“The Garden Party” Revisited

Abstract

“The Garden Party”, Katherine Mansfield’s short story of 1922, deal with a bourgeois mode of consumption, interrogating the ways in which a new paradigm of shopping helped to fashion class consciousness in the early twentieth-century city. It indicates that the making of the middle class in contemporary society is involved not only with the matter of means of production but also with that of consumption style. The party in the story represents a nouveau riche version of the aristocratic banquet. It is a ceremony in which the rising middle-class family displays its wealth, social status and privileged lifestyle. The festivity epitomizes a celebration of bourgeois culture as consumer culture, affirming the point that the formation of class identity, to a great extent, hinges upon the acquisition and use of appropriate consumer goods. The story thus suggests that middle-class ideas, values and lifestyle are reproduced through the appropriation of commodities. Furthermore, the fact that the affluent world of the bourgeoisie is depicted in antithesis with the seedy world of the underclass can be read as Mansfield’s oblique social critique of class segregation; and the juxtaposition of the two incompatible rituals—the party and the funeral—in the story could be construed as her comment upon the futility of materialism that penetrates into the very heart of bourgeois culture.