Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party"

Discussion Leader for Thursday: Amanda
As usual, the Wikipedia entry for Katherine Mansfield is a good way to start -- click here!

Much of the criticism surrounding her short story "The Garden Party" has to do with class consicousness. Laura, one of the daughters in the story, feels a certain sense of kinship with the workers and again with the Scotts. Her mother thinks it would embarrass them to receive flowers. An omniscient narrator also explains that as children Laura, Jose, Meg and Laurie were not allowed to go near the poor's dwellings, which spoil their view. Another issue in the story has to do with Death -- the realization of Laura that life is "simply marvellous" shows the death of a human being in a positive light. Death and life co-exist together and death seems to Laura merely a sound sleep far away from troubles in human life.

So what do you all think?

What do you think about this critique that comes from a web site on socialism (click here!): "The mother in Katherine Mansfield’s famous short story 'The Garden Party,' published in 1921 and printed below, behaves like a child. Throughout this fierce critique of middle-class ruthlessness, the apparently charming retreat into childish insouciance, made by almost all the characters, is portrayed as a grotesque cover for their brutality, though never satirised beyond the bounds of realism."