The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [91]
THE VOYAGE
1. The Picton boat: this announces a New Zealand setting: K. M. had made more than one childhood voyage to Picton, once as a baby and again when she was five.
2. ulster: a long, loose overcoat, first introduced in 1867, by a manufacturer from Belfast, in Northern Ireland.
3. fascinator: a headscarf or shawl for wearing at home in the interests of warmth and decorum, rather like a bedjacket.
4. bush… umbrella ferns: the bush and umbrella ferns remind us of the remoteness of the place: the little girl awakening to a strange early morning view is like a discoverer.
5. bluchers: boots named after a Prussian commander, von Blücher (compare wellingtons, named after the Duke of Wellington). Grandpa has been gardening.
MISS BRILL
1. Jardins Publiques: public gardens. This alerts us to the setting on the French Riviera, where Miss Brill is a year-round resident, supporting herself by teaching English (as usual, the reader assembles this information bit by bit).
2. They were all on the stage: something of this feeling is generated in the other Riviera story, ‘The Young Girl’, with its role-playing and voyeurism, but theatricality is pervasive in K. M.’s writing, from the excitement of back-stage preparations in ‘The Garden Party’ to the dramatic monologue of ‘The Lady’s Maid’.
HER FIRST BALL
1. the Sheridan girls and their brother: this story’s young girl, Leila, is a country cousin being introduced into society by the smart Sheridans of ‘The Garden Party’.
2. Twig?: middle-class slang meaning ‘understand’ or ‘catcl on’. On the brother–sister relationship see Introduction, pp. xiv–xvi.
3. ‘More pork’: more pork is the popular name for this New Zealand owl, a name which echoes its call.
THE SINGING LESSON
1. The Singing Lesson: music is central to this story, but plays an important part in many others: K. M.’s characters’ lives are full of popular tunes, sentimental songs and dance music, and she often imagines them setting their own inner thoughts to music, like Constantia in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, inspired by a barrel-organ in the street (‘A week since father died/ A week since father died’), or Reggie in Rhodesia in ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, who sat on his dark veranda ‘while the gramophone cried, “Dear, What is Life but Love?” ’ In ‘The Singing Lesson’ music’s power to accommodate secret, private meanings in public is the point.
THE STRANGER
1. I brought her up here… myself: for the background of this story, see Introduction, p. xix. Antony Alpers (ed. cit.) changes the disguised place-names back to Auckland (here Crawford) and Napier (here Salisbury).
BANK HOLIDAY
1. Bank Holiday: this story, and particularly the first paragraph, is a clear example of Post-Impressionist word-painting. For once it is nearly impossible to decide on the setting, for this is a slice of the kind of carnival life that occurs in countries around the world – at once festive, time-bound and tawdry.
AN IDEAL FAMILY
1. No man had a right… it was uncanny: see Introduction, pp. xv—xvi: Harold – compare Harold Kember in ‘At the Bay’ and Basil in ‘The Singing Lesson’ – is a version of what was known as a ‘ladies’ man’, with not only a hint of the gigolo, but also (much more disturbing to the family’s patriarch) of bisexuality, hence ‘uncanny’.
2. cabbage palms outside the Government buildings: the palms and Government buildings announce a New Zealand setting.
3. the sixty-guinea gramophone: the Neaves (compare the Sheridans in ‘The Garden Party’) live in bourgeois luxury: the price of the gramophone is a reminder of the wealth needed to sustain their style (this would have been at least a third of a clerk’s annual salary at the time). The relation between work and play is one of this story’s themes. In Mr Neave’s ideal family men should work and women are obliged to play: son Harold, however, threatens to make a nonsense of this neat division of labour.
THE LADY’S MAID
1. Eleven o’clock. A knock at the door, apart from