Laura's Statement In The Garden Party By Katherine Mansfield

Great Essays
The garden party is a short story written by Katherine Mansfield in 1921. This short story is Truncated Bildungsroman that is a young girl who changed her point of view about life through her experience, It is “a story of the growth and maturity of a young idealistic character” (Rich, 2013). The story tells the upper-class family called Sheridans family held garden party in their house and their mother Mrs. Sheridan asks the party’s arrangement for her children to make out themselves as adults, and then the children did their work. At the same day of the party, suddenly, a workman from the Scotts- lower class family, their neighborhood from cottages died. Thus, this paper will focus on observing how class distinction in Laura’s perspective …show more content…
The basic determinant of one's class is one's relationship to the means of production. For example in late capitalist society the two basic classes remaining are the owners of the means of production, i.e., capitalists, and those who own only their labor, i.e., the workers or proletariat. In this story shows the borjuis and the workmen.

The Garden Party is in truth a pointed social satire, or, if the term is appropriate, a “short story à thèse” designed to refute the Victorian socio-moral values (Kaya, 2011). It shows moral values that Laura did towards lower-class family. In this story, Mansfield shows Laura as sensitive one between Mrs. Sheridan’s daughters responding the death their neighborhood. It might be caused by class consciousness that Mrs. Sheridan taught to her children. Her children is not allowed to have relationship or near with lower-class people because they different with them. It is shows by the narrator in page 7:
That really was extravagant, for the little cottages were in a lane to them at very bottom of a steep rise that led up to the house. A broad road ran between. True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all [...] When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might
…show more content…
However, Laura realize that she belongs to upper-class children, that makes Laura disagree with this class distinction is “nickname” that given by her sister and her mother to lower-class is inappropriate. Like in page 7, Jose, Laura’s sister, called “drunken workman” to the man who died, and her mother said their house as “poky little house” to their house in page 8. Laura thinks is really she “extravagant” if she stop the party. She just feels what those family feels. The man left his wife and his children. It proved in page 8: Am I being extravagant? Perhaps it was extravagant?. Just for a moment she had another glimpse of that poor woman and those little children, and the body being carried into the house. But it all seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper. I'll remember it again after the party's over, she decided. And somehow that seemed quite the best plan.. Now, she feels the deceased's family "seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper" to her. She decides that she will remember it again after the party is over. After the party, Mrs. Sheridan asks Laura to bring foods. She prepared the foods in the basket to be brought by Laura to Scotts’s family

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