The Garden Party (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): and Other Stories

By Katherine Mansfield and Lynette Felber

By the end of the twentieth century, Katherine Mansfield had assumed her place with Edgar Allen Poe and Anton Chekhov as one of the worlds most admired and respected short story writers.

Her best-known stories, "The Garden Party," "Her First Ball," and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," are widely appreciated and frequently anthologized as masterpieces of the short story form. One of a handful of writers whose names have become synonymous with British modernism, Mansfield was viewed by Virginia Woolf as her most formidable professional rival and fictionalized by D. H. Lawrence as the independent, artistic Gudrun Brangwen in his novel Women in Love. After her death from tuberculosis in 1923 at age thirty-four, her posthumous reputation was fueled by the tireless (but also self-serving) efforts of her editor and husband, John Middleton Murry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411431386

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born into a wealthy family in Wellington, New Zealand. She received a formal education at Queen’s College in London where she began her literary career. She found regular work with the periodical Rhythm, later known as The Blue Review, before publishing her first book, In a German Pension in 1911. Over the next decade, Mansfield would gain critical acclaim for her masterful short stories, including “Bliss” and “The Garden Party.”

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INTRODUCTION

BY the end of the twentieth century, Katherine Mansfield had assumed her place with Edgar Allen Poe and Anton Chekhov as one of the world’s most admired and respected short-story writers. Mansfield’s third collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories, attests to her status as a virtuoso of the modernist short story. Mansfield’s readership has grown enormously in the more than eighty years since the first publication of The Garden Party. Her best-known stories, The Garden Party, Her First Ball, and The Daughters of the Late Colonel, are widely appreciated and frequently anthologized as masterpieces of the short story form. One of a handful of writers whose names have become synonymous with British modernism, Mansfield was viewed by Virginia Woolf as her most formidable professional rival, and she was fictionalized by D. H. Lawrence as the independent, artistic Gudrun Brangwen in his novel Women in Love. After her death from tuberculosis in 1923 at age thirty-four, her posthumous reputation was fueled by the tireless (but also self-serving) efforts of her editor and husband, John Middleton Murry.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1888-1923) adopted the name of Katherine Mansfield when she began to publish her fiction in 1907. One of the first to benefit when British institutions of higher education opened to women, she attended Queen’s College in London. The Wellington of her childhood appears as a setting in many of her stories although she returned to her colonial homeland for only two years after leaving Queen’s. Mansfield’s youth was characterized by many brief but passionate relationships with women and men. She said of her attraction to another young woman, I feel more powerfully all those so-termed sexual impulses with her than I have with any man.¹ For reasons that appear to be related to her sexual adventures, her mother took her to a Bavarian spa for hydrotherapy in 1909 and cut her daughter from her will shortly thereafter. Mansfield’s stay ended in a miscarriage. Mansfield described herself as a writer first and a woman after,² and this dedication to her art, along with her ill health, determined her personal priorities. She married twice, first in 1909 to the musician G. C. Bowden; she left him immediately, before consummating the marriage. Mansfield and Bowden did not legally divorce for eight years, and she finally married Murry in 1918 after a six-year relationship. Mansfield and Murry often lived separately for a variety of reasons: the war, personal conflicts, and most notably her tuberculosis, which led her to seek mild climates and treatment abroad. Due to her geographical separation from Murry, Mansfield left a large body of correspondence. Her letters to Murry reveal a loving though conflicted relationship and her unsuccessful quest for a cure for her tuberculosis. Toward the end of her life she felt a need for spiritual development She claimed that "[t]he weakness [is] not only physical. I must heal my Self before I will be well,"³ and she entered the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France.

Mansfield is the master of a relatively new genre that was gaining prominence during the early part of the twentieth century. Critic T. O. Beachcroft claims that her name is inevitably linked with the emergence of the ‘new’ short story on both sides of the Atlantic, and she is one of its very earliest and most influential practitioners.⁴ Her stories appeared in avant-garde periodicals—the New Age, the Atheneum, and Rhythm—the last edited by Murry, whom Mansfield met when she was a contributor and eventually joined as an editor. Her first collection of stories, In a German Pension, was published in 1911. Mansfield’s fiction began to receive wider recognition with the publication of her second collection, Bliss, in 1920. The Garden Party was first published in 1922, now viewed a banner year for breakthrough texts of modernism: James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room also appeared that year. Don W. Kleine explains that Mansfield’s strategies of flashback, dream image, interior monologue, and, above all, an exquisite verbal equivalent of fleeting mental nuances represent an innovative originality.⁵ Although Mansfield was an innovator, she is perhaps even more significant as a cultivator who refined the modernist short story into its finest embodiment of subtle perfection.

Many of Mansfield’s stories, including the near novella-length Prelude, are autobiographical family portraits. In this volume, The Garden Party, At the Bay, and The Voyage focus on her childhood experiences. The stories of The Garden Party demonstrate that, whatever her subject matter, Mansfield’s contribution to the short story genre is inseparable from her role as an early and experimental modernist. Her stories depart from the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction: They often contain little or no exposition and the progression of the story may be nonlinear. Gillian Boddy asserts that in moving away from the concept of the short story as a narrative and . . . suggesting . . . the immense possibilities of what could be done once the artificialities of conventional plot were eliminated, K. M. had a profound influence on the development of the modern short story.⁶ Two of her most highly respected stories—The Daughters of the Late Colonel and At the Bay—are organized by numbered, nonchronological sections, what one critic terms the twelve-cell structure and finds to be her most distinctive contribution to the form of the modernist short story.⁷ Similar to Joyce and Woolf, modernist stream-of-consciousness writers, Mansfield sometimes effaces the narrator and shifts point of view from character to character. The reader’s role is instrumental in this kind of fiction—in discovering the background or back story as the work unfolds and in linking the various characters’ perspectives into a coherent whole.

Mansfield’s narratives, characterized by their economy, often use an epitomizing detail—a small, telling stroke that introduces a moment of profound irony or a joyous epiphany. Mansfield’s distinct trademark is her cultivation of exquisitely crafted endings; many of her stories terminate with a perfect moment of subtle revelation. Although they cannot be called surprise endings because plot is de-emphasized in her fiction—she shuns momentous revelations of action or plot, and suspense is missing altogether—she often concludes with an epiphany. Her use of such a moment has been compared to not just Chekhov but to O. Henry.⁸ For instance, in Her First Ball the naive Leila encounters a momento mori when an elderly man dances with her and reminds her that she too will get old and die. Yet she quickly turns her back on this grim epiphany, absorbed in youthful joy in the dance, caught in the momentum of youthful joie de vivre.

Mansfield’s subject matter is understated, never sensationalistic. Her characters are ordinary people, outwardly unassuming. Readers often see and know more than her characters, but the superiority of the reader is tempered—or burdened—with empathy and compassion. Dramatic irony is thus another technique Mansfield brings to perfection. Some of her work might be characterized as dark comedy, particularly those stories in which the characters are grotesques whose actions are both poignant and ridiculous, comic and horrendous. Mansfield admired T. S. Eliot’s poems, and Kleine places her in the post-Romantic tradition of writers who depict the wasted, unrealized life of characters such as a J. Alfred Prufrock.⁹

Critics have found that Mansfield’s early training in music influenced her story form; she studied cello but was discouraged by her father from becoming a professional musician. However, Mansfield acted as an extra in several films, and Hubert Zapf notes the way her work emulates techniques of time-lapse camera.¹⁰ Her technique is cinematic in other ways—visual as well as auditory. Her best stories demonstrate mastery of juxtaposition, pacing, timing, and compression—techniques of rhythm and composition often associated with film. One of her most original contributions is the outward visual projection of a character’s inner thoughts. In The Daughters of the Late Colonel, first published in the London Mercury and much admired,¹¹ the titular daughters’ lives are so merged that they have a simultaneous vision of a Ceylonese courier: Both paused to watch a black man in white linen drawers running through the pale fields for dear life. Yet Mansfield also signals the sisters’ individual imaginations as Josephine pictures a tiny man, who scurried along glistening like an ant. Her sister Constantia envisions a tall, thin fellow who is a very unpleasant person indeed. Similarly, in Mr. and Mrs. Dove the lovesick suitor Reggie, immediately sees his rival. When his beloved Anne says she cannot marry a man she laughs at (i.e., Reggie), it seemed to Reggie that a tall, handsome, brilliant stranger stepped in front of him and took his place. . . .

Mansfield has often been called the English Chekhov but she might as aptly be termed a twentieth-century Jane Austen. An inheritor of Austen’s barbed yet sympathetic irony, Mansfield dissects social class and the psychology of class distinctions. Characters make decisions and enact social-class prejudices of which they do not seem fully cognizant. Mansfield shares Austen’s ironic approach and her themes—social class conflict and the initiation of young women are crucial to both writers—but she also adapts many of her predecessor’s techniques. Although she often uses indirect discourse and creates ironic depictions of characters’ foibles, social interactions, and small talk, her treatment is uniquely modern. The initiation stories chart a more complex development than a simple maturation from innocence to experience. Critics, for example, cannot agree upon an interpretation of the ending of The Garden Party. The youthful, upper-class protagonist, Laura Sheridan, experiences some kind of epiphany in her visit to the dead laborer’s cottage on the day of her family’s perfect party. In a work by a lesser genius, Laura might simply encounter mortality or the reality of social-class structure in which the rich give parties while the laborers die doing their jobs. Critics have viewed the story as archetypal and mythic, a fairy tale with a twist, but there is no consensus about the nature of Laura’s experience. As Jayne Marek points out, the story involves more than an adolescent’s personal epiphany or a clever critique of upper-class complacency.¹² Mansfield’s own explanation of this story is often quoted as an interpretation. She claimed that it was about [t]he diversity of life and how we try to fit in everything, Death included. That is bewildering for a person of Laura’s age.¹³ Mansfield’s comment speaks to the complexity of her protagonist’s experience, and critics’ identification of the archetypical dimensions of the story are suggestive, yet the actual effect of the story exceeds any summary of it. Whatever Mansfield’s intentions, the story ends with a perfectly poised ambiguity which does not reveal whether Laura is inarticulate because she lacks insight and maturity or because the experience she has had is beyond words, beyond articulation.

Mansfield is also, like Austen, a woman writer whose feminism is disputed because irony makes her position ambiguous. Mansfield’s chief biographer quotes from a letter in which Mansfield said, I could not be a suffragette, and concludes that she was not an incipient feminist.¹⁴ But even as a young women she complained about the options available to women: "I am keen upon all women having a definite future. . . . The idea of sitting still and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting.¹⁵ Accordingly, Kate Fullbrook finds that [t]he ideology in Katherine Mansfield’s early writing is decidedly and overtly feminist.¹⁶ Mansfield depicts unmarried women with sympathy and satire because of their tragicomic plight in a society that allows them few options. Some of her most notable stories feature unmarried women. The Daughters of the Late Colonel, for example, was inspired by the plight of Mansfield’s long-time companion, Ida Constance Baker, whom she called L.M. or Lesley Moore. The terrifying Colonel of the story was derived from Baker’s father, an Indian Army Doctor.¹⁷ In The Singing Lesson a woman destined for spinsterhood accepts a marriage proposal with joy though the story has revealed that she is accepting a false happiness with a man who will only give her a little" love. Mansfield’s ironic treatment creates distance which produces an implied social criticism.

Mansfield’s treatment of women’s limited lives is not consistently ironic, however. In some stories her treatment is poignant rather than comic, though always eschewing sentimentality. For instance, Life of Ma Parker, based on a charwoman she herself employed in 1911 while living at Clovelly Mansions in Gray’s Inn Road, depicts the dignified and courageous grief of a woman who has borne thirteen children and lost seven of them, yet can find no place to have a good cry over the death of her grandson. The genius of the story resides in Mansfield’s proportion and emphasis. Ma Parker expects so little, yet she is denied even one moment in private to grieve. In The Lady’s Maid, the protagonist (perhaps based on Mansfield’s loyal friend, Ida Baker) refuses marriage in order to remain with her employer. The titular Miss Brill is a voyeur who lives vicariously by eavesdropping on conversations. Watching people in the park as if they were actors on a stage, she overhears a couple making fun of her and her fox fur cries in a displacement of her own inarticulate sorrow.

The strong influence of Chekhov on Mansfield’s stories resulted in posthumous charges of plagiarism. However, Ronald Sutherland points out that Mansfield’s early work bears her distinguishing characteristics even before she had read Chekhov’s work.¹⁸ Her reading of Theocritus, who wrote over two thousand years before the emergence of modernism, provides an even more unlikely influence. T. O. Beachcroft nevertheless demonstrates that Theocritus’ fifteenth Idyll provides an almost perfect model of the short realistic story that is intended for reading and reveals itself without a personal narrator and that the notion of the story as a small visual picture continued to dwell in her mind and to influence her.¹⁹ In her short life, Mansfield made an enormous contribution to an emerging genre that grew to prominence in the twentieth century. Had she lived longer, she might have finished one of her novels (she also wrote poems and diaries) or turned her innovation in different directions. We can never know if Mansfield reached her full potential, but the stories of The Garden Story epitomize her contribution as a writer who had already reached professional maturity at the time of her premature death.

Lynette Felber is a specialist in British literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author of Literary Liaisons: Auto/ biographical Appropriations in Modernist Women’s Fiction (2002) and Gender and Genre in Novels Without End: The British Roman Fleuve (1995), she is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, and Editor-in-Chief of Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History.

AT THE BAY

I

VERY early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling—how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again. . . .

Ah-Aah! sounded the sleepy sea. And from the bush there came the sound of little streams flowing, quickly, lightly, slipping between the smooth stones, gushing into ferny basins and out again; and there was the splashing of big drops on large leaves, and something else—what was it?—a faint stirring and shaking, the snapping of a twig and then such silence that it seemed some one was listening.

Round the corner of Crescent Bay, between the piled-up masses of broken rock, a flock of sheep came pattering. They were huddled together, a small, tossing, woolly mass, and their thin, stick-like legs trotted along quickly as if the cold and the quiet had frightened them. Behind them an old sheep-dog, his soaking paws covered with sand, ran along with his nose to the ground, but carelessly, as if thinking of something else. And then in the rocky gateway the shepherd himself appeared. He was a lean, upright old man, in a frieze coat that was covered with a web of tiny drops, velvet trousers tied under the knee, and a wide-awake with a folded blue handkerchief round the brim. One hand was crammed into his belt, the other grasped a beautifully smooth yellow stick. And as he walked, taking his time, he kept up a very soft light whistling, an airy, far-away fluting that sounded mournful and tender. The old dog cut an ancient caper or two and then drew up sharp, ashamed of his levity, and walked a few dignified paces by his master’s side. The sheep ran forward in little pattering rushes; they began to bleat, and ghostly flocks and herds answered them from under the sea. Baa! Baaa! For a time they seemed to be always on the same piece of ground. There ahead was stretched the sandy road with shallow puddles; the same soaking bushes showed on either side and the same shadowy palings. Then something immense came into view; an enormous shock-haired giant with his arms stretched out. It was the big gum-tree outside Mrs. Stubbs’s shop, and as they passed by there was a strong whiff of eucalyptus. And now big spots of light gleamed in the mist. The shepherd stopped whistling; he rubbed his red nose and wet beard on his wet sleeve and,