Short Fiction, Part 2: Style, Class and Free Indirect Discourse in Mansfield's "The Garden Party", with Canadian and Indigenous Short Fiction

Hook: the party must go on

Your family is hosting the biggest party of the year. The food is ready, the band has arrived. Then you hear that a young man who lived just down the road has been killed in an accident, and his family is grieving a few hundred metres away. Do you cancel?

That is the question at the centre of Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party (1922). Mansfield was born in New Zealand in 1888 and wrote in England; she died in 1923. The story is short, but every sentence is doing two jobs: telling you what happens, and showing you how class shapes what people are able to see and feel.

The story in brief

The opening sentence sets the tone: And after all the weather was ideal. (Notice And: the story begins mid-thought, inside the family's excitement.)

The wealthy Sheridan family is preparing a garden party. Laura, one of the daughters, is sent to tell the workmen where to put the marquee (a large party tent). She likes the workmen and thinks the barriers between classes are silly, while also noticing every detail of their manners.

News arrives that a young carter (a man who drove a horse and cart for work), Mr. Scott, who lived in the poor cottages at the bottom of the lane, has been thrown from his horse and killed, leaving a wife and children. Laura wants to stop the party. Her sister Jose says she is being absurd, and their mother says that People like that don't expect sacrifices from us. Then her mother gives Laura her own beautiful hat; looking at herself in the mirror, Laura decides to think about it later.

The party is a success. Afterward, Mrs. Sheridan has an idea: send the leftover party food to the widow in a basket. Laura goes down the lane, still in her party dress and big hat. In the cottage she is shown the young man's body. He looks peaceful, as if asleep; to Laura he seems wonderful, beautiful. She sobs and says the only thing she can think of: Forgive my hat. Outside, she meets her brother Laurie and tries to explain:

"Isn't life," she stammered, "isn't life—"

The story ends with Laurie's answer: "Isn't it, darling?"

Free indirect discourse: whose voice is this?

Mansfield rarely tells us Laura thought. Instead, the narration slips into Laura's voice: her exclamations, her slang, her shifting moods appear in third-person sentences. This is free indirect discourse. It lets us feel with Laura and, at the same time, notice where her thinking is limited.

Here is an original short passage written for this lesson in Mansfield's style, so you can see the technique clearly:

Clara carried the tray out to the porch. Really, it was too ridiculous. Why should a person have to smile at Mrs. Hale just because Mrs. Hale owned the bakery? Clara smiled at her anyway.

The first and last sentences are plain narration. The middle two (Really, it was too ridiculous. Why should a person...) are Clara's own thoughts and words, but with no quotation marks and no she thought. That blend is free indirect discourse. Notice the irony: the narration lets her protest, then shows her obeying anyway, just as Laura protests about the party and then puts on the hat.

The ending: unfinished on purpose

Laura's last words are an unfinished sentence: Isn't life—. Is life wonderful? Terrible? Unfair? She cannot say, and Mansfield will not say for her. Laurie's answer, Isn't it, darling?, seems to understand, but it may also be too easy: he does not ask what she means.

Read through a class lens: Laura's experience of death is beautiful and moving to her; she sees the dead man as peaceful, wonderful. But the widow has lost her husband and her family's income. Some critics argue that Laura's epiphany is real; others argue that the story shows how even a sympathetic rich girl turns other people's tragedy into her own aesthetic experience. A strong reading considers both.

Canadian and Indigenous short fiction to read next

These stories are under copyright, so they are described here, not quoted. All are widely anthologized; preview them first.

• Sinclair Ross, The Painted Door (1939): during a Saskatchewan prairie blizzard, a farmer's wife, alone and isolated, makes a choice while her husband walks through the storm to help his father. Ross uses the setting (snow, wind, isolation) as a pressure on the characters, a good comparison with Mansfield's use of the hill.
• Alistair MacLeod, The Boat (1968): a Cape Breton fishing family, told by a retrospective narrator torn between his father's life on the sea and a university life elsewhere. A natural comparison with Araby's retrospective narrator.
• Eden Robinson (Haisla and Heiltsuk), the title story of Traplines (first published 1991; collection 1996): a teenage boy, Will, trapped in a troubled family, looks for a way out of the life he knows. It is told from inside the narrator's own family and community, which makes for a revealing comparison with how The Garden Party sees its poor family from outside. (The collection has dark, mature content.)

Critical-literacy question for any of them: Who is seen from inside, and who is seen from outside? In The Garden Party, the Scott family is seen only through the Sheridans' eyes; in Traplines, the point of view belongs to a young person inside the family and community being described.