The Garden Party Summary & Analysis

Fittingly, Mansfield introduces the Sheridan family through a detailed description of their intensively-cultivated garden, which reflects the family’s superficiality and obsession with status. Mrs. Sheridan’s passive-aggressive parenting style is immediately clear through her insistence that the children plan the party, even though she will still control most of the details.

Laura imitates her mother in dealing with the unfamiliar men because her family is the only model she has for interacting with others. However, it’s notable that when she stops being herself and starts being her mother, she is literally unable to speak. This strongly suggests that Laura’s nature is incompatible with her mother’s behavior, which is also the behavior that is expected of Laura. This sets up Laura’s internal conflict over whether to be like her family or to be herself.

Laura is uncomfortable around working-class people, but she is fascinated by them. This contrasts with her family members, who have no doubts about their inherent superiority to their workers and servants; the rest of the Sheridan family feels perfectly comfortable ordering working-class people around and cares little about their experiences or perspectives. Even though the narrator suggests that she understands the workman’s “bang slap” comment, she clearly does not: a corner of the tennis court would be too inconspicuous. Laura’s desire to understand the workmen is undercut by her class background, which makes her unable to understand what they are actually saying.

The workman’s ability to appreciate the beauty of the lavender plant surprises and delights Laura, which again points to her difference from her family: she appreciates the lavender for its existence—its beauty and scent—while her family only cultivates the garden to show off their wealth. In this moment, her internal monologue diverges sharply from her external appearance: she is delighted even though the workmen wonder whether everything is quite alright with her, which suggests again that her inner life is quite different from how her circumstances make it appear. She tries to signal her sympathy with the working classes by eating breakfast outside, but the workers probably don’t understand the message she is trying to send. This also shows Laura’s shallow understanding of what makes a person working class.

Laura is again called to family obligations, but it doesn’t seem to bother her, even though her family interrupted a pleasant experience outside. In this moment, it’s less clear that Laura’s inner life is out of sync with her family: she seems delighted to be around them, and she loves parties just as much as they do.

Laura’s work-girl fantasy ends as she returns to fulfilling her real class position. Her ability to speak like her mother without stuttering here shows that Laura does have the potential to be at home in her life. Mrs. Sheridan’s comment about the hat shows her desire to control others and her concern with appearances, while Laura’s sensitivity to the blowing winds demonstrates that she finds beauty in the everyday and the ephemeral.

Sadie is little more than a messenger, emptied of all emotion and personality. This reflects the family’s indifference to the humanity of working people, including the servants with whom they are intimately familiar. Laura’s sudden, involuntary and intensely physical response to the flowers suggests a kind of sexual awakening. Laura’s “artistic” sensibility again manifests in the way she is deeply moved by the beauty of the living things around her; indeed, whereas Mrs. Sheridan bought the excessive number of lilies so that she could finally have “enough,” Laura can appreciate them regardless of their quantity, so she thinks that there must have been a mistake. Mrs. Sheridan’s admission that she ordered the flowers reveals that she continues to run everything behind the scenes even as she professes to have no control over this year’s party.

Mansfield emphasizes the contrast between Jose and Laura, both through Jose’s pleasure at controlling the servants and in her inability to recognize the mournful content of the song she sings with delight. Jose performs primarily for her mother’s approval and breaks into a young child’s voice when she asks for it. Whereas Jose’s attitude reflects her mother’s obsession with hoarding beauty as a display of status, Laura continues to be the only Sheridan who can actually experience joy at beautiful things. Indeed, the notion that “This Life is Weary” would ever be an appropriate song for the garden-party suggests that the Sheridans and their guests are so sheltered from the suffering that poor people in their community experience that they would, like Jose, take pleasure in the song’s tune without recognizing or relating with what its words actually say.

Mrs. Sheridan is unable to admit that she forgot about the sandwich flags because doing so would be an admission that the servants know better than she does. Likewise, she accuses the children of hiding the envelope because she cannot face the possibility that she was the one who lost it. Mrs. Sheridan also evades her own responsibility for the flags by making Laura write them. Her fear of the cook is peculiar given the arrogance with which she treats the rest of the servants. Perhaps this is because the cook (unlike Sadie, Hans and the deliverymen) is actually responsible for a significant component of the party’s success.

The cook is just doing her job, but Jose congratulates her as though making the sandwiches were some sort of meaningful personal accomplishment, which reflects her inability to understand that others have to work due to their economic status. As when Laura eats outside with the workmen, eating the cream puffs at the wrong hour means breaking the social conventions of food and drink (which the sandwich flags also symbolize). Mansfield’s voice comes through in Laura’s nostalgia for past parties – after all, the Sheridan estate and Laura’s character are based on the author’s own childhood. Again, Mrs. Sheridan sees excess as impressive: the cream puffs she ordered have so much icing that the cook has to remove some of it.

Scott’s accident soon precipitates the main conflict in the story. The servants’ reactions to the news suggest that they can empathize with Scott’s family because they are from a similar social class (even though their family is roughly the same size as Scott’s, the Sheridans prove unable to do the same). Godber’s man, however, delights at being the center of attention even though he brings tragic news. Unlike the servants, he is the emissary of a company that traffics in extravagance and presumably focuses on serving rich people who would care more about the intrigue of the story than the fate of Scott’s family. Like Laura in reverse, Godber’s man’s identification with the rich overtakes his actual identity as a worker.

Mansfield introduces Laura’s central conflict with her family: whether they should go on with the garden party. Laura imagines the festivities from the Scotts’ perspective and worries that the Sheridans’ garden-party – which they are throwing for no special occasion whatsoever – would be insensitive to the mourning family down the hill. But Jose’s coldhearted response and the narrator’s description of the cottages demonstrate the disdain the rich feel for the cottage’s residents, whom the Sheridans see as intruding on what is rightfully their own neighborhood. Jose is incapable of feeling pity for poor workers, even though her family relies on servants from the same class, because she thinks the cottages’ ugliness makes them valueless. But Laura’s previous exploration of the cottages shows her boundless curiosity about ways of life beyond her own. She expects Mrs. Sheridan to exercise better judgment than Jose, reflecting her ongoing trust in her mother at this stage in the story.

Mrs. Sheridan, like Jose, only looks out for her own family’s welfare and paints the Sheridans as the true victims of Scott’s death; she snaps back into an emotionless stoicism as soon as she realizes the worker’s death hasn’t tainted her perfect garden. Mrs. Sheridan speaks in ways that probably seem ironic to Laura and the reader. For instance, Laura is worried that the guests’ enjoyment will spoil the Scotts’ mourning process, but Mrs. Sheridan suggests that Scott’s death will “spoil everybody’s enjoyment” of the garden-party. Laura’s disappointment with her mother’s lack of sympathy escalates the tension between them that has been building in the story so far, chiefly through Mrs. Sheridan’s continued attempts to control the party despite her request to be treated as a guest. The hat is another of these attempts: Mrs. Sheridan tries to distract Laura from her concern by pointing out how beautiful she looks in the hat.

For the first time in the story so far, Laura actively disobeys her mother by refusing to look at herself in the hand-mirror and leaving to her own bedroom. But she then accidentally sees herself wearing the beautiful hat, exactly as her mother intended a few sentences before, and suddenly she transforms back from a class-conscious empath into a self-conscious aesthete like Mrs. Sheridan. As soon as she begins to act on her principles and break away from her mother’s control, in other words, Laura gets drawn straight back into Mrs. Sheridan’s plan to undermine her independence. Just after Mrs. Sheridan calls Laura “a picture” in the hat, Scott transforms into “a picture” when Laura sees herself in the mirror. When she refocuses on outward appearances, chasing beauty rather than morality, Laura forgets her concern for the Scotts’ wellbeing and her anger at her mother’s passive-aggressive control. In both cases the decontextualized “picture” loses all emotional depth.

Mansfield uses Kitty Maitland and Laurie’s exaggerated personalities to satirize the presumptuousness of the Sheridans and their social class. Laura remains in line with her family’s superficiality, but she does briefly remember the cart-driver’s death when she sees Laurie in work clothes, which suggests that the same powerful beauty that Mrs. Sheridan uses to coax her daughter into agreement can also give Laura a way out of her family’s mindset. However, Laura decides not to mention Scott when Laurie compliments her hat, which represents her family’s values triumphing over her conscience yet again.

Mansfield’s incredibly spare description of the Sheridans’ party flashes by in an instant, just like the ephemeral pleasures that fill the evening. Unlike Laura, who can find lasting fulfillment in the ephemeral beauty of a gust of air or vibrant flower, the party’s guests consume the garden’s beauty and keep moving on. Mrs. Sheridan, despite earlier relinquishing the role of host, nevertheless takes it on during the goodbyes and even brings Laura with her. Nevertheless, Laura’s enjoyment does not prevent her from recognizing the band’s labor and looking out for them by asking her father to get them drinks and presumably also a moment of rest to enjoy those drinks. After the party, the Sheridans end up convening in the marquee; as a literal shelter built for them by the workmen, the marquee reflects the sheltered nature of the Sheridans’ lives, in which working people provide absolutely everything for them.

Mrs. Sheridan only has her idea when her husband mentions the accident, which suggests that she may take his input seriously (unlike the children’s). However, his comment initially bothers her, which suggests that Mrs. Sheridan sends the basket only signal to the rest of her family that they have done their good deed and need not keep worrying about the Scotts. She takes credit for the family’s goodwill toward the Scotts even though she still puts her party and friends first: she sends a basket of leftovers as an afterthought and tries to “impress” the Scotts with beautiful lilies. As during the party, her instinctual way of interacting with others is to signal her own family’s wealth, even though the extravagance of what she sends would more likely embarrass or offend the Scotts than comfort them. She continues to appear incapable of truly expressing sympathy for their pain, and her agreement that she should not risk damaging Laura’s frock by sending the flowers after all shows that the Sheridans continue to prioritize their own outward appearances above all else. Laura again disagrees with her mother’s judgment but nevertheless cannot translate that disagreement into action; instead, she dutifully does what her mother asks. Mrs. Sheridan’s decision not to finish her final line, in addition to paralleling Laura’s stutter, expresses her expectation Laura will disobey her. Given Mrs. Sheridan’s tendency to say the opposite of what she ends up doing (most notably in her insistence that she will take a backseat to the party planning) her unfinished order suggests that she may be more self-aware than she previously seemed.

As Laura heads to the cottages, she finds herself unable to rediscover the sympathy she previously felt for the Scotts; her mind is fixated on the pleasures of the garden-party, which reinforces the Sheridans’ tendency to prioritize their own happiness at the expense of feeling for others. Once she arrives, Laura is intensely uncomfortable in the lower-class neighborhood, even though she intellectually understands that class is socially constructed and arbitrary. Those earlier realizations happened inside the Sheridan home’s gates; among the cottages, for the first time, Laura realizes that social differences are based in concrete economic inequalities that she cannot surmount with her imagination alone. Also for the first time, she finds herself ogled rather than the ogler: she feels like she stands out and learns what it is like to be aestheticized rather than treated with humanity. Nevertheless, she manages to make it to the Scotts’ door, again fulfilling her mother’s wishes against and above her conscience.

Although Laura comes to express her family’s condolences, her inability to finish a sentence ends up inverting the expected social obligations: the Scott family ends up comforting the crying Laura, and Mansfield does not tell us whether she leaves the basket after all. Even here, the poor end up serving the rich as Em’s sister leads Laura around the house and shows her Scott’s body when she seems to want to see it. Laura’s preoccupation with her own guilt prevents her from feeling or expressing empathy for the mourning Em.

Laura’s anxiety gives way to a perverse fascination with Scott’s corpse, which she sees as “dream[ing]” because she cannot bring herself to see it as a corpse. Her earlier sense of outrage at Scott’s death has disappeared and plays no part in her reaction to the body. Her confrontation with death is, like Jose’s song, limited to the aesthetic; her earlier class consciousness has mysteriously faded. Even her obsession with her own hat suggests that she is too afraid of judgment to sincerely give her condolences. As with the hat when she first tries it on, the visual shock of Scott’s body limits Laura to her own perspective; she sees its beauty but not the horror its beauty masks. When she does cry, it is not because she sincerely feels pained at the circumstances of Scott’s death but rather because she feels “you had to.” She cries in order to fill a social obligation, just as the most of her family members’ displays of emotions are mere unfelt performances.

Laura and Laurie meet on the road that separates rich from poor. Laurie’s assumption that Laura must be horrified by what she has seen reflects the Sheridan party line: concern for family members who have been exposed to poverty rather than for people suffering it. The narrator pretends that Laurie “quite understood” even though he clearly does not, which reflects Laura’s increasing distance from her family as well as the Sheridans’ tendency to insist that they know best even when they are incompetent. Ultimately, however, Mansfield does not say precisely what Laura has realized, perhaps in an attempt to let the reader’s response determine the story’s meaning—much as Laura’s response to Scott’s body determines its meaning for her. It is clear that Laura has learned something about class, life and death on the day of the garden-party; however, at the end of the story she is left caught between her family’s world of superficial images and the world of authentic suffering that the Scotts represent, unable to fully communicate with either side but nevertheless privy to both.