Published: 1922
Category: Society
Text: Classic Reader
Summary:
The accidental death of a young husband and father is the seed that allows the illusion of class distinction to take root and grow in the fertile ground of a young girl's mind.
Analysis:
Mansfield deftly employs an array of metaphors: flowers, hats, food, topography, and technology to describe a gradual change in a young girl's, Laura's, view of the people and events that fill her life on a day when "Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold"; implying the girl's changed view will be the result of an illusion created by a golden veil thrown over her head to turn her clear (true blue) vision hazy.
The story's title, "The Garden Party", itself, suggests a lovely summer's day of innocent pleasures while at the same time reminding us of the Garden of Eden and the possible loss of innocence as well as an indulgence in pleasures that may be sins. The idea of supplanted innocence is reinforced in the first paragraph where we are told
The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine.Daisies, white spring flowers often associated with children and innocence, have been replaced with "dark flat rosettes". Later in the story we find that fake gold daisies decorate the brim of a hat given to Laura by her mother; not a "sweet hat" like the one her friend Kitty "wore on Sunday" but a "black hat" that made Laura look "Spanish", "striking" and "stunning" and directed her thoughts away from others
Just for a moment she had another glimpse of that poor woman and those little children, and the body being carried into the house. But it all seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper.and onto herself "Never had she imagined she could look like that." Her new hat induces new thinking. The man's death, which took place "just outside the front gate", and his family's grief, which she first viewed as personal, "they're nearly neighbours", are now seen impersonally "like a picture in a newspaper." In fact, the whole impoverished community is now unreal to her, they are like the old woman with "her feet on a newspaper."; they no longer tread on common ground. Laura, her family, the garden, occupy the top of the hill, the dead carter, his family, neighbours and "cabbage" patches, the bottom. She does not bring them the "bread and butter" she nourished herself on at breakfast but the "fancy cream puffs" she indulged in later; filled with a "whipping cream" that induces an "absorbed inward look".
Instinctively recognizing her new view as false, "if only it was another hat", Laura blurts out "Forgive my hat", knowing she is no longer capable of putting it aside. As she re-climbs the hill, her brother emerges from the shadows and asks if she was crying "Laura shook her head. She was." She has learned to lie.
