Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party': A Study of Class, Aesthetics, and Identity, Apuntes de Literatura

¡Descarga Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party': A Study of Class, Aesthetics, and Identity y más Apuntes en PDF de Literatura solo en Docsity! Katherine Mansfield is a writer of short stories from New Zealand. She was born in a privileged context. However, she was not remarkable in this period. She travelled to London to study in an English college. She started publishing short stories in magazines. In 1911, she published her first book ( collection of short stories). She lost her brother in 1912. In 1918 she married an intellectual figure. In 1917, she discovered she had tuberculosis. In 1920, she wrote Bliss. She wrote The Garden Party in 1922 and she died one year later. The Garden Party. “And after all the weather was ideal” -> Description of a perfect setting: their garden. They are organizing the garden party. The beginning makes us be disoriented as we do not know anything about the context. Ambiguity: Use of the pronoun “they” but we do not know who is she referring to. The garden as an artificial space, not human made. From the very beginning they give us the information that a gardener ¡is taking care of the garden. Therefore, the idea of class appears from the beginning. It is a perfect example of free indirect speech: Third person narrator emerged but ¡tis Laura's consciousness( “ Hundreds, yes,, literally hundreds...”). Relation of the garden with the idea of heaven ( hyperbolic description of the garden). This tells us that Laura is an innocent girl, who focuses in the description of the graden as a sign of being romantic. She sees everything in terms of aesthetic; something is either ugly or beautiful. She does not understand that the garden is artificial and that the gardener makes it look beautiful. Working class as the people who make upper classes have beautiful aesthetics. Women organizing the party remind us of the Victorian ideology ( angle in the house). “There's been a horrible accident”-> Someone has died and Laura wants to stop the party, but her sister does not want to. Scott died working, suggesting that working class people can die in ways that upper-class cannot. Laura ¡is really affected by Scott's death. Possibility to divert from Victorian identity and have a different outcome in terms of her identity( that social order could change). Class division throughout the whole novel: Us versus them. Idea of the garden seen in a negative way, so there is an opposition with the beginning of the novel. The place as being ugly ( again the aesthetic view). She makes an aesthetic view but it is also a moral judgement ( because it is ugly, it is wrong). She is basically saying that they should not be there as they look ugly. She is finding an aesthetic way to feel entertained. “But my dear child, use your common sense” -> Confrontation between Laura's feelings and her mother's act to distract her. Change of Laura's perception. She changes her and because she sees herself in the mirror with the hat and she likes it. Another aesthetic view as she realises she can be beautiful. She is also accepting her position in society ( kind of an act of crowning). She starts thinking about how her mother may be right. Her first resolution is to continue with the party; She is surrending a way to her mother's ideology and social concern ( hostess). Her social concern has become blurred. She is putting a distance between the tragic events and her identity. Examples of material beauty( only upper-classes can enjoy beauty). “Laura only wanted to get out, to get away” -> Not a clear and close ending, typical of modernists stories. At the end, she is creating irony ( “He quite understood”) because we know that he did not understand. When seeing the corpse, she is beautifying the corpse. Aestheticizing Scott's dead body. Epiphany -> Realisation that her actual identity is to be a hostess. She is performing the role of a child affected by his death. She does not have the conceptual tools to articulate the feeling of sadness, she can only articulate things in an aesthetic way.