Childhood, Family and Independence Theme Analysis

“The Garden Party” is also a coming of age story: Mansfield depicts Laura’s struggle between, on the one hand, her sense of duty to her family and her instinct to follow her mother and, on the other, her growing dissatisfaction with her sheltered upbringing and desire to explore a broader world. Mansfield treats adolescence as a half-step to independence: Laura begins to question the circumstances and expectations into which she is born, even as she remains completely dependent on them. Her ambivalence about her upbringing—and her mother in particular—grows throughout the story and reflects both the privileges and the limitations of the structure that a nuclear family can provide.

In particular, Mrs. Sheridan’s passive-aggressive style lets her pretend that the children are acting independently while she continues to influence them. Because she recognizes that her children are getting older, Mrs. Sheridan pretends to relinquish responsibility for the party: she insists throughout that the party is her children’s idea, even as she seems to do all the planning. She asks to be treated not as a host but “as an honoured guest,” pretending to defer to her children even as she effectively plans the whole party. After the party, she exclaims, “why will you children insist on giving parties!” Mrs. Sheridan tends to talk to her children in leading questions like “don’t you agree?” and “we should still be having our party, shouldn’t we?”; Laura strongly feels that she should not openly disagree with her mother, so Mrs. Sheridan gets to pretend that her ideas are her children’s while nevertheless making her children do her bidding.

While Mrs. Sheridan’s decisions covertly control most of the action in this story, this does not mean her only function is to retrench Laura’s dependence on her family. Even though Laura was the one who originally wanted the Sheridans to reach out to the Scotts, she only goes when her mother has “one of her brilliant ideas” and decides to send her with a basket of leftovers. Without her mother’s idea, Laura simply would never have gone. And, just before Laura departs down the hill, her mother calls out, “don’t on any account—” but decides not to finish her sentence. Presumably, her order would have had something to do with viewing Scott’s body, and readers are left to wonder whether Laura would have done so had Mrs. Sheridan finished her thought.

Laura’s dependence on her mother extends beyond the obvious situations where Mrs. Sheridan compels agreement, as Laura also tends to imitate her mother when dealing with adults. When she meets the workmen, she tries to “copy her mother’s voice” and “look severe and even a little bit short-sighted.” Likewise, on the phone with Kitty Maitland, Laura’s overly-formal, ornamented speech is indistinguishable from her mother’s. Even when she inadvertently copies her mother—namely, when she accidentally sees herself wearing her mother’s hat—she falls back in line with the family consensus. Laura had never before “imagined she could look like that,” which reflects her burgeoning maturity: she is on the brink of womanhood. Laura’s dinners with the “silly boys” of other wealthy colonial families and ecstatic reaction to the beautiful canna-lilies suggest that she is also undergoing a subtle sexual awakening around this time in her adolescence.

Despite all Mrs. Sheridan’s covert influence over Laura’s behavior, the reader’s window into Laura’s thought process reveals that she clearly begins to think beyond the constraints of her family’s conspicuous and limited lifestyle. If the force that binds Laura to her family’s way of thinking is her mother’s subtle manipulation, the force that leads Laura to think independently is her own curiosity. She begins to think for herself primarily by noticing things that she is not necessarily meant to see or hear; her own curiosity leads Laura to places and perspectives the rest of her family does not reach. This starts well before the day the story recounts: even though the cottages are “disgusting and sordid,” Laura and Laurie cannot resist sometimes exploring them “on their prowls.” Their curiosity consumes them despite their class instincts: “one must go everywhere; one must see everything.” In this vein, Laura learns about Scott’s death when she accidentally runs into the cream puff deliveryman telling the Sheridans’ domestic servants about it; she is the first in the family to find out. At the end of the story, Laura ends up visiting the Scotts’ house and viewing Mr. Scott’s dead body not because she wants to see the dead man’s body, but rather because she enters the wrong room in an attempt to flee the Scotts’ house. Once she sees his body, she is transfixed by its tranquility and reaches an epiphany that, unlike her earlier expeditions into the cottages, she can no longer share with Laurie. For Laura, growing up in the Sheridan family also, to some extent, means growing out of the Sheridan family.