56 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine MansfieldThe Garden Party
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Historical Context: World War I
While the characters in “The Garden Party” are not bound by a specific historical period, this story demonstrates how World War I (1914-1918) profoundly impacted many authors of the 1920s. During this decade, the European continent experienced political, economic, and social upheaval, including the rise of fascist ideology and leadership, the spread of communism, and the economic collapse and devaluation of currencies, such as in Germany’s Weimar Republic. Placed in the historical context of war, Mansfield’s work takes on new significance, especially with its characteristic themes of mortality, disillusionment, and emotional alienation. Analogous to how Laura’s adolescent naiveté crumbles upon meeting the somber reality outside her household gates, the author’s generation ended its adolescence with World War I and was ushered into an era of maturation characterized by confusion, disarray, and restructuring.
For Mansfield, this story is a personal reflection on not only the broader themes of life and death in post-World War I Europe but also her own experience of being a young woman navigating the world. Literary scholars have compared Mansfield to Laura, as the author left behind her privileged upbringing in New Zealand to face the realities of the world in the United Kingdom. This story may also have been written in a time of nostalgia and life reflection, as Mansfield wrote it while receiving treatment for tuberculosis in Switzerland. She died in 1923, one year after the story’s publication in her collection The Garden Party and Other Stories.
Literary Context: Modernism
Born in New Zealand in 1888, Mansfield moved to the United Kingdom at an early age and spent most of the rest of her short life involved in its literary scene, where she would have profound influence and earn her reputation as a crucial master and early proponent of the Modernist short story.
Throughout Mansfield’s lifetime, her technique continually evolved; but, like most literary Modernists, she prioritized character psychology—and its revelation through narrative voice—over traditional dramatic action or plot structure. Among her primary tools for crafting character psychology is a technique called free indirect discourse, a style of third-person narration wherein an omniscient narrator occasionally adopts the subjective perspective (and even the style of diction) of a character. For example, when Laura rests indoors and delightedly listens to the many small noises of her old house, the narrator says, “But the air! If you stopped to notice, was the air always like this?” (3). This is Laura’s perception, but instead of prefacing it with dialogue tags like “Laura said” or “Laura thought,” the narrator simply speaks the subjective thought as though it describes an objective reality.
Mansfield’s writing especially influenced author Virginia Woolf, who is well known for helping pioneer the Modernist writing technique of stream-of-consciousness narration (a technique Mansfield used also). Woolf was a part of the famous Bloomsbury literary group of authors in London, which, like other Modernist writing groups, experimented with different literary techniques and styles that departed from tradition. Mansfield was associated with many of the Bloomsbury group writers yet was stylistically distinct enough that she is not usually affiliated with them. Woolf greatly valued Mansfield’s input, and she shared her own stories with Mansfield for feedback, praising Mansfield particularly for her style of prose. Many scholars consider Mansfield one of the best short story writers, with “The Garden Party” epitomizing her prowess. Her style still influences contemporary authors; in fact, in the novel Spring (2020), Ali Smith focuses much of her narrative on the period in which Mansfield wrote “The Garden Party” in Switzerland.
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