Ph Vivian
September 2017
In The Garden Party, Katherine
Mansfield has drawn a social realistic canvas with two contrastive pieces of colours
in which Laura’s compassion is the tenuous sole stroke existing in a society of
people from different walks of life.
Laura is a young lady from the
upper class. She, as any other nobles in the society, leads a luxurious, well-off
life. She lives in a big splendid bright house with pearls and flowers where the
presence of laughter is regularly and the absence of sorrow is always. However,
in the Garden Party, to some extent, Laura is a sensitive girl when she is
impressed that one workman stops to smell lavender, when she delights in the
busy sounds of the house, she can even feel the little breezes blowing through
the doors, and the sunshine alighting here and there. And above all, although
living in wealth, she also possesses a sense of compassion. She muses that she
would get along well with those simple workmen and wouldn’t let class
distinctions get in the way. She is conscious of her class though, she wants to
get along with the lower ones.
Laura’s family is boisterously preparing
a party in the family garden where all the luxury is exhibited from a meticulous
beautiful cup to fashionable dresses and dances which are intrinsically born for
the silk-stocking. Then the Godber’s man comes and informs that a young cart
driver was killed that morning when his horse reared on the street. The man’s
name was Scott and he had lived in a cottage just down the road from the
Sheridans in a settlement of commoners. He left a wife and five children. Young
sensitive Laura was moved hearing the news. She calls Jose aside and tells her
the garden party must be called off. From my perspective, such thinking is as
beautiful as a flower blooming on a stone. People could not achieve full happiness
when the others’ sorrow still exists in front of their eyes. Down the hill,
there is a poor family of commoners suffering from their immense lost – their
very husband and father, the backbone of the family. It seems that there is
nothing more mournful than death. As far as I am concerned, Laura’s compassion,
no matter how weak it is, has a sense of thorough understanding. Love and
compassion are necessary. They are not luxury. Without them, humanity cannot
survive. A couple of lines in Mahabharata – a Great Epic of Bharata Dynasty – run
like this:
-
What is the most wondering thing in the world, Yudhisthira?
-
The most wondering thing in the world is all around us, people can be
died and we don’t realize it can happen to us, reply Yuhhisthira.
Those sentences have reminded us
the reason that we come to this life. So what is compassion, we may ask? Compassion
is the ability of realizing clearly the nature of sorrow. Compassion is also one’s
ability of standing firmly to realize that he/she will not be apart from the
sorrow. Laura to some extent shares the feeling of the commoners’ family’s
grief. She wants to stop the party and visit the victim’s house. Although young
Laura’s compassion is so feeble that she comes there with a velvet streamer on her
head, the pride of class consciousness is still running in her blood, and when
people are looking at her, she wishes she hadn’t come, she wishes she were
anywhere but here with all of those eyes staring at her, this would be an
unforgettable milestone in her life. She has grown up witnessing the death man
which she has never seen before. “There lay a young man, fast asleep – sleeping
so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote,
so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the
pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. He was
given up to his dream. What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks
matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful.”
And the Laura speaks to him: “Forgive my hat.”
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