But it is now time for Laura to try her wings. Mrs. Sheridan pushes her from the nest. She tells her to go down to the cottages to give the widow a sympathy basket of their leftovers. Laura must confront her conflict between the worldview that nags at her and the more slivered view of her advantaged p. 269 upbringing. She faces her conscience. She goes down from the safety of her home, crosses the “broad road” to the cottages, and becomes caged in the house of the dead man. She becomes self-conscious of her appearance, shiny and streaming, something apart from the people who live here. She sees herself through the eyes of the young widow and is confused that the woman does not know why Laura has come. She begins to recognize that her world does not belong here, and the realization frightens her. She wants to flee, but she must ultimately view the dead man. It is while looking at him that she chooses to see, instead of the reality of the hardship the man’s death leaves to his family, an affirmation of her own lifestyle. She reasons that his death has nothing at all to do with “garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks,” and she is thereby lifted from moral obligation. The revelation is “marvelous.” If Laura cannot explain what life is to her brother, “Isn’t life . . . isn’t life—” it is because as Mansfield writes, it is of “no matter.” Laura has learned to look at it from a loftier perspective. She needn’t pretend to look shortsighted anymore.
Wow. I’d like to say I taught her everything she knows, but that would be a lie. She never got those insights from me. In fact, that’s not the primary direction my reading tends, but if it were, I don’t believe I could improve upon it. It’s neat, carefully observant, fully realized, elegantly expressed, if obviously the product of a much more intense study of the text than I had asked you to undertake. In fact, as a group, the student observations I solicited were on the money. If your response was like any of them, give yourself an A.
If we express the act of reading in scientific or religious terms (since I’m not sure if this will fall into the realm of physics or metaphysics), all these student readings represent, with varying degrees of specificity and depth, almost clinical p. 270 analysis of the observable phenomena of the story. This is as it should be. Readers need to deal with the obvious—and not so obvious—material of the story before going anywhere else. The most disastrous readings are those that are wildly inventive and largely independent of the story’s factual content, those that go riffing off on a word out of context or a supposed image that is in truth not at all the image presented in the text. What I want to do, on the other hand, is consider the noumenal level of the story, its spiritual or essential level of being. If you don’t think such a thing is possible, neither does my spellchecker, but here we go. This is an exercise in feeling my way into the text.
I’ll be honest here. I’m about to cheat. I asked you to tell me what the story signifies first, but for my own response, I’m going to hold that for last. It’s more dramatic that way.
Way back I mentioned that Joyce’s Ulysses makes heavy use of Homer’s tale of long-suffering Odysseus wending his way home from Troy. You may recall that I also mentioned that, except for the title, there are almost no textual cues to suggest that these Homeric parallels are at work in the novel. That’s a pretty big level of signification to hang on one word, even a very prominent one. Well, if you can do that with the title of an immense novel, why not with a little story? “The Garden Party.” Now all the student respondents worked with it, too, chiefly with its last word. Me, I like the middle one. I like looking at gardens and thinking about them. For years I’ve lived next to one of the great agricultural universities, and its campus is a giant garden filled with a number of spectacular smaller gardens. Every one of those gardens, and every garden that’s ever been, is on some level an imperfect copy of another garden, the paradise in which our first parents lived. So when I see a garden in a story or poem, the first thing I do is to see how well it fits that Edenic template, and I must admit that in Mansfield’s story, the fit is also imperfect. That’s okay, though, p. 271 because the story from Genesis of Adam and Eve is only one version, and on the level of myth, it has many cousins. For now I think I’ll reserve judgment for a little bit about what sort of garden this particular one might turn out to be.
What I notice first in the text is that word “ideal”; how many times have you described your weather as ideal? They couldn’t have had a more “perfect” day. Those two words may just be hyperbole, but coming in the first two sentences of the story, they feel suggestive. The sky is without a cloud (just so we can’t but expect some sort of cloud is coming), and the gardener has been at work since dawn. Later, this perfect afternoon will “ripen” and then “slowly fade,” as a fruit or flower would. By then we will have seen that flowers permeate this story, as befits a garden party. Even the places emptied of daisies are “rosettes.” And the real roses themselves have bloomed “in the hundreds” overnight, as if by magic or, since Mansfield mentions a visitation by archangels, by divinity. This first paragraph is bracketed by the ideal and archangels—not a particularly human environment, is it?
When I see an unreal, idealized setting such as this, I generally want to know who’s in charge. No mystery here: everyone defers to Mrs. Sheridan. Whose garden is it? Not the gardener’s; he’s just a servant doing the bidding of the mistress. And what a garden, with its hundreds of roses, lily lawn, karaka trees with broad leaves and bunches of yellow fruit, lavender, plus trays and trays and trays of canna lilies, of which, Mrs. Sheridan believes, one cannot have too many. This excess of canna lilies she describes as “enough” for once in her life. Even the guests become part of her garden realm, seeming to be “bright birds” as they stroll the lawn and stoop to admire the flowers, while her hat, which she passes on to Laura, has “gold daisies.” Clearly she is the queen or goddess of this garden world. Food is the other major element of her realm. She is responsible for food for the party, sandwiches (fifteen different p. 272 kinds including cream-cheese-and-lemon-curd and egg-and-olive) and cream puffs and passion fruit ices (so we know it is New Zealand and not Newcastle). The final component is children, of which she has four. So a queen overseeing her realm of living plants, food, and progeny. Mrs. Sheridan begins to sound suspiciously like a fertility goddess. Since, however, there are lots of kinds of fertility goddesses, we need more information.
I’m not done with that hat. It’s a black hat with black velvet ribbon and gold daisies, equally incongruous at the party and at the later visitation, although I’m less impressed by what it is than by whose it is. Mrs. Sheridan has purchased it, but she insists that Laura take it, declaring it “much too young” for herself. Although Laura resists, she does accept the hat and is later captivated by her own “charming” image in the mirror. No doubt she does look charming, but part of that is transferral. When a younger character takes on an older character’s talisman, she also assumes some of the elder’s power. This is true whether it’s a father’s coat, a mentor’s sword, a teacher’s pen, or a mother’s hat. Because the hat has come from Mrs. Sheridan, Laura instantly becomes more closely associated than any of her siblings with her mother. This identification is furthered first by Laura’s standing beside her mother to help with the good-byes and then by the contents of her charity basket: leftover food from the party and, but for the destruction they would have wrought on her lace frock, arum lilies. This growing identification between Mrs. Sheridan and Laura is significant on a couple of levels, and we’ll return to that presently.
First, though, let’s look at Laura’s trip. The perfect afternoon on the high promontory is ending and “growing dusky as Laura shut[s] their garden gates.” From here on her trip grows progressively darker. The cottages down in the hollow are in “deep shade,” the lane “smoky and dark.” Some of the cottages show a flicker of light, just enough to project shadows on the windows. She wishes she had put on a coat, since her p. 273 bright frock shines amid the dismal surroundings. Inside the dead man’s house itself, she goes down a “gloomy passage”
to a kitchen “lighted by a smoky lamp.” When her visit ends, she makes her way past “all those dark people” to a spot where her brother, Laurie, “steps out of the shadow.”
There are a couple of other odd features here. For one thing, on her way to the lane, Laura is gratuitously accosted by a large dog “running by like a shadow.” Upon getting to the bottom, she crosses the “broad road” to go into the dismal lane. Once in the lane, there’s an old, old woman with a crutch sitting with her feet on newspaper. On her way in and out Laura passes individuals and small knots of shadowy figures, but they don’t speak to her, and the one by the old woman (she alone speaks) parts to make way for her. When the old woman says the house is indeed that of the dead man, she “smiles queerly.” Although Laura hasn’t wanted to see the dead man, when the sheets are folded back, she finds him “wonderful, beautiful,” echoing her admiration in the morning for the workman who stoops to pick and smell the lavender. Laurie, it turns out, has come to wait at the end of the lane—almost as if he can’t enter—because “Mother was getting quite anxious.”
What just happened here?
For one thing, as my student respondents note, Laura has seen how the other half lives—and dies. One major point of the story is unquestionably the confrontation she has with the lower class and the challenge that meeting throws at her easy class assumptions and prejudices. And then there is the story of a young girl growing up, part of which involves seeing her first dead man. But I think something else is going on here.
I think Laura has just gone to hell. Hades, actually, the classical underworld, the realm of the dead. Not only that, she hasn’t gone as Laura Sheridan, but as Persephone. I know what you’re thinking: now he’s lost his mind. It wouldn’t be the first time and probably not the last.
p. 274 Persephone’s mother is Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, fertility, and marriage. Agriculture, fertility, marriage. Food, flowers, children. Does that sound like anyone we know? Remember: the guests admiring the flowers at Mrs. Sheridan’s garden party go about in couples, as if she has in some way been responsible for their pairing off, so marriage is in there. Okay, the long version is in Chapter 20 , but here’s the lightning-round version: fertility-goddess mother, beautiful daughter, kidnap and seduction by god of underworld, permanent winter, pomegranate-seed monkey business, six-month growing season, happy parties all round. What we get here, of course, is the myth explaining the seasons and agricultural fertility, and what sort of culture would it be that didn’t have a myth to cover that? Highly remiss, in my book.
But that’s not the only thing this myth covers. There’s the business of the young woman arriving at adulthood, and this constitutes a huge step, since it involves facing and comprehending death. The myth involves the tasting of the fruit, as with Eve, and the stories share the initiation into adult knowledge. With Eve, too, the knowledge gained is of our mortality, and while that’s not quite the point of the Persephone story, it’s sort of unavoidable when she marries the CEO of the land of the dead.
So how does that make Laura into Persephone, you ask? First, there’s her mother as Demeter. That one is, as I suggested, pretty obvious, once the flowers and food and children and couples are considered. Moreover, we should recall that they live on this Olympian height, towering geographically and in class terms over the ordinary mortals in the hollow below. In this divine world the summer’s day is perfect, ideal, as the world was before the loss of her daughter plunged Demeter into mourning and outrage. Then there is the trip down the hill and into a self-contained world full of shadows and smoke and darkness. She crosses the broad road as if it were the p. 275 River Styx, which one has to cross to enter Hades. No entry is possible without two things: one must pass by Cerberus, the three-headed dog who stands guard, and one must have the admission ticket (Aeneas’s Golden Bough). Oh, and a guide wouldn’t hurt. Laura has her confrontation with the dog just outside her garden gate, and her Golden Bough turns out to be the gold daisies on her hat. As for guides (and no traveler to the underworld should be without one), Dante in the Divine Comedy (1321 A.D.) has the Roman poet Virgil; in Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid (19 B.C.), Aeneas has the Cumaean Sibyl as his guide. Laura’s Sibyl is that very old woman with the queer smile: her manner is no stranger than that of the Cumaean version, and the newspaper under her feet suggests the oracles written on leaves in the Sibyl’s cave, where, when the visitor entered, winds whipped the leaves around, scrambling the messages. Aeneas is told to only accept the message from her own lips. As for the knot of unspeaking people who make way for Laura, every visitor to the lower world finds that the shadows pay him or her very little mind, the living having nothing to offer those whose living is done. Admittedly, these elements of the trip to Hades are not native to the Persephone myth, but they have become part and parcel of our understanding of such a trip. Her admiration for the deceased man’s form, her identification with the grieving wife, and her audible sob all suggest a symbolic marriage. That world is dangerous, though; her mother has started to warn her before she sets out, as Demeter warns her daughter against eating anything in some versions of the original. Moreover, Mrs. Sheridan sends Laurie, a latter-day Hermes, to escort Laura back from this world of the dead.
Okay, so why all this business from three or four thousand years ago? That’s what you’re wondering, right? There are a couple of reasons, it seems to me, or perhaps a couple of major ones out of many possibilities. Remember, as many commentators have said about the Persephone myth, it encompasses the p. 276 youthful female experience, the archetypal acquisition of knowledge of sexuality and of death. Our entry into adulthood, the myth suggests, depends on our understanding of our sexual natures and of our mortality. These modes of knowledge are part of Laura’s day in the story. She admires the workmen, comparing them favorably to the young men who come to Sunday supper, presumably as prospective beaux for one or another of the sisters, and later she finds the dead man beautiful—a response encompassing both sex and death. Her inability at the very end of the story to articulate what life is—as caught in the repeated fragment of speech, “Isn’t life”—suggests an involvement with death so strong that she cannot at this moment formulate any statement about life. This pattern of entry into adult life, Mansfield intimates, has been a recognizable part of our culture for thousands of years; of course it has always been there, but the myth embodying the archetype has continued unbroken through Western culture since the very early Greeks. In tapping into this ancient tale of initiation, she invests the story of Laura’s initiation with the accumulated power of the prevailing myth. The second reason is perhaps less exalted. When Persephone returns from the underworld, she has in a sense become her mother; in fact, some Greek rituals did not distinguish between mother and daughter. That may be a good thing if your mother is really Demeter, less so if she is Mrs. Sheridan. In wearing her mother’s hat and carrying her basket, she also takes on her mother’s views. Although Laura struggles against the unconscious arrogance of her family throughout the story, she cannot finally break away from their Olympian attitudes toward the merely mortal who reside below the hill. That she is relieved to be rescued by Laurie, even though she has found the experience “marvelous,” suggests that her efforts to become her own person have been only partially successful. We must surely recognize our own incomplete autonomy in hers, for how many p. 277 of us can deny that there is a great deal of our parents, for good or ill, in us?
What if you don’t see all this going on in the story, if you read it simply as a narrative of a young woman making an ill-advised trip on which she learns something about her world, if you don’t see Persephone or Eve or any other mythic figures in the imagery? The modernist poet Ezra Pound said that a poem has to work first of all on the level of the reader for whom “a hawk is simply a hawk.” The same goes for stories. An understanding of the story in terms of what literally happens, if the story is as good as this one, is a great starting point. From there, if you consider the pattern of imag
es and allusions, you’ll begin to see more going on. Your conclusions may not resemble mine or Diane’s, but if you’re observing carefully and meditating on the possibilities, you’ll reach valid conclusions of your own that will enrich and deepen your experience of the story.
So what does the story signify, then? Many things. It offers a critique of the class system, a story of initiation into the adult world of sex and death, an amusing examination of family dynamics, and a touching portrait of a child struggling to establish herself as an independent entity in the face of nearly overwhelming parental influence.
What else could we ask of a simple little story?
Envoi
p. 278 THERE’S A VERY OLD TRADITION in poetry of adding a little stanza, shorter than the rest, at the end of a long narrative poem or sometimes a book of poems. The function differed from poem to poem. Sometimes it was a very brief summation or conclusion. My favorite was the apology to the poem itself: “Well, little book, you’re not that much but you’re the best I could make you. Now you’ll just have to make your way in the world as best you can. Fare thee well.” This ritual sending-off was called the envoi (I told you that all the best terms are French—and the worst), meaning, more or less, to send off on a mission.
If I told you that I didn’t owe my book an apology, we’d both know it was untrue, and every author wraps up a manup. 279script with some trepidation as to its future welfare. That trepidation, however, becomes pointless once the manuscript becomes a book, as the old writers understood, which is why they told the poor book that it was now an orphan, that whatever parental protections the writer could offer had ended. On the other hand, I figure my little enterprise can get along without me pretty well, so I’ll spare it the send-off.
How to Read Literature Like a Professor Page 26