Essays on The Garden Party

Words like "wealthy", "perfect", "charming", and "happy" accurately describe what you first see when you look at the Sheridan family in Katherine Mansfield's story, "The Garden Party". While words like "unsophisticated", "grieving", "poor", and "wretched" portray the working-class neighbourhood living just down the street from them. "The Garden Party", in a nutshell, focuses on the preparation and aftermath of the Sheridan family's exquisite and expensive garden party, taken place in the early ...

The short story ‘The Garden Party’, was penned by Katherine Mason, a burgeoning short story writer from New Zealand, and the story was first published in 1922 in “The Garden Party and Other Stories.” This short story dives into modernity through innovative literary techniques, such as beginning in media res and using 3rd person over the shoulder narration; and in doing so makes the age old ‘coming of age tale’ new and fresh. The short story, takes place in a small town in New Zealand, where ...

In The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield, Laura Sheridan’s inability to escape the social caste system is represented by her extravagant hat. While Laura grapples with class distinctions and accepting her role in an upper-class family, her relatives have been fully socially conditioned to ignore the misery in the outside world. Her sister, Jose, is a prime example of how cold and self-absorbed nobles were raised to be. She sings with mock passion along to a melancholy song about life being ...