Most criticism of Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party” concentrates on the story as a truncated bildungsroman—a story of the growth and maturity of a young idealistic character. Critics such as Daniel S. Taylor in “Crashing the Garden Party: A Dream, A Wakening,” for example, see Laura’s initiation as a passage from the “dream…
Tag: The Garden Party
The Garden Party – Setting
Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” was written in 1922, during the period between the two world wars. In many ways it reflects the context of its creation. The 1920s saw enormous political and social disturbance throughout Europe. In the new Soviet Union, for example, the Marxist revolution was nearing completion. The Soviet Union’s powerful leader,…
The Garden Party – Literary Devices
Style Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party” employs a style that is distinctly modern in its use of impressionistic detail and stream-of-consciousness narrative method. These stylistic features also characterize the works of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and other innovative writers of the 1920s and 1930s. The narrative begins in ‘ ‘the middle of things”—…
The Garden Party – Themes
Innocence and Experience “The Garden Party” traces the psychological and moral growth of Laura Sheridan. The story presents her adolescent confusion regarding the social values of her family and her awakening to a more mature perception of reality after her exposure to poverty and death at the carter’s cottage. Laura’s self-consciousness regarding her own youth…
The Garden Party – Characters
Cook The Sheridan’s cook is a nurturing figure, allowing Laura and one of her sisters to indulge in eating rich cream-puffs that have been delivered for the garden party just after they finish breakfast. Laurie Sheridan Laurie is Laura’s older brother and closest family member. After viewing the body of the laborer who died before…
The Garden Party – Summary
Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party” opens with frantic preparations being made for an afternoon garden party. The main character, Laura, is an idealistic and sensitive young girl. She is surrounded by her more conventional family: her sister, Jose, who, as the narrator tells us, “loved giving orders to servants”; her mother, Mrs. Sheridan,…