The Garden Party first edition 1922
During the reading and discussions several points came up repeatedly. These have been gathered together below as a prologue to the readings themselves.
1. Class Divide
Why does class divide play such a major role in Mansfield's short stories? She used her writing to critically expose the rigid social hierarchies and their associated prejudices during the early 20th-century society. Her stories are deeply influenced by her own upbringing in a wealthy New Zealand family that resided on the edge of a poor district, and served as a mirror to the inequalities she observed in both colonial New Zealand and London.
Mansfield often highlights the selfishness of the upper class, showing how they maintain their luxurious lifestyles through the labor of the working class while remaining indifferent to the latter's suffering. She might have been a Marxist in a different era. George Orwell, Edith Wharton, and D.H. Lawrence, were famous for exploring the class divide in Britain and America.
Class consciousness was indoctrinated into children, causing them to treat peers as inferior based on their socioeconomic status. This too Mansfield decided was worth exposing – how children are brought up in wealthy households to disdain the working classes.
The enlightenment of Laura in The Garden Party, who emancipates herself from the class consciousness she was born into is an exemplary moment that Mansfield wants to convey to her readers: you can overcome prejudice if you think with your heart as well as your mind.
2. The short story form as inferior
The short story is often unjustly considered an inferior genre compared to the novel, largely due to its brevity and focus on a single, intense moment rather than expansive, complex narratives. The brevity imposes limitations in character development, and narrative, and make it appear less substantial. But masters of the short story know it requires immense precision, skill and focus.
True it is a slice of life rather than the whole loaf, and if the short story makes a point, it is a sharp point not a whole massive structure that has to be unravelled slowly to discover its essence.
Writing a short story is challenging because it requires maximum impact with minimal words. Every sentence must serve a specific purpose, either developing the plot or revealing the character(s). Writers must cut scenes and descriptions that do not directly contribute to the central theme or conflict. It is often necessary to start in the middle of the action, avoiding lengthy exposition or scene-setting. There is no time to waste. The world has seen great short story writers – from the time of Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales. Modern masters come from all parts of the world: Alice Munro (Canada), Anton Chekhov (Russia), Ernest Hemingway (USA), Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Edgar Allan Poe (USA), Guy de Maupassant (France), James Joyce (Ireland), Rabindranath Tagore (India), and the list goes on.
Anton Chekhov, renowned Russian playwright and short-story writer
For the same reason of time, a short story can typically only focus on two or three main characters. Evolution of the characters and any significant change must happen quickly without feeling forced or abrupt.
The most important thing is that a successful short story must revolve around a central theme with perhaps, a few interconnected complications.
Coming to the ending, short stories rely on a surprise, a twist, or a profound revelatory conclusion.
3. Mansfield’s life as a writer and its associations
Katherine Mansfield was a rare New Zealand writer to achieve international renown. She left for Europe as a 19-year-old. This sensitive documentary examines her relationships with her family and homeland, her turbulent personal life, her writing, and her early death in France in 1923, at age 34. It quotes extensively from her letters to give an account of the years of her productive life.
John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield in France 1921
John Middleton Murry (1889 – 1957) was an English writer. He was a prolific author, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married in 1918 as her second husband. Following Mansfield's death, Murry edited her work.
It seems that Mansfield wrote the short story, The Garden-Party, while she was dying of tuberculosis. Middleton Murray, her husband and primary publisher, wrote of his wife, “She loved life—with all its beauty and its pain.” In the story Laura experiences both the beauty and the pain of life, but Mansfield leaves Laura at the end of the story groping for a satisfactory definition of life.
4. The stories
Marriage à la Mode depicts the quiet tragedy of a marriage undone by incompatible desires and societal pressures, where neither partner truly understands the changes occurring in the other, resulting in mutual dissatisfaction and an ironic, sad conclusion.
The Stranger is concerned with how death affects the living, and in this respect it is like that of Mansfield’s two other short stories in this collection, Daughters of the Late Colonel and The Garden Party. In The Stranger Mrs.Hammond returning from a long absence has been greatly affected by the death of a passenger on the ship who dies in her arms. She seems distant and not very responsive to her surroundings after the experience, “She made no answer. She was looking away from him at the fire.” But the deaths also touches Mr. Hammond and deprives him of an intimacy that he has been yearning for.
Miss Brill analyses loneliness, illusion vs. reality, and aging, through the story of a fragile, solitary woman who creates a fantasy world where she's an actress in a grand play, only to have it shattered by a young couple's cruel words. Those words reveal her isolation and lead her to retreat like her fur, crying, into her “little dark room.” It explores the theme of social alienation.
Her art of writing is described by Mansfield in relation to this story in one of her letters:
I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence—I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit [Miss Brill] on that day at that very moment. After I’d written it I read it aloud—number of times—just as one would play over a musical composition, try to get it nearer and nearer to the expression of Miss Brill—until it fitted her.
5. Her colonial locales
Many of the stories in Katherine Mansfield's collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories, are written with a New Zealand locale. The specific story The Garden Party is explicitly set in Wellington, New Zealand, and is based on her own childhood home. It pictures the cloudless blue sky “veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer” and the karaka trees “with their broad, gleaming leaves, and their clusters of yellow fruit.” They stand in contrast to the “mean little cottages” down the hill that reflect the real-life landscape and class distinctions of Mansfield's youth. Its luxurious setting is based on Mansfield's childhood home at 133 Tinakori Road (originally numbered 75), the second of three houses in Thorndon, Wellington that her family lived in.
Katherine Mansfield House and Garden was her early childhood home
The collection features fifteen stories in total; while many are set in her native New Zealand, others are set in England and the French Riviera, reflecting where she lived at various points in her life.
Her work often explores New Zealand identity, social class, and gender roles within that specific colonial context.
