“The Garden Party” Interpretation Analysis

One can appreciate Katherine Mansfield’s, “The Garden Party”. This short story opens up with a character named Laura Sheridan and her conventional family’s’ lavish life of living. Mansfield portrays the correlation between different social classes and the contrasts of illusion versus reality. In detail, this can be exhibited through Laura Sheridan, when she opens herself up to the external world and discovers the death of her neighbor, Mr. Scott. Laura experiences many self-inflicting conflicts throughout the story with the correlation of different social classes and the ideal themes of illusion versus reality.
Mansfield begins by setting off a turn of events when Laura expresses self-curiosity of Mr. Scott’s death. At this point Laura is awakened of this phony life she has been trapped in by her mother. She expresses feelings of anguish when she is conversing with her mother, “ you’re being very absurd, Laura…people like that don’t expect scarifies from us”(Mansfield 1344). Mansfield achieves the use of much absurdity coming from Mrs. Sheridan, who believes in the idea that one class is superior towards another and they should not face contact with one another.
Mansfield at this point recognizes Laura’s revelation and begins to give emphasis to the idea that Laura can’t accept the idea of death; she is too young to understand such things. Accordingly, Laura becomes aware that death is part of life, and she becomes also aware about their life of the upper class. In fact, this disillusions Laura when she realizes that she is living in a dream, where everything is good; their life is only about fine things. She has no idea about what she sees now, this means, she has no idea about what exists outside their world. However, the Sheridan family is living in a sublime world, in which everything is ideal, and privileged. In spite of this, Mrs. Sheridan, I think, is escaping from reality. She doesn’t want her children to have any contact with the other class, and this is clear when Laura is talking with the working man about the marquee, Laura thinks: “…whether it was quite respectful of a workman to talk to her …”(Mansfield 1339). At this point, Laura’s feeling is not hers; this is because of her mother’s attitudes toward them. For the reason that, throughout the story Laura feels sympathy toward the workmen, and from her discussion with them, she discovers that they are alike. Thus said, the Sheridan’s life appears more comfortable even when Mansfield is talking about them she uses only positive images, pleasure, flowers, songs, even in the house is highly organized. While talking about the Scotts and their class, only images of dark, ugliness, sorrow, disorder, and chaos came to our minds. On the other hand, Mansfield gives certain importance for many words by repeating them persistently, especially hats, lilies, flowers, all those are symbols of wealth and superiority, in connection to the Sheridan’s. Nevertheless, we can learn that Laura doesn’t represent only the Sheridan’s, but also the whole upper-class people who live in an illusion of money and prestige.

Thus, all over the story we can perceive the difference between the upper class and lower-class lives. Even the language in their description is different. I think that the latter is more similar to the real life, because there is no life about only fine things. In short, I believe that speaking about this theme of illusion versus reality; illusion is related to the Sheridan’s’ world, while reality is related to the Scotts’ world, although it is somehow rigid. This means, the Sheridan’s’ are living in a world which they see as ideal, but in fact it is an illusion. Therefore, Laura’s visit to the Scotts house is considered as a consciousness from the illusion she is living in.