The story begins on a perfect early summer day in the Sheridan family’s garden. Workmen arrive as Mrs. Sheridan and her daughters, Laura, Meg, and Jose, eat breakfast. Mrs. Sheridan sends Laura to supervise the workers. Mrs. Sheridan thinks of Laura as her artistic child, and Laura enjoys arranging things.
The workmen are there to set up a marquee (a big tent). At first, Laura adopts a look and tone like her mother’s when addressing the four men. However, the affectation embarrasses her, so she resumes speaking naturally. Laura is impressed with the men’s friendliness and lack of pretense. She tries to direct their work but has little effect. She watches them work, wishing away the class divisions between her wealthy family and the working class.
Rushing inside to answer a telephone call, Laura meets her father and Laurie, her only brother, preparing to leave for the office. Laurie speaks in an affected upper-class manner. He asks her to check if his coat needs to be ironed before the party. She agrees, hugging him and expressing her love of parties, before continuing toward the phone.
Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” explores themes of maturation and the loss of innocence as its protagonist, Laura, develops an understanding that distinctions of class vanish in the face of human mortality. The story’s exposition describes the setting as a perfect summer day at the home of the wealthy Sheridan family. The sun, cloudless sky, and abundance of flowers suggest an earthly paradise where the Sheridan girls are safe and sheltered. Mrs. Sheridan and her daughters are preparing for a garden party that afternoon.
Mrs. Sheridan instructs Laura to supervise the workmen who have arrived to set up a marquee. The narrator describes Laura as artistic, someone who loves to arrange things. Laura becomes flustered when she tries to address the workers as her mother would. Instead, she switches to a more relaxed and natural conversational style. As she talks with the men and watches them work, she admires their friendliness and lack of pretense. She wishes they could be friends, and she could be a working girl. Laura is becoming aware of the class division between her family and the working class, and it makes her uncomfortable.
However, she slips comfortably back into upper-class affectations when she takes a telephone call from her friend, Kitty. A delivery man arrives with an overabundance of lilies, which Mrs. Sheridan has ordered, showing her extravagant tastes. In the drawing room, Laura’s sisters, Jose and Meg, practice a song for the party. Jose sings while Meg accompanies her on the piano. Jose’s smiling expression does not match the song’s melancholy topic and tone. This foreshadows the death later in the story and Jose’s inappropriate response to it.
When Laura and Jose go to the kitchen to deliver some party items, a man is delivering cream puffs. Cook allows them to take one, despite having recently eaten breakfast. Their interaction shows the cook’s ambivalent nature. While she is familiar and motherly with the girls, she is also called “Cook” and not her given name, reinforcing the class divide.
Later, in the narrative’s inciting incident, the delivery man shares news of a fatal accident on a nearby street. Mr. Scott, a poor neighbor and cart driver, has left behind a wife and five young children. Laura believes it to be insensitive to the deceased’s family to continue with the party. Jose strongly disagrees. The accident introduces the story’s main conflict. Externally, Laura’s attempts to cancel the party are met with repeated refusals from her family. Because of their class pretensions, they believe the success of their party takes precedence over the tragic death of their poor neighbor and his family’s mourning. Internally, Laura struggles between her love of her callous, wealthy family and her sympathies for their working-class neighbors.
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