This extract is from the final two pages of Katherine Mansfield’s short story, ‘The Garden Party’. The narration follows Laura (the protagonist) as she visits her neighbours house to deliver a basket of food after one of them has died. This happens on the same day as her family’s garden party, and the extract explores Laura’s emotions during this experience.
The text is written in third-person narration using free indirect discourse, which is where the narrator expresses the thoughts that clearly belong to a character.[1] This has the effect of showing Laura’s unspoken thoughts, and allows Mansfield to move between different viewpoints.
A prominent feature of the extract is the variation in sentence length. The opening paragraph features particularly short sentences, such as ‘Laura only wanted to get out, to get away. She was back in the passage. The door opened. She walked straight through…’ (p.348).[2] This has the effect of evoking a sense of fear and claustrophobia in the reader, so they can empathise with how Laura feels in this unfamiliar house. It also adds pace to the story, symbolising how Laura hurries nervously through the rooms.
The next character we are introduced to is ‘Em’s sister’[3] (p.349, all subsequent quotations are from p.349), who is related to the now dead Mr Scott. The fact that her real name is not revealed helps readers empathise with Laura’s feelings of fear and unfamiliarity; the character is a stranger to both reader and protagonist. She calls Laura “my lass”, an informal word to describe a young woman, telling her “you’d like a look at ‘im, wouldn’t you… ‘e looks a picture”. This informal language contrasts starkly with the well-spoken lexicon of Laura or her brother, with phrases such as “simply marvellous”, “I say” or “Mother was getting quite anxious” elsewhere in the extract. This draws attention to the class difference between the families, with the Scotts portrayed as working class. These quotations also show the lady to seem unfazed by her relative’s death, offering the guest to “look at ‘im” as though his body is some spectacle for viewing. Furthermore, “’e looks a picture” means that he looks good, which again seems bizarre to say. Due to the class difference, Laura may not be used to such an upright and frank way of speaking.
We later learn that Em’s sister has a ‘fond and sly’ voice. This oxymoron perhaps represents Laura being unable to decide if the lady is kind, with a ‘fond’ voice, or is ‘sly’ and untrustworthy.[4] This makes the character more mysterious for the reader too. She tells Laura “come along my dear”, which is immediately followed by ‘Laura came’. The short sentence that quickly follows on from the lady’s command creates tension by perhaps showing Laura to be obedient out of fear.
The paragraph where Laura sees Mr Scott’s body features sibilance in ‘sleeping so soundly, so deeply’. This creates a whispering sound for the reader, reinforcing the themes of sleep in the first sentence, ‘a young man fast asleep… He was dreaming’. Furthermore, sibilance slows the pace of reading, which symbolises the slow nature of sleep[5]. Repetition is used in ‘far, far away… so remote, so peaceful’, perhaps connoting Christian ideas of Heaven and life after death. Conversely, it may show Laura as having a childish view of death; children are often told something dead has ‘gone to sleep’ as a euphemism. Instead of acknowledging that he is dead, Laura euphemises it as ‘given up on his dream’. This could reflect Laura’s innocence as a character.
There are many short sentences together in the part where Laura sees the body; ‘so peaceful… His head was sunk… his eyes were closed; they were blind under closed eyelids. He was given up to his dream’. This represents the fast pace of Laura’s racing thoughts, and contradicts the peaceful nature of what the narrator is saying. The narration continues ‘Never wake him up again… All is well… This is just as it should be’, which sounds emphatic and forced. These quotations seem to show Laura to be conflicted; these positive thoughts about the dead man make it seem as though Laura is forcing herself to feel that way. The narration reads ‘I am content’ right before Laura gives out ‘a childish sob’, then justifies why she is crying – ‘at the same time you had to cry’. Here in particular, Laura’s internal monologue and the narrator merge; we are able to access her thoughts. The fact that she cries in a ‘childish’ way further emphasises Laura’s innocence as a character, as previously explored. In this way, the extract denotes themes of growing up and losing innocence.
Upon seeing the dead man, the narrator wonders ‘what did garden-parties and baskets and lace-frocks matter to him?’ This reflects Laura’s thoughts about material things being meaningless after death, which contrasts to her previously worrying about the garden party. This could show Laura as having what Modernist writer Virginia Woolf described as a ‘moment of being’- a sudden event in a character’s life where their perception changes and they experience a revelation or discovery[6]. She seems to realise that her previous worries are trivial when faced with death. Soon after, the narration reads ‘Happy… Happy….’. The second ellipses use four dots, rather than the standard three, emphasising the long pause after death.
After leaving the house, Laura meets her brother Laurie as he ‘steps out of the shadow’. This description suggests that she is still anxious as she sees him. Upon seeing Laura crying, Laurie says, “Don’t cry”, with a “warm, loving voice”. The use of “loving” shows Laura to be at ease, not frightened, with seeing her brother.
In the final part of the extract, Laura stammers “Isn’t life… Isn’t life—”, showing her to be still in shock. Mansfield uses enigma so we never discover what Laura was going to say, whether life is good or bad. By contrast, her inability to speak is “No matter” for her brother, who “quite understood”. This alienates the reader, since the siblings know what she wanted to say but we do not, which is an example of reverse dramatic irony.[7] The end of the extract emphasises the semantic field of positive imagery, juxtaposing life and death. Despite wiping her tears, Laura says the experience was “Simply marvellous”, perhaps once again showing Laura to have had a ‘moment of realisation’.
Bibliography
Baldick, Chris, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, (New York, Oxford University Press, 2001)
Berkman, Sylvia, Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study (USA: Yale University Press, 1971)
Crystal, David, ‘On tomorrow and to-morrow and to morrow’, 29/5/2012, < http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2012/05/on-tomorrow-and-to-morrow-and-to-morrow.html > [Accessed 12/3/22]
Hanson, Clare, ‘Moments of Being: Modernist Short Fiction’, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980, ed. By Clare Hanson (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 1985), pp. 55-81
Mansfield, Katherine, Selected Stories, ed. By Angela Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Reboul, Anne., Delfitto, Denis and Fiorin, Gaetano, ‘The Semantic Properties of Free Indirect Discourse’, Annual Review of Linguistics,2 (2016) pp.255-271 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011415-040722 [Accessed 12/3/22]
[1] Anne Reboul et al. ‘The Semantic Properties of Free Indirect Discourse’, Annual Review of Linguistics 2 (2016) p.255 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011415-040722 [Accessed 12/3/22]
[2] Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, ed. By Angela Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 348
[3] Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, ed. By Angela Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 349
[4] Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 179-180
[5] Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 236
[6] Clare Hanson, ‘Moments of Being: Modernist Short Fiction’, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980, ed. By Clare Hanson (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 1985), pp. 55-81
[7] Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 130
The Ventriloquist 
Leave a comment