up of the party to her confronting her own family about the crassness of holding a party so near a grieving family and later visiting the house containing the dead man to offer sweets and condolences. The latter section reminded me a bit of [a:Louisa May Alcott|1315|Louisa May Alcott|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1200326665p2/1315.jpg]'s classic novel Little Women with the sisters sharing their Christmas meal with the impoverished family down the road, which is likely an inspiration for Mansfield as the other Sheridan siblings, Jose, Meg and Laurie, share names with Alcott’s characters.

‘If you're going to stop a band playing every time some one has an accident, you'll lead a very strenuous life.’

There is a sharp juxtaposition between classes present here, though Mansfield does well to remind us that distinctions are merely constructs enforced in order to oppress and depress those who do not hold power in order to retain control of it. While the happenings around the party are a celebration of beauty and life, we see how death is always creeping in and the two cannot be truly separated. Mr. Scott dies just outside the gate when thrown from a horse, but even the gate cannot keep the inevitably of death away, such as how, when singing a song to focus on how beautiful her voice is, Jose sings about death with lines like ‘this life is weary, hope comes to die’ which serve almost as foreshadowing. But best is the description of the wealthy cottages with the poorer homes, existing practically right on top of one another yet depicted as such opposites:

‘True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans' chimneys. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Children swarmed. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went.’

The descriptions have you looking down your nose at them, so couched in the perspective of the Sheridan’s and their contemporaries. The juxtaposition is in everything, from the lushness and light of the garden party to the poorer homes always described in terms of darkness. While the Sheridan house is a world with trees ‘lifting their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of silent splendour,’ amidst ideal weather ‘without a cloud,’ the people at the Scott household are ‘a dark knot of people’ curling into a ‘gloomy passage’ or crowding a ‘wretched little low kitchen, lighted by a smoky lamp.’ Laura’s journey from the glow of the garden to the darkness of the Scott household seems like a journey into the underworld to see death firsthand and bestows an epic sense not unlike the Greek myths into the narrative.

‘People like that don't expect sacrifices from us,’ Mrs. Sheridan scoffs at Laura’s insistence their festivities are vulgar in light of Mr. Scott’s death, ‘and it's not very sympathetic to spoil everybody's enjoyment as you're doing now.’ Which is really the crux of this story–the working class must sacrifice everything to uphold the world of the rich but the rich will not lift a finger for them. To them the lives of those outside their circle ‘seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper.’ Worse, they validate their inhospitality and insensitivity by assuming the worst, such as Jose insisting the Scott family are drunks and blaming drinking on the accident despite any evidence. For the Sheridan’s even the rose bushes ‘bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels’ which touches on the idea that wealth was a sign of god’s grace and divinely deserved while the poor suffer out of sin. But this cruelty only pushes Laura towards empathy and embarrassment and her hat, a symbol of frivolity is suddenly garish in the space of death. ‘Forgive my hat’ she says, meaning forgive my family, forgive my class, meaning Laura has had her eyes opened.

‘What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things.’

A quick story, but one full of power and crackling with social critiques and class consciousness. Written in 1922 as Mansfield was slowly succumbing to tuberculosis, The Garden Party continues to impress and is a marvelous little story.

5/5