The Garden Party

In Katherine Mansfield’s short story, “The Garden Party,” she juxtaposes ‘proper’ language with the colloquial in order to illustrate both visible and invisible prejudice against the working class. By casting an older child as the main character in her story, Mansfield is able to illustrate both the ingrained classism of her and her family, as well as the child’s ignorance thereof. “The Garden Party” was written in 1922. It takes place mostly on the property of the Sheridans, an upper-middle class white family living in New Zealand around the turn of the century. On the morning of the day the Sheridans were hosting a garden party, they hear that a man in the poor section of town (right down the hill from the Sheridans) has been thrown from

The ability to speak ‘properly’ is a privilege. It signifies a good education, the luxury of time to spend studying, and affluence enough to afford both of these things. Mrs. Sheridan sends her youngest teenage daughter, Laura, outside after breakfast to supervise the workmen and their placement of the marquee for the family’s party later that afternoon. Laura is visibly uncomfortable in her new position of power and stumbles over herself when she first speaks to the workmen that her mother hired. “‘Good morning,’ she said, copying her mother’s voice. But that sounded so fearfully affected that she was ashamed, and stammered like a little girl ‘Oh—er—have you come— is it about the marquee?’ ‘That’s right, miss,’ said the tallest of the men… “That’s about it.” (2582). Don W. Kleine points out in his 1963 essay “‘The Garden Party’: A Portrait of the Artist" that “Unlike her mother… Laura cannot comfortably wear the affected mask of social superiority; so momentarily she reverts to childhood,” (365). Laura’s first instinct after she recovers is to speak to the men and like of them as her pseudo-equals. “How very nice workmen were! And what a beautiful morning!” Before she expresses this, however, Laura quickly realizes her place and thinks that “she mustn’t mention the morning; she must be businesslike. The marquee.”

Though she doesn’t say it out loud, Laura’s thought that her father was tactless for bringing up their deceased neighbor (despite her refusal to refer to him as such) is an act of violence in the form a of microaggressive thought. The concept of microaggression is a relatively new one (It was only coined in 1970 and has only recently come into common use), but the act itself is centuries if not millenniums old. A microaggression is a subtle, indirect, unintentional, or otherwise covert form of discrimination or bias. Laura’s belief that it was tactless to mention a dead neighbor and to express sympathy for his wife and children is stems from the sentiment that this caste of people is less important than their own. Because these people matter less, discussing their tragedies isn’t mandatory. It isn’t even important. It’s tactless and inconvenient, and the man who died messed up Laura’s afternoon. The microaggression is the tip of the iceberg. It expresses and further normalizes a deep seated prejudice and long-term inequality between the upper-middle and working classes, and, when unpacked, expresses the inherent, explicit violence of the class system in this