Kathrine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” starts with a description of the Sheridan family’s garden and the preparations for a garden party. The mother usually makes the decisions, but this time she wanted her chil-dren, Laura, Meg, Jose, and Laurie to decide instead. Laura, being the most imaginative of them, took up the challenge, although it seems most of it took care of itself. In fact, the mother planned much of it beforehand anyway. Laura and her sister Jose had just finished tasting the cream puffs and were about to head for the garden when Sadie (the maid), Hans (one of the servants), and one of the cooks came in and told the two that a man had died in the little village nearby. Laura was appalled and pleaded with both her sister Jose and her mother to stop the party in order to spare the family’s feelings. Neither would al-low it and called her childish and too sentimental. Eventually they suc-ceeded in quelling her fears and had a delightful party. However, at the end there were still some sandwiches and cream puffs left, so the mother decided she would send Laura to the cottage to give them to the dead man’s family. When Laura arrived, she started to have sec-ond thoughts about going, but it was too late to turn back. The family pulled her into the house when all she wanted to do was leave the basket and go home. When she saw the body, she thought he looked peaceful and content. In the end, she concluded that life was a mar-velous thing.
I believe that the main theme of this story is growing up or maturing. When Laura was talking to the workmen she was shy at first and “stammered like a little girl” (2646) after trying to sound like her mother. This suggests that she was still growing up and was not used to doing adult business. After her talk with the workmen and Kitty, on of her friends, she started to daydream a bit. The following excerpt is an example of this:
“But the air! If you stopped to notice, was the air always like this? Little faint winds were playing chase in at the tops of the windows, out at the doors. And there were two tiny spots of sun, one on the inkpot, one on a silver photo-graph frame, playing too. Darling little spots. Especially the one on the inkpot lid. It was quite warm. A warm little sil-ver star. She could have kissed it.” (2648)
Three pages later, her mother calls her childish because of her insis-tence to stop the party. Laura couldn’t understand why her mother and Jose were acting like that because it felt wrong to be happy when neighbors were sad. When she looked in the mirror, however, “There, quite by chance, the first thing she saw was this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies and a long black velvet ribbon.” This is when she starts to see that she’s not quite the child she thought she was.
I liked this story because Laura’s childishness reminds me of my own in comparison to others. I am still a bit afraid of walking into the wide world alone and barely feel like I have the skills or courage to leave home. I could see both side of the dilemma about stopping the party because I would have had the same worries as Laura. However, I would also be annoyed if I had gotten all ready to have some fun only to have it ruined by an unrelated event. In the story, I am guessing that the man’s death would be much like if someone died in a village close to my house, like Hemlock. I would not know them personally, but it would be close enough to be shocking.
20th Century Poetry
In “Snake” by D. H. Laurence, the speaker tells about a hot summer morning in Sicily. Apparently, his house has no indoor plumbing, so he comes brings his pitcher with him to gather some water from a trough in his backyard. However, he finds that a snake has beaten him to it and stands, waiting on the steps in the shade of a tree. As the snake is drinking, the speaker is musing about its color, which would indicate that it is poisonous. Even knowing this, he stays his hand because of fear of the snake, a want to talk to it, and a feeling of honor that it chose his trough in which to drink. After the snake finished drinking, he turned and entered the hole from whence it came. Now unfrozen from his reverie, the speaker puts down his pitcher and throws a log at the trough, which startled the snake. The speaker soon regrets dis-turbing the peace of the moment and wishes the snake would come back so he could atone for his pettiness.
The speaker personifies the snake as it was “drinking, as cattle do” (16), “came like a guest in quiet” (27), “looked around like a god” (45), and “seemed to me like a king, / Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld” (68-9). He comments on the “earth-brown” (20) color of the snake and the stone texture of the trough, which makes it easier to visualize the scene. He also uses a bit of juxtaposition of how the snake was supposed to be venomous, but instead seemed innocent and peaceful. Furthermore, he remarks on how his education de-manded he kill the snake, while his inner nature wished only for peace, respect, and understanding. This is a bit odd as when one usually things of human nature, it is usually the education that brings peace and tempers human urges to destroy things. However, one could say that it is our higher thinking that makes us so destructive and that the speaker was tapping into the animal side of his being.
I chose this poem because I found Laurence’s description of a snake interesting. This poem also seems to be the one that touches the clos-est to human nature that I have read from the 20th century poems. My mother has always been afraid of snakes, but I respect them rather than fear them. I know what they are capable of doing and so avoid them, while mom starts screaming and breaks what could have previ-ously been a peaceful moment. Animal personification intrigues me, as when you look at domesticated animals, individuals tend to have dis-tinct personalities. My dogs, for example, are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Abby is hyperactive and eager to play while Hanna is le-thargic and I have never seen her play at all. Thus, I believe I could say the same for any other animal in the world. This, of course, leads me to wonder why I was born as a human and not some other animal. This idea leads me to the reason for my existence and the old question of “am I alone?”
Required Question
One obvious image that piqued my interest was in A Modest Proposal. The thought of a whole society turning to cannibalism to solve their problems is quite a profound image. I admit that I tend to hope that absurd things like this would happen just to see what would come of it. Of course, if I was one of the children to be eaten, this would be no laughing matter. It is just the idea of it that makes me wonder what it would be like. For example, children are told not to talk to strangers, but what if a stranger only wanted to help? Wouldn’t that put the child in danger?
Another concept that stuck in my mind was that of Iago. It got me to thinking about how heroes and villains really are not very different. This is obvious as this will by my fourth paper in this class mentioning it, so I forgive you if it has gotten a bit repetitive. I have been talking to a few friends about it too and they agree: heroes and villains are opposite sides of the same coin. Heroes are villains that get away with murder because its “justified” and villains are heroes that can do any-thing because they are not obliged to society. It reminds me that the government usually calls heroes “vigilantes” for a reason. Yeah, they may get the deed done, but they usually cause a lot of damage doing it. That is not to say that being brave or opportunistic is a bad thing, just not when it is at the cost of life.
The third image that made me think was in “The Poison Tree”. The ini-tial image is that when friends do you wrong, it is easier to forgive them than when it is a stranger with whom the grudge intensifies through lack of communication. This grudge grows until it is a want for them to die, as visualized in the final lines of the poem. Going beyond this, however, is the thought that when a friend does an unimaginable wrong and you stop talking to them the grudge grows all that much quicker because you are more likely to dwell on it. After it festers too long, no amount of communication will make it heal. Thus, this is the usual situation for the best protagonist/antagonist relationships in sto-ries. And this brings me full circle to Iago and the hero/villain theory, so I’ll leave it at that.
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