Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- CRITICISM
- Interior Matters: Secrecy and Hunger in Katherine Mansfield's ‘Bliss’
- Katherine Mansfield and Vitalist Psychology
- A Raft in the Sea of Loneliness: Katherine Mansfield's Discovery of Cosmic Anatomy
- Mansfield's Psychology of the Emotions
- Feeling ‘Like a Work-girl’: Class, Intimacy and Alienation in ‘The Garden Party’
- Me or I? The Search for the Self in the Early Writings of Katherine Mansfield
- ‘Jigging away into nothingness’: Knowledge, Language and Feminine Jouissance in ‘Bliss’ and ‘Psychology’
- ‘For the life of him he could not remember’: Post-war Memory, Mourning and Masculinity Crisis in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly’
- CREATIVE WRITING
- CRITICAL MISCELLANY
- REVIEW ESSAY
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- Join the Katherine Mansfield Society
Feeling ‘Like a Work-girl’: Class, Intimacy and Alienation in ‘The Garden Party’
from CRITICISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- CRITICISM
- Interior Matters: Secrecy and Hunger in Katherine Mansfield's ‘Bliss’
- Katherine Mansfield and Vitalist Psychology
- A Raft in the Sea of Loneliness: Katherine Mansfield's Discovery of Cosmic Anatomy
- Mansfield's Psychology of the Emotions
- Feeling ‘Like a Work-girl’: Class, Intimacy and Alienation in ‘The Garden Party’
- Me or I? The Search for the Self in the Early Writings of Katherine Mansfield
- ‘Jigging away into nothingness’: Knowledge, Language and Feminine Jouissance in ‘Bliss’ and ‘Psychology’
- ‘For the life of him he could not remember’: Post-war Memory, Mourning and Masculinity Crisis in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly’
- CREATIVE WRITING
- CRITICAL MISCELLANY
- REVIEW ESSAY
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- Join the Katherine Mansfield Society
Summary
In a letter written on 13 October 1920, while Katherine Mansfield was living in Menton, she describes an exchange she had with a ‘jardinier who comes here le vendredi’, that anticipates a key scene of attempted cross-class intimacy in ‘The Garden Party’:
This man drew a design of the flower bed on the gravel, & then after telling me the names of the flowers he described them. […] In trying to describe the scent – c'est – un – parrr-fum – & then he threw back his head put his thumb & forefinger to his nose – took a long breath & suddenly exploded it in a kind of AAAHHH, almost staggering backwards – overcome – almost fainting. […] To think the man cares like that – responds– laughs like he does and snips off a rosebud for you while he talks. Then I think of poor busmen & tube men and the ugliness of wet dark London. Its wrong. People who are at all sensitive ought not to live there.
Mansfield may be hinting at her own feelings about the ease of breathing on the Mediterranean coast compared to the suffocations of London, but this letter also anticipates a pair of interactions between Laura Sheridan and working-class men in ‘The Garden Party’. The first interaction resonates strongly with the text of this letter:
Only the tall fellow was left. He bent down, pinched a sprig of lavender, put his thumb and forefinger to his nose and snuffed up the smell. When Laura saw the gesture she forgot all about the karakas in her wonder at him caring for things like that – caring for the smell of lavender.
His love of lavender fills Laura with such homely comfort that she begins to feel ‘just like a work-girl’ (288). The second interaction, with Scott the carter's body, aligns with the ‘poor busmen & tube men’ of London. When Laura is invited, ‘to her horror’, deeper and deeper into the ‘disgusting and sordid’ sphere of the neighbourhood's working classes, she both confronts the unhomely abjection of working-class reality and intuits the inextricability of that reality from herself (297, 293).
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- Information
- Katherine Mansfield and Psychology , pp. 68 - 81Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016