How to Read Literature Like a Professor (26 page)
Read How to Read Literature Like a Professor Online
Authors: Thomas C. Foster
But all the same you had to cry, and she couldn’t go out of the room without saying something to him. Laura gave a loud childish sob.
“Forgive my hat,” she said.
And this time she didn’t wait for Em’s sister. She found her way out of the door, down the path, past all those dark people. At the corner of the lane she met Laurie. He stepped out of the shadow. “Is that you, Laura?”
“Yes.”
“Mother was getting anxious. Was it all right?”
“Yes, quite. Oh, Laurie!” She took his arm, she pressed up against him.
“I say, you’re not crying, are you?” asked her brother.
Laura shook her head. She was.
Laurie put his arm round her shoulder. “Don’t cry,” he said in his warm, loving voice. “Was it awful?”
“No,” sobbed Laura. “It was simply marvellous. But Laurie—” She stopped, she looked at her brother. “Isn’t life,” she stammered, “isn’t life—” But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood.
“Isn’t it, darling?” said Laurie.
What a terrific story! If you have any aspirations to fiction writing, the perfection of this story has to inspire awe and envy. Before the questions, a bit of background. Katherine Mansfield was a writer who came from New Zealand, although she spent her adult years in England. She was married to John Middleton Murry, a writer and critic, was friends with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence (in fact, she was the model, at least in part, for Gudrun in his
Women in Love
), produced a sizable handful of very lovely and accomplished stories, and died young of tuberculosis. Despite her slim output, there are those who would rank her as one of the unquestioned masters of the short story form. The story printed here appeared in 1922, the year before she died. It is not autobiographical in any ways that matter for our purposes. So are you ready for those questions?
First question:
what does the story signify?
What is Mansfield saying in the story? What do you see it as meaning?
Second question:
how does it signify?
What elements does Mansfield employ to cause the story to signify whatever it signifies? What elements, in other words, cause it to mean the things you take it to mean?
Okay, here are the ground rules:
- 1) Read carefully
- 2) Use any interpretive strategies you’ve picked up from this book or elsewhere
- 3) Employ no outside sources about the story
- 4) No peeking at the rest of this chapter
- 5) Write down your results, so there’s no fudging. Neatness doesn’t count, nor spelling, just obser
vations. Give the story careful thought and record your results, then bring them back here and we’ll compare notes.
Take as long as you like.
Oh, you’re back. That didn’t take too long. Not too arduous, I hope? What I’ve done in the meantime is hand it out to a few college students of my acquaintance, some of them veterans of my classes, some of them close relatives who owe me a favor. I’ll give you three different versions and you can see if they sound familiar. The first, a college freshman, said, “I know that story. We read it junior year. It’s the one about a rich family that lives up on a hill and has no clue about the working class that’s trapped down in the valley.” This is pretty much what all my respondents noticed. So far, so good. The beauty of this story is that everybody gets it. You feel what’s important in it, see the tensions of family and class.
The second, a history major who has taken several of my courses, expanded on that initial assessment a bit:
To have the party or not, that is the question. An element of indifference is the ultimate overtone. These things happen, how could we not celebrate? For our main character, her guilt is heightened by the fact that these mourners live down the hill. It is brought to extremes when at the end of the party it is suggested that in an act of goodwill and charity, those below should be given the leftovers. What does this signify? The indifference of the dominant class of people to the suffering of others. Our main character is somewhere in between, caught between what is expected of her and how she feels. She faces it. She takes the food, the waste of the party, to the widow in mourning, she faces the horrible reality of human
ity. Afterward, she seeks the comfort of the only person who could possibly understand the situation, her brother, and finds no answers because there are no answers, just shared perceptions of reality.
That’s pretty good. A number of themes are beginning to emerge. Both of these first two readings have picked up what is most central to the story, namely the growing awareness of the main character to class differentiation and snobbery. Consider the third response. The writer, Diane, is a recent graduate who took several classes from me in both literature and creative writing. Here’s what she said:
What does the story signify?
Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” shows the clash between the social classes. More specifically, it shows how people insulate themselves from what lies outside their own narrow view of the world—how to put up blinders (be they with velvet ribbons), if you will.
How does it signify?
Birds and Flight
Mansfield uses the metaphor of birds and flight as a strategy to show how the Sheridans insulate themselves from the lower classes. Jose is a “butterfly.” Mrs. Sheridan’s voice “floats” and Laura must “skim over the lawn, up the path, up the steps” to reach her. They are all perched high on an aerie up a “steep rise” from the cottages below. But Laura is a fledgling. Her mother steps back and encourages her to flit around in her preparations for the party, but Laura’s wings aren’t quite experienced enough—she “flung her arms over her head, took a deep breath, stretched and let them fall,”
then sighed, so that even a workman “smiled down at her.” From her vantage on the ground, Laura still has a foot in their lower-class world. They are her “neighbors.” She has not yet separated herself from them. Remote sympathy is fine, but intimate empathy directly conflicts with the Sheridans’ manner of living. If Laura is to rise to the level of her family and class, then she is going to need instruction.
Like her siblings before her, she learns from her mother. Mrs. Sheridan teaches Laura how to put on a garden party, but more to the point, she teaches the strategy to see the world from a loftier—though somewhat myopic—perspective. Like a mother bird teaching her young to fly, Mrs. Sheridan encourages Laura to go so far on her own until it becomes clear that her inexperience requires intervention. When Laura pleads with her mother to cancel the party because of the carter’s death, Mrs. Sheridan diverts her with a gift of a new hat. Though Laura is reluctant to abandon her base instincts, she does manage a compromise: “I’ll remember it again after the party’s over.” She chooses to put a little space between her life on the hill and the outside world.
Laura sees her peers, her fellow partygoers, as “birds that had alighted in the Sheridans’ garden for this one afternoon, on their way to—where?” The answer is left vague. There is a danger below at the cottages of the lower-classes; when the Sheridan children were young they “were forbidden to set foot there.” A man down there has a “house-front…studded all over with minute bird-cages.” Those cages represent a threat to the way of life of the high-flying birds of the social elite. As long as they remain aloft, they evade the danger.
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
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 short-sighted 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
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,
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
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.
