(Im)perfect celebrations by intergenerational hostesses
Katherine Mansfield’s “The garden party” and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
Abstract
Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf nourished a peculiar stream of parallel foreignness and kinship with each other as coetaneous writers. This article explores the likenesses and dialogues between Mansfield’s story “The Garden Party” and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to detect and depict how bourgeois women, like Laura Sheridan and Clarissa Dalloway, albeit from two different generations, are indoctrinated by social etiquette, class consciousness and the prevailing archetype of domestic femininity inherited from Victorian times. Integrated into their compulsory roles as angelic daughters and wives, Laura and Clarissa gladly perform the role of the hostess to organise (im)perfect parties at home until death knocks at the door. Paradoxically that uninvited guest precipitates escapades of self-discovery and mental emancipation, leading to transient or enduring transformations in the lives of these two women.
Downloads
References
Ames, C. (2010). The Life of the Party: Festive Vision in Modern Fiction. Athens & London: University of Georgia Press.
Atkinson, W. (2006). Mrs. Sheridan’s Masterstroke: Liminality in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’. English Studies, 87(1),53-61.
Blair, E. (2007). Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel. Albany: State University of New York.
Day, T. (2011). The Politics of Voice in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’. English, 60(229), 128-141.
Dunbar, P. (1997). Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short-Stories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Forbes, S. (2005). Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian
‘Self’ in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 38(1), 38-50.
Froula, C. (2005). Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Hawthorn, J. (1975). Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: A Study of Alienation. London: Sussex University Press.
Henke, S. (1981). Mrs. Dalloway: The Communion of Saints. In J. Marcus (Ed.), New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (pp.125-147). London & Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.
Horvarth, A., Thomassen, B. & Wydra, H. (2015). Liminality and the Search of Boundaries. In A. Horvarth, B. Thomassen & H. Wydra (Eds.), Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (pp.1-8). New York, NY & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Kimber, G. (2015). Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Littleton, J. (1995). Mrs. Dalloway: Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman. Twentieth-Century Literature, 41(1),36-53.
Marcus, L. (2017). ‘Some Ancestral Dread’: Woolf, Autobiography, and the Question of ‘Shame’. In
J. de Gay, T. Breckin & A. Reus (Eds.), Virginia Woolf and Heritage (pp.264-281). Clemson: Clemson University Press.
Mansfield, K. (1989). Mansfield’s letter to William Gerhardi (11 March 1922). In V. O’Sullivan (Ed.), Katherine Mansfield, Selected Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
---. (2002). The Garden Party. In A. Smith (Ed.), Selected Stories (pp.336-349). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McLoughlin, K. (2013). Introduction: A Welcome from the Host. In K. McLoughlin (Ed.), The Modernist Party (pp.1-24). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Moran, P. (2016). Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia.
Murray, H. (1990). Double Lives: Women in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press.
Randall, B. (2013). Virginia Woolf’s Idea of a Party. In K. McLoughlin (Ed.), The Modernist Party (pp.95-111). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Russell, R. R. (2015). Radical Empathy in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Genre, 48(3), 341-381.
Shaup, K. L. (2015). Consuming Beauty: Aesthetic Experience in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’. PLL, 51(3),221-243.
Showalter, E. (2009). A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers, from Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing. London: Virago.
Smith, A. (1999). Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
---. (2013). ‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield’s Party Stories. In K. McLoughlin (Ed.), The Modernist Party (pp.79-94). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sorkin, A. J. (1978). Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’: Style and Social Occasion. Modern Fiction Studies, 24(3),439-455.
Walsh, W. (1970). A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth Literature. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble.
Webb, C. (1994). Life after Death: The Allegorical Progress of Mrs. Dalloway. Modern Fiction Studies, 40(2),279-298.
Woolf, V. (1998). A Room of One’s Own. M. Shiach (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
---. (1992). Mrs. Dalloway. S. McNichol (Ed.). London: Penguin.
---. (2008). Professions for Women. In D. Bradshaw (Ed.), Selected Essays (pp.140-145). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zwerdling, A. (1986). Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
The works published in this journal are subject to the following terms:
1. The Publications Services at the University of Murcia (the publisher) retains the property rights (copyright) of published works, and encourages and enables the reuse of the same under the license specified in item 2.
2. The works are published in the electronic edition of the magazine under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 4.0.
3.Conditions of self-archiving. Authors are encouraged to disseminate pre-print (draft papers prior to being assessed) and/or post-print versions (those reviewed and accepted for publication) of their papers before publication, because it encourages distribution earlier and thus leads to a possible increase in citations and circulation among the academic community.
RoMEO color: green
