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Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” explores themes of maturation and the loss of innocence as its protagonist, Laura, develops an understanding that distinctions of class vanish in the face of human mortality. The story’s exposition describes the setting as a perfect summer day at the home of the wealthy Sheridan family. The sun, cloudless sky, and abundance of flowers suggest an earthly paradise where the Sheridan girls are safe and sheltered. Mrs. Sheridan and her daughters are preparing for a garden party that afternoon.
Mrs. Sheridan instructs Laura to supervise the workmen who have arrived to set up a marquee. The narrator describes Laura as artistic, someone who loves to arrange things. Laura becomes flustered when she tries to address the workers as her mother would. Instead, she switches to a more relaxed and natural conversational style. As she talks with the men and watches them work, she admires their friendliness and lack of pretense. She wishes they could be friends, and she could be a working girl. Laura is becoming aware of the class division between her family and the working class, and it makes her uncomfortable.
However, she slips comfortably back into upper-class affectations when she takes a telephone call from her friend, Kitty. A delivery man arrives with an overabundance of lilies, which Mrs. Sheridan has ordered, showing her extravagant tastes. In the drawing room, Laura’s sisters, Jose and Meg, practice a song for the party. Jose sings while Meg accompanies her on the piano. Jose’s smiling expression does not match the song’s melancholy topic and tone. This foreshadows the death later in the story and Jose’s inappropriate response to it.
When Laura and Jose go to the kitchen to deliver some party items, a man is delivering cream puffs. Cook allows them to take one, despite having recently eaten breakfast. Their interaction shows the cook’s ambivalent nature. While she is familiar and motherly with the girls, she is also called “Cook” and not her given name, reinforcing the class divide.
Later, in the narrative’s inciting incident, the delivery man shares news of a fatal accident on a nearby street. Mr. Scott, a poor neighbor and cart driver, has left behind a wife and five young children. Laura believes it to be insensitive to the deceased’s family to continue with the party. Jose strongly disagrees. The accident introduces the story’s main conflict. Externally, Laura’s attempts to cancel the party are met with repeated refusals from her family. Because of their class pretensions, they believe the success of their party takes precedence over the tragic death of their poor neighbor and his family’s mourning. Internally, Laura struggles between her love of her callous, wealthy family and her sympathies for their working-class neighbors.
As the rising action unfolds, Mrs. Sheridan gives Laura a new, extravagant hat to wear at the party. At first, Laura cannot bring herself to look at it. The hat symbolizes her desire to embrace her family’s upper-class values. When she glimpses herself in a mirror, she cannot resist how attractive she looks in the hat. Her family and their values win out as Laura dismisses her doubts about the appropriateness of the party.
At the party, Laura plays the gracious hostess, enthralled by her role. The description of the party takes up very little space in the story. It is like a happy dream that quickly passes. After the party, Mrs. Sheridan sends Laura with a basket of leftover party food to the deceased man’s house. This seemingly gracious gift shows Mrs. Sheridan’s disconnect from reality. She thinks the gesture will be much appreciated; she does not realize it is an insult to her neighbors' dignity.
The story reaches its climax as Laura walks away from the Sheridans’ wealthy home on the hill down to the Scott’s impoverished home in its literal and metaphorical shadow. She leaves behind the bright, open gaiety of the garden party and moves into the dark, enclosed sadness of the deceased man’s wake. Like a Greek hero, Laura descends into the underworld. Acting as her guide, the widow’s sister takes Laura into the home, to the grieving Mrs. Scott, and finally to the bedroom where the deceased lies. Gazing upon the body, Laura experiences an epiphany. Rather than feeling uncomfortable or distressed, Laura feels reassured. Mr. Scott looks like he is asleep and at peace. He no longer suffers the weariness of the world. She realizes that there is beauty in both life and death. And death is the great equalizer, ignoring class entirely.
In the story’s falling action and conclusion, Laura leaves the Scott home and begins to make her way back up the hill to her home. She meets her brother Laurie, who asks if the experience was awful. Laurie displays his upper-class disregard by being more concerned with his sister than with the bereaved family. Laura replies that “it was simply marvelous.” When she tries to express her complicated thoughts and feelings, she cannot. She says, “Isn’t life —” Readers do not learn exactly what she discovered about life. However, by venturing out of her safe, sheltered home, Laura has matured, gaining a new understanding of life and death, as well as of class.
