Momism, The Feminine Mystique, and Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party"

By Madison Koenig

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) wrote dozens of short stories during her life, many of which feature women as primary characters.  Although her short stories were published in England at the beginning of the twentieth century, mid-century American ideas about women are still incredibly relevant in understanding her complex characters.  Applying the work of Betty Friedan and other writers may also provide insight into early feminist stirrings present in literature during this period. 

The story I will examine here is called “The Garden Party.”  Katherine Mansfield wrote this story in 1921 and published it the following year.  I wrote about this story for an English class a few quarters ago; however, the knowledge I gained in Women’s and Gender Studies 200 will allow me to return to it with a feminist lens.

Here is a short summary: Told in third person from the view of Laura, a young girl in upper-middle-class New Zealand, “The Garden Party” is about what happens when Laura’s family, the Sheridans, throw a party for the neighborhood.  On the day of the party, while the entire household is running around trying to set everything up, as tragedy occurs: a man who lives in the poor neighborhood down the lane is killed.  Laura immediately wants to stop the party preparations, but her family tells her to stop acting “so extravagant” (Mansfield 292).  After the party is over, Laura takes a basket of leftover treats to the family of the deceased man.  It is here that she experiences the stirrings of something greater, although she cannot name her desire.  “The Garden Party” is a story of middle class values, of class conflict, of internal struggles.  It is also, primarily, a story about women, and this is where our interests lie.

For me, one of the most fascinating parts of “The Garden Party” was the character of Mrs. Sheridan and the complicated relationships she has with her children.  It is this character that I will focus on in my analysis.

One aspect of mid-century America that I will apply to “The Garden Party” is the fears about mothers.  In her book A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Woman at the Dawn of the 1960s, Stephanie Coontz discusses the “hostility directed at stay-at-home wives and mothers.”  “Historian Rebecca Jo Plant notes that many “modern” thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s had criticized the nineteenth-century cult of domestic motherhood not because it limited women’s rights but because it gave women too much moral authority within the home” (48).  These criticisms could easily be applied to Mrs. Sheridan.  She is a woman with few concerns; even the garden party, the focal point of her family’s day, is something she prefers to orchestrate from the sidelines, telling her daughters “I’m determined to leave everything to you children this year” (Mansfield 286-287).  However, she soon contradicts herself by issuing commands to both her household (291) and the party’s guests (289).  Looking at “The Garden Party” from an anthropological stance, William Atkinson argues that Mrs. Sheridan is cleverly devising a status-elevation ritual for Laura, using every action and event “to move her daughter from a mildly rebellious adolescence to a young-womanhood that does not question the status quo” (Atkinson 54).  In his view, Mrs. Sheridan is a grand puppet-master, tugging on everyone’s strings to get them to do what she wants.  If she is successful, then Laura and her siblings will simply become younger versions of their mother.  Philip Wylie, author of Generation of Vipers, would have found this development concerning, particularly when it came to the case of Laurie, Mrs. Sheridan’s only son.  In her article “‘Blown to Bits!’: Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden-Party’ and the Great War,” Christine Darrohn describes Laurie as “merely the extension of [his] mother, who is the forceful agent of a middle-class mentality.”  This concept is reinforced by the similarity of Laurie and Mrs. Sheridan’s manners and values.  Wylie might have viewed Mrs. Sheridan as a perfect example of “momism,” and the close relationship between Mrs. Sheridan and Laurie as one of the devastating results of this societal epidemic—after all, Laurie might turn out to be a “sissy” (Cootnz 48).  Both Atkinson and Wylie might argue for Mrs. Sheridan’s agency; however, I believe that her character is also shaped deeply by forces outside her control—namely, the feminine mystique.

Although Mrs. Sheridan certainly has dominance in the home, I believe that she is more than just a controlling, overbearing mother.  Darrohn describes Mrs. Sheridan as someone “who represents the consciousness of the privileged middle class.”  In fact, Mrs. Sheridan could easily be described as being trapped in Betty Friedan’s feminine mystique.  In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan speaks of “women who adjust to the feminine mystique, who expect to live through their husbands and children, who want only to be loved and secure, to be accepted by others, who never make a commitment of their own to society or to the future, who never realize their human potential” (43).  Mrs. Sheridan is one of these women.  She is married to a well-earning, if absent, man, and has a large home filled with children and servants.  She only interacts with the outside world through her children or when it enters her home.  Mrs. Sheridan even belittles her own intelligence.  When Laura notes a contradiction in Mrs. Sheridan’s requests, her mother says “My darling child, you wouldn’t like a logical mother, would you?” (Mansfield 290).  Mrs. Sheridan strives to live up to the ideal of the housewife, and her life is defined by what Friedan called “dailyness:” she does “not have a personal purpose stretching into the future” (Friedan 433).  Planning the garden party is her most forward-thinking accomplishment. 

The most important aspect of Mrs. Sheridan’s life is maintaining a sunny veneer.  She longs for everyone to appear happy, and does her best to bring about this cheerfulness.  However, it comes at a cost: she is unable, and unwilling, to deal with anything less than ideal.  On one end of the spectrum, she endeavors to avoid slight domestic confrontations and is terrified of criticism. When she misplaces a list that the cook requires, she sends Jose, one of Laura’s older sisters, in her place to the kitchen to pacify the cook, confessing that she is “terrified of her [the cook] this morning” (291).  Later on, when Laura enters the kitchen, Laura points out that the cook “did not look at all terrifying” (291).  Mansfield describes the cook as a kind woman, almost a surrogate mother, who seems to be tender towards the Sheridan daughters. 

What is it about the cook that so frightens Mrs. Sheridan?   Perhaps Mrs. Sheridan’s terror has nothing to do with the cook at all.  In her article, Darrohn points out that “anxieties about the working class…are displaced onto the women in the [lower-class] house.”  I believe that the Sheridans displace not only their “anxieties about the working class,” but also their greater concerns about society and themselves.  This is true for all the lower-class women that the Sheridans encounter.  Of course, as Stephanie Coontz points out, the values of the feminine mystique do not apply to these women, and maintaining the feminine mystique is all that Mrs. Sheridan cares about.  As Şebnem Kaya, a literary critic, argues, Mrs. Sheridan is limited by the values of her upper-class Victorian education: “Mrs. Sheridan concentrates exclusively on her own social circle, her first and only priority, expecting Laura to do the same” (Kaya 56).  Mrs. Sheridan has an image of herself as an au fait woman, the ruler of her domestic domain; when the cook notices that she lost the list, this image is threatened.  She has made a mistake, and by doing so, she lets some of her control slip.  Instead of facing this shortcoming, Mrs. Sheridan leaves the task of dealing with the mishap to one of her daughters. 

Another, more serious example of Mrs. Sheridan’s complete inability to deal with unpleasant aspects of life occurs with the death of a neighbor.  Laura is still young and, overall, she is not entrenched in the social mores of her class.  Therefore, she instantly sees that holding a party within the view of a mourning family’s home is irreverent and unkind.  “‘Mother, isn’t it really terribly heartless of us?’ she asked.”  Her mother has a more complex and less concerned response to the news.  When Laura questions her, Mrs. Sheridan’s first response is to draw attention away from the serious issue and toward Laura’s physical appearance.  “Before Laura could stop [Mrs. Sheridan] she had popped it on. ‘My child!’ said her mother, ‘the hat is yours.  It’s made for you.  It’s much too young for me.  I have never seen you look such a picture.  Look at yourself!’ And she held up her hand-mirror.”  Here we can see Mrs. Sheridan’s shallow appreciation of appearance, an important value of the feminine mystique, overriding Laura’s philosophical questioning.  When Laura persists in probing the situation, her mother becomes curt and supplies an answer that even Laura sees as an evasion: “‘You are being very absurd, Laura,’ [Mrs. Sheridan] said coldly. ‘People like that don’t expect sacrifices from us.  And it’s not very sympathetic to spoil everybody’s enjoyment as you’re doing now’” (Mansfield 294).  Abraham Maslow’s discussion of growth proves useful here in understanding Mrs. Sheridan’s desire for oversimplification: “Growth also often means giving up a simpler and easier and less effortful life in exchange for a more demanding, more difficult life” (Friedan).  Because she is so young, Laura is still willing and able to grow; however, Mrs. Sheridan is so trapped in the feminine mystique that she no longer desires to risk her superficial, blissful life, even if it might mean greater intellectual involvement.  Mrs. Sheridan’s life is not perfect or particularly stimulating, but it is all she and other women of the feminine mystique can hope to have.

Katherine Mansfield wrote “The Garden Party” in 1921, long before “momism” or “the problem with no name” were identified.  Yet as we can plainly see, these concepts, established in mid-century America, are still relevant to this story.  The character of Mrs. Sheridan could have been a housewife in the 1950s or 1960s just as easily as today. The problems she and her children face are not limited to a particular time period, but are rather an undeniable part of our culture.

Note: Although this is not the version I read and referenced, if you’re interested in reading “The Garden Party,” you can find a version here: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/GardPart.shtml

Sources:

Atkinson, William. "Mrs. Sheridan's Masterstroke: Liminality In Katherine Mansfield's “The Garden-Party”." English Studies 87.1 (2006): 53-61. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Oct. 2011.

Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic, 2011. Print.

Darrohn, Christine. ""Blown to Bits!": Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden-party" and the Great War." Modern Fiction Studies 40.3 (1994): 513-39. Modern Fiction Studies. The Purdue Research Foundation, 1998. Web. 23 Sept. 2011.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963. Print.

Kaya, Şebnem. "Laura's Lessons in Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party"" American             International Journal of Contemporary Research 1.2 (2011): 54-61. American International Journal of Contemporary Research. Centre for Promoting Ideas. Web. 27 Oct. 2011.

Mansfield, Katherine, and Vincent O'Sullivan. Katherine Mansfield's Selected Stories. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2006. Print.

Unknown. "Katherine Mansfield." Katherine Mansfield House. Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society Inc., 2005. Web. 04 June 2012. <http://www.katherinemansfield.com/mansfield/>.