Beauty, Refinement and Detachment Theme Analysis

“The Garden Party” suggests that beauty is a double-edged sword: it is as much a worthwhile source of pleasure as a way for the privileged Sheridans and their associates to detach themselves from the suffering that surrounds them. In this story, social elites become so focused on the surface appearance of things that they seem to lose a normal range of human emotion; they position themselves as viewers of, rather than participants in, the world.

The Sheridans, for instance, carefully cultivate their garden as an aesthetic space; from the start, the reader is told that the conditions are “ideal” for a garden-party. The weather, flowers, and lawn are divine, the sky is “veiled with a haze of light gold,” the roses apparently know their impressiveness, and “the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.” This contrasts with the cottages’ gardens, which have “nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens, and tomato cans.” For the poor, a garden is for growing food, a way to eke out a living, whereas for the Sheridans a garden is about consolidating and packaging beauty for the sake of social recognition.

But beauty, although a luxury, still has a strong hold over the Sheridans and other characters of their class. It is provocative and distracting; they respond to it instinctively, with involuntary physical outbursts and mental associations rather than deliberate contemplation or analysis. When the florist’s man delivers a ridiculous amount of canna lilies, for instance, Laura feels their beauty physically: “she crouched down as if to warm herself at that blaze of lilies; she felt they were in her fingers, on her lips, growing in her breast.” Likewise, when Laura catches a glimpse of her own beauty in her bedroom mirror, her sympathy for the Scotts begins to fade and she gives into the temptation to prioritize the immediate pleasure of the garden-party over her conscience. But, two paragraphs later, when she sees Laurie still in work clothes, she recalls the world outside the party and suddenly thinks of Scott’s death; Laurie’s own sudden and forceful reaction to Laura’s beautiful hat, however, leads her to immediately forget Scott again.

Mansfield’s description of the party itself is entirely a series of disjointed surface details: strolling couples look at the garden, people compliment Laura’s appearance, and the guests’ happiness is a contrived performance rather than genuine feeling: “what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.” One of the Sheridans’ guests, Kitty Maitland, sees the band and “trills” her only line, “aren’t they too like frogs for words? You ought to have arranged them round the pond with the conductor in the middle on a leaf.” While she is a minor character, Maitland is also the only named guest in the story and, accordingly, the reader’s only window into the Sheridans’ social circle. Her concern with the band focuses on their appearance—and how they ought to be arranged for the most striking visual effect—even though they are there to play music (which is never described). Whereas Laura worries whether the band needs a drink, for Maitland the band is purely a thing to look at and their beauty deprives them of humanity.

But Laura is not immune to this pattern of aestheticizing the poor: when she sees Mr. Scott’s body, Laura does not see him as dead, but rather perceives “a young man, fast asleep” whose expression says “Happy… happy… all is well.” She thinks his body is “wonderful, beautiful,” and the tranquility of his lifeless body prevents Laura from feeling the sense of tragedy and injustice that she ought to at his death. She blurts out “forgive my hat” because she remains so distracted by the fact that she looks out of place in the cottages that she forgets the deep sense of tragedy she originally felt when she heard about his accident. She sees the poor worker’s body as a kind of art, the same way her family sees their garden. At the end of the story, it is unclear whether Laura has returned to an appreciation of the tragedy; when she says “isn’t life—” to her brother as she leaves the Scotts’ cottage, her inability to express her thought suggests that life, death, and the struggle to survive poverty are far more consequential than the cultivated surface beauty of the Sheridan family’s lives and garden.

The other Sheridans’ indifference to death suggests that Laura has learned something they might never experience. Jose and Mrs. Sheridan are unable to conceive Scott’s death as a real tragedy that happened to a real person and affects a real family. Analogously, when Jose sings the song “This Life is Weary,” because everyone is so preoccupied with the quality of her voice, nobody seems to notice that the song is actually about death and suffering. Jose sings with “a brilliant, dreadfully unsympathetic smile,” and the song’s last lines (“This Life is Wee-ary / Hope comes to Die / A Dream—a Wa-kening”) foreshadow the story’s conclusion, where Laura sees Scott’s death as a dream and then experiences her own sort of awakening. It also emphasizes the way that the rest of the Sheridans never awaken from this dream. Their inability to see past superficial beauty makes them monstrous and leads them to miss out on real, spontaneous experiences that are valuable in themselves rather than orchestrated for show. For instance, Mrs. Sheridan tries to send Laura to the Scotts’ house with arum-lilies because she thinks it will impress them—she tries to send beauty instead of sympathy or condolences. (Jose then suggests that the flower stems might damage Laura’s clothes, so Mrs. Sheridan decides not to send them at all because preserving her daughter’s beauty is more important.) The beauty of surface appearances repeatedly seduces the Sheridans, distracting them from the reality of death.