Class Consciousness in the Writing of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf by Jiaye Wang

Atlanta’s Garland is a miscellany of short stories published to celebrate the Edinburgh University Women’s Union on its 21st anniversary. The collection features works that illustrate contemporary women’s art by writers of various European languages. The object in the Rubenstein Library is a first edition copy and it is a medium-sized book. The frontispiece of the book is a triptych by Phoebe Traquair that depicts a tender mother holding a baby in her arm. Just like mothers that nurture children in traditional households, women’s art also provides the necessary nurturing of new ideas for society. 

Two unfinished stories of Katherine Mansfield are included in the book. Like “The Garden Party,” the two unpublished short pieces also give attention to the lower class. In “The Garden Party,” Mansfield told the story of a wealthy family and one of their regular garden parties. The daughter of the family, Laura heard the news that one of the poor neighbors died and she underwent emotional struggles about whether the family should carry on the party. At the end of the story, she brought food to console the poor family and her interaction with the poor produced a moment of unuttered epiphany.

Instead of positioning the poverty-stricken scene in the background, these two rough sketches focalize the poor families and give more lurid details about the actual poverty. I think this approach produced a normalized setting of poverty. The narrator allowed the readers to experience the hardships of life without labeling it or placing it in the context of social class. Little Jean depicted an infant who had an overprotective family, while Lucien delineated a poor boy who helped his mother to make a living. In Little Jean, Mansfield wrote,

“Jean’s cheeks were white because he lived in a basement”.

“Living in a basement” shows that the family couldn’t afford a decent house and “white cheeks” indicates that the baby either lived in a poorly-heated environment or was undernourished. At the end of the same story, Mansfield wrote,

“there are large newspaper parcels which contain his mother’s mending.”

This is a description of the pram that the mother brought for little Jean. The narrator mentioned earlier that the pram was second-hand and “large newspaper parcels” demonstrates the extent of the secondhandedness. In Lucien, Mansfield wrote,

“With what a sigh his mother rummaged in the folds of her petticoat, brought out her shabby purse with a clasp and counted and thumbed the coins before she dropped them into his little claw.”

The sequence of actions (“sigh”, “rummage”, “clasp”, “count”, “thumb”, “drop”) and “the shabby purse” gradually add up the degree of poverty. The description of the boy’s hand as “claw” connotates that poverty had a dehumanizing effect on the body. 

Virginia Woolf’s A Women’s College from Outside is also a part of the collection. Her story, narrated in a limited third-person perspective, told the confusion of a lower-middle-class woman in a woman’s college filled with young ladies from the more privileged class. “The Garden Party” and this story both center around an epiphany that occurred to the protagonist through interaction with a different class. Angela in Woolf’s story felt disenchanted with the playful attitudes of her classmates and she realized that college meant something different for her classmate. She had the illusion of “the golden fruit” in the end that excited and pained her at the same time. Similarly, when Laura took a look at the dead corpse of Scott, her unfortunate neighbor, she had a realization that both made her sob and content. Both Laura and Angela lacked the language to utter their epiphanies. My interpretation for Laura’s epiphany is that she had a more concrete sense of the realness of life by confronting the poverty and the death of Scott. She understood after the visit that death, a horrible thing in her imagination, might be liberating for others. While for Angela, I think her epiphany was the crackdown of her hope for the education she was getting. She realized that her school was not empowering her to achieve the independence she dreamt of.