Many of Katherine Mansfield’s stories, including “The Garden Party,” take place in New Zealand, Mansfield’s place of origin. Mansfield was born into a socially prominent, wealthy family, much like the Sheridans in “The Garden Party.” The Sheridan Estate, the story’s primary setting, is based on Mansfield’s childhood home.
The story opens in the Sheridans’ garden on a day they plan to host a party. The narrator describes the garden in idyllic terms:
They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine.
The bright and cloudless weather emphasizes the garden’s beautiful, pleasing nature. The garden is an aesthetic space rather than a practical one; the gardener works to make the plants appear beautiful instead of cultivating them for a more functional purpose, like eating. The karaka-trees are described as “lovely, with their broad, gleaming leaves, and their clusters of yellow fruit.” The garden’s lushness is later contrasted with the meager garden patches of the Cottages down the hill, where “there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans.” Mansfield uses this descriptive language to emphasize the Sheridans’ privilege and class position. Their world is one of beauty and luxury, disconnected from the harsh realities of life.
Mansfield also uses vibrant imagery to extend the lush, dreamlike world of the garden to the Sheridan home:
The house was alive with soft, quick steps and running voices. The green baize door that led to the kitchen regions swung open and shut with a muffled thud. And now there came a long, chuckling absurd sound. It was the heavy piano being moved on its stiff castors.
Sensory details, such as the sound of the piano and door opening, create the sense that the house is “alive,” almost like an animal or person. By contrast, the Cottages down the Hill, where Scott’s death takes place, symbolize death and the harsh realities of working-class life:
They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighborhood at all […] mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. […] The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans’ chimneys.
The narrator describes the cottages in wholly negative terms, ”mean,” “sick,” and “poverty-stricken,” incomparable to the beauty of the Sheridan Estate. This dismissive tone reflects the Sheridans’ privileged point of view and, moreover, highlights how class influences their attitudes and actions. Laura’s descent into the Cottages after the garden party thus represents her attempt to cross class boundaries.
