Operation Shylock- Philip Roth

In modernist novels there is a preoccupation with the fragmentation of language and the impossibility of communication. In postmodern novels there is a preoccupation with the fragmentation of reality. Operation Shylock is perhaps one of the most creative postmodern novels I’ve read in a long time. There is such a masterful blending of fact and fiction as the novel is  framed within a distorted version of a true story. The moments of fact are more of a mirage than anything that could ground the reader to an objective reality, and the polemic set up between fact and fiction thread their way throughout the narrative in a web of unnavigable complexity.

“For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book. These are minor changes that mainly involve details of identification and locale and are of little significance to the overall story and its verisimilitude…” 1

This is how the preface begins. 

At the end there is a note to the reader, after the reader has lost all hope of deciphering any shards of objective reality, that says: 

“This book is a work of fiction…names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This confession is false.”

Which confession is false? The specific note to the reader? The entire work? The frame is ambiguous and we find ourselves lost within the complexity of a frame within a frame. It’s perfect. 

The book opens with Philip Roth learning of an impersonator making his way throughout Jerusalem (this actually did happen) and arguing for a policy of Diasporism, or the return of European Jews back to the European heartland. (Where he is sure they will be met, as the cattle cars, now repurposed agents of transportation, arrive at the station and the civilians meet the refugees with the cry of “Our Jews are back! Our Jews are back!”) As the real Philip Roth processes this news of mistaken identity he remembers how he almost lost his mind a few months back to a Halcion induced mental disintegration after knee surgery. 

This impersonator is obviously suffering from some mental collapse, but as Roth ruminates on his own recent mental collapse the line between sanity and lunacy seems to dissolve. 

“My mind began to disintegrate. The word DISINTEGRATE seemed itself to be the matter out of which my brain was constituted, and it began spontaneously coming apart. The fourteen letters, big, chunky, irregularly sized components of my brain, elaborately intertwined, tore jaggedly loose from one another, sometimes a fragment of a letter at a time, but usually in painful unpronounceable non syllabic segments of two or three, their edges roughly serrated. This mental coming apart was as distinctly physical a reality as a tooth being pulled. and the agony of it was excruciating.”  (20)

“Where is Philip Roth?” I asked aloud. “Where did he go?” I was not speaking histrionically. I asked because I wanted to know.” (22)

The drug, Halcion, has led to hallucinations and intense nightmares, and as Roth begins to try to make sense of this impersonator in Jerusalem he wonders if this is just his mind playing tricks on him once again…if perhaps the temporary insanity was only partially due to the pharmaceuticals and partially the result of his own exhausted mind. He calls the hotel and hears the voice of the impersonator, but even this doesn’t feel definitive. Who is this new Philip Roth? Could he be“…a specter created out of my fear of mentally coming apart while abroad and on my own for the first time since recovering - a nightmare about the return of a usurping self altogether beyond my control.” (29)

This fear of losing power to one’s double is played out frequently in literature, most notably for Roth in Dostoevsky, Kafka and Gogol. My favorite being Gogol’s short story “The Nose.” Kovaloff finds his nose missing one morning and as he goes about his routine in a state of shock trying to piece together how he has lost such as estimable portion of his face he witnesses a carriage pull up, a gentleman disembark…only this gentleman turns out to be Kovaloff’s very own nose! 

“The hat, adorned with a plume, showed that it held the rank of state-councillor. It was obvious that it was paying “duty-calls.” It looked round on both sides, called to the coachmen “drive on,” and got into the carriage, which drove away.” 2

Finally Kovaloff makes up his mind to approach the nose…even though it seems that his own  nose somehow now outranks him and he approaches with an attitude of deference. 

“Honorable sir,” said Kovaloff with dignity, “I do not know how I am to understand your words. It seems to me the matter is as clear as possible. Or do you wish- but you are after all my own nose!” 

The Nose looked at the Major and wrinkled its forehead. “There you are wrong, respected sir; I am myself. Besides, there can be no close relations between us. To judge by the buttons of your uniform, you must be in quite a different department to mine.” So saying, the nose turned away.” 

Despite Kovaloff’s protestations the nose will not relinquish its independence. As Kovaloff attempts to track down his nose and make sense of this new disorderly world his ontological framework slowly begins to collapse. 

Roth recognizes in his impersonator the childlike imp of Jewish folklore Moishe Pipik, loosely translated as “Moses Bellybutton” and for the rest of the novel this how the two Roth’s are distinguished. Philip Roth and the unruly and out of control ‘bellybutton” bent on usurping the identity of the real Roth and exposing his mental fragmentation. 

Roth calls his imposter to try and expose the farce. He pretends to be a journalist, Pierre Roget, the author of the Thesaurus, “the definitive book of synonyms.” And while Pipik is pretending to be Roth, Roth is pretending not to be himself. Initially this seems to be a hilarious caper, but then the sincerity of his imposter throws Roth into a small existential crisis. If this fake so truly believes himself to be the real Roth, if he’s so committed to this identity that it is not pretend but the most extreme version of truth he knows…then the only one pretending is the real Roth. As he argues with “himself” on the phone the only thing that seems definitive is the absurdity of the whole situation. 

Throughout the novel the doubling shifts, with the pretending frequently distorting reality and always saturated in the absurd. At one point when Roth learns that his imposter was a detective, as ludicrous as this seems, the explanation makes contextual sense. Then when Pipik disappears, supposedly heading back to the states, (after being defeated intellectually by the real Roth) the real Roth makes his way to the hotel room of Pipik and begins some detective work of his own. “If he could disguise himself as a writer, I could pretend to be the detective.” (252)

As Roth combs through the pristine room, looking for clues in a space that looks un-lived in, the beds still have that fresh laundry scent about them, nothing looks out of place or disordered, he finally finds a singular pubic hair on the underside of the toilet seat and a small pile of beard trimmings. He puts his findings in an envelope and then a trickling fear begins to run through his mind: what if these are simply his hairs? What if Pipik has done the same thing to him that he is know doing to Pipik? What if he came to his room and collected these samples simply to leave behind for the anticipated sleuth. 

“These envelopes and their contents remind me that the spectral, half-demented appearance was, in fact, the very earmark of its indisputable lifelike realness and that, when life looks least like what it’s supposed to look like, it may then be most like whatever it is.” (253)

While Pipik is offered as the double of Philip Roth, the uncontrollable appendage wandering around and wreaking havoc, Shakespeare’s Shylock is offered as a double for Jewish identity as a whole. For four hundred years Jews have been living within the shadow of this literary imposter, introduced to the world with the lines “Three thousand ducats.” Lines pronounced in such an oily and innuendoed voice by Mr. Charles Macklin that he “instantly aroused, with just those three words, all of the audience’s hatred of Shylock’s race.” (275) 

“Today a Shylockless Venice, tomorrow a Shylockless world. As the stage directions so succinctly puts it after Shylock has been robbed of his daughter, stripped of his wealth, and compelled to convert by his Christian betters: Exit Jew…” (276)

This whole treatise on Shylock is given by a bookseller, Supposnik, in the lobby of the hotel (after Roth’s detective work has been completed) as Roth is attempting to make his way back to the trial of Ivan the Terrible. Like so many climactic moments throughout the novel the movement forward is impeded by an immense digression. Here in the lobby, person after person presents themselves to Roth who finds himself trapped in constant dialogue while trying to escape. School children pepper him with questions: “What comes first, nationality or Jewish identity? Tell us about your identity crisis.” (268)

Identity is voiced over and over again, the refrain for the inevitable mental implosion. 

The oily hatred directed historically at the Jew is reexamined throughout the trial of John Demjanjuk, who is argued to be none other than Ivan the Terrible, the infamous guard and champion of brutality that personally was responsible for the deaths of nearly a million Jews at the death camp of Treblinka. 

The defense argues that Demjanjuk and Ivan the Terrible are two different people, the evidence is worthless and the identity photos are unreliable…but at what point does the absurdity of the trial breakdown into merely a show trial, an attempt to find a singular scapegoat for the atrocity of the holocaust? Will a single scapegoat ever be enough? The defense buries the trial in meaningless details, they spend two days “arguing over the paper clip on the identity card to establish if the paper clip is authentic or not.” (340) If the identity and authenticity of a paperclip can not be determined how likely will the trial ever come to consensus about the identity and authenticity of a real person? 

The trial is reimagined in a dream sequence Roth has about the water company demanding he pay $128 million for his water bill. He wakes up, slumped in a chair, his skin has become the physical diary of the last few days, collecting every smell along the way and the stench of must and feces is overpowering. Smell is objectively true, a sense you can’t manipulate and he smells of all of “them”: 

“The shitting driver. The fat lawyer. Pipik. He was the smell of incense and old, dried blood. I smelled of every second of every minute of my last twenty-four hours, smelled like the container of something forgotten in the refrigerator whose lid you pop open after three weeks. Not until I decompose in my coffin will I ever be so immensely pungent again.” (261)

But after a shower, when the smell has been eradicated…he contemplated whether it ever actually existed, or did he simply dream it? 

I bathe. 

Two words. 

I dress in clean clothes. 

Five words. 

I no longer smell. 

Four words. 

Eleven words, and I no longer know if I ever did smell like my corpse. 

(261)

So, in a Rothian style, we are confronted with the reliability of memory. Do all the eye witnesses of Ivan the Terrible truly remember this senior man sitting before them? This family man from Ohio with the unblemished record? When Roth walks into the courtroom and is first confronted with John Demjanjuk he says “There he was,” and begins a two and a half page imagined reverie of Ivan the Terrible, as a young twenty-two year old Ukrainian, crushing skulls and bludgeoning to death his victims. Roth is riding the hatred, bottled up and waiting for an unleashing, a focus for its wrath and vengeance. But John Demjanjuk, as he sits there chewing his cud, seems so harmless. So meaningless…so banal. Has he changed? Is he a different person? After a six part repetition of “There he was.” he ends with “Or wasn’t.” 

As Roth is caught in this paradox between “Was” and “Wasn’t” he thinks the only thing that is certain is that while justice may be served by this trial, John Demjanjuk’s children will be plunged into a world incensed by hate- and the curse will be revived. 

Roth’s dream of a $128 million water bill becomes a metaphor for the absurdity of the trial. How can one man be responsible for a water bill of $128 million? How could any one person use that much water? The enormity of the accusation becomes the perfect obfuscation to hide behind. The suburban father can hide all the transgressions and regrets of his youth behind a bill that is too enormous to fathom. “Everything putrid in the past just snaps off and falls away. Only America happened. Only the children and friends and the church and the garden and the job have happened.” (261) How can he be both? Was he there or wasn’t he? 

Either way the trial has morphed into something unmanageable.  Demjanjuk sits there unconcerned, with the occasional smile on his face he seems to say: 

“…$128 million worth of water? You sent me the bill for the city of Cleveland. You sent me the bill for the state of Ohio. You sent me the bill for the whole fucking world! Look at me in this courtroom, under all this, and still at the end of the day all I have sipped from my glass is maybe three or four ounces of water. I’m not saying  that I don’t take a drink of water when I’m thirsty, of course I do…but do I look to you like somebody who could be wasteful of water to the tune of $128 million?…There has been a mistake. I am just an average suburban consumer of water and I should not be on trial for this gigantic bill!” (262) 

In the end what we are left with is a compilation of parodies. The detective novel, seeking to unravel a mystery or a crime, is left with two envelopes containing ambiguous pubic hairs. Nostalgia becomes a joke, as unreliable as memory and fed on our current preoccupations and hatreds. And lastly, and perhaps most dishearteningly, justice has become little more than a parody, a circus act, an illusion of smoke screens and tightrope walkers. Zionism, Diasporism and all the other “isms” have been submerged in the most “powerful of all the senseless influences on human affairs and that is “Pipikism”, the anti tragic force that inconsequentializes  everything.” The radicals and truth tellers, the prophets and sages are little more than disembodied noses and bellybuttons, walking around as autonomous individuals, so removed from their contextualized base that everything they espouse has become meaningless. 

Or is it? For postmodern novels there really is no such thing as a simple thesis statement. And after 398 pages as we have witnessed every serious thing get turned into a farce, we are left struggling with the ambiguity of everything. 

1. All quotations from: Roth, Philip. Operation Shylock. New York: Random House, 1993. 
2. Nikolai Gogol "The Nose": https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Nose_(Gogol/Field)

As I Lay Dying -William Faulkner

As I lay Dying is an exercise in the chaotic failure of language. The world has been rocked by the aftermath of WWI, where men looked around them and were forced to reassess a world order that no longer made sense. The orgiastic 1920’s have vanished like a dream.The world that Faulkner creates in the beginning of the 1930’s is fractured and broken and each character is forced to slowly pick up the pieces of themselves and hold themselves together in a way that seems continuously on the verge of falling apart. 

The story is told through fifteen different focalizers, each with a different perspective and point of view. This creates a novel where reading becomes an active experience rather than passive. This is not the type of novel you can read at night with a cup of tea to escape the chaos of life…this is the chaos of life distilled into roughly 260 pages and it demands attention and focus. Without an objective narrator there is no objective truth. There is no center. The reader is forced into something textually resembling a piece of abstract art and finding one’s bearing in this densely packed landscape can be incredibly challenging. 

“The front, the conical facade with the square orifice of doorway broken only by the square squat shape of the coffin on the sawhorses like a cubistic bug, come into relief.” (Darl, 219)1

There is a type of sensory overload to the text as well. The reader is exposed to a barrage of sights, smells (“sulfurous,” the slowly decaying body, etc), sounds (the chuck, chuck, chuck of the saw,) and tastes. All of this plunges the reader viscerally into the context of the narrative. 

The plot line itself is fairly simple at first glance: As the narrative begins, the matriarch of the Bundren family is on her death bed. Her son Cash stands in the courtyard, just outside her bedroom window and builds her coffin, holding each piece of wood up for her inspection. When she finally dies the family wraps her in a quilt, covers her face which has holes bored through it by the youngest son, thinking he was rescuing her from her entrapment, and they begin their trek to Jefferson where they will bury Addie in her family’s plot. 

But then slowly everything unravels. 

In Puritanism to Postmodernism, Ruland and Bradbury argue that: “…what dominated the 1920’s was the postwar novel- the novel permeated by war as an apocalyptic metaphor, the sign of a world severed from its past, changed, darkened, modernized…the writing of the 1920’s abounds in images of fragmentation, waste, castration and sterility.”  2

Fragmentation is a great way to describe this novel. The main focalizing voice is that of Darl, whose origination begins with a 'verbal trick': 

“Then I found that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed I would kill Anse. It was though he had tricked me, hidden within word like within a paper screen and struck me in the back through it. But then I realized that I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love, and that the same word had tricked Anse too, and that my revenge would be that he would never know that I was taking revenge.” (Addie, 172)

Darl’s character is distilled into verbal processing, wrestling with a system of language that is ultimately broken. He is given the largest portion of narration, but seems to be the least heard and most misunderstood character in the family. The more one communicates the more isolated and alienated they become. For the modernists, language is little more than each of us tricking each other and being tricked by the impossibility of ever really truly understanding each other’s reality. 

Darl also represents the collateral damage of the first World War. We find out towards the end of the novel that he is suffering from shell shock having served in the trenches in some capacity during the war: “Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the War. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face.” (Darl, 254)

This realization coming at the end of the novel, forces the reader to reassess his reliability as a narrating voice and wrestle with the protean definitions of insanity. 

In some capacity, the metaphor of a spyglass becomes a cue on how we are to read this novel. Darl’s spy glass and distorted vision is juxtaposed with Tull’s spy glass and vision of ownership and destiny. Tull is one of the few outside “objective” focalizers that is supposed to ground the reader in the world outside of the chaos of the Bundren family, but we are left questioning whether or not his sight or vision is truly tenable or just a mirage. 

“When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated often it like it was more the sweat, the broader the land…”(Tull, 139) 

For Tull, the objective outside perspective that should provide a counterpoint to the Bundrens’ narrative and ground their perspectives in a less abstract reality, we see optimism and ownership. The power to consume; the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. But Darl’s spy glass has revealed a completely different world. A world comprised of distorted pig-women, a world where the intelligible falls apart. This is the Modern world, gruesome and chaotic without equilibrium. Throughout the text we hear echoes of Yeats poem: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” 3

As a family, the Bundrens are doing more than just traveling for 6 days across the inhospitable world to bury their mother, they are predominantly wrestling with the effects of modernism, with things falling apart. Rather than pulling the family together into a “bund”: a league or confederacy, their wrestling drives them apart into individualized and unique isolation. 

Addie’s monologue does a couple important things. First it offers a new “spy glass” for the reader to view the narrative context within. Prior to this moment, it would have been feasible to believe that the family, with the direction and guidance of the father, Anse, were making this trip to Jefferson out of love and affection for their mother/wife. After her monologue this view is no longer possible. Their marriage was not based on “love.” (Arguably either “love” or “hope” was the word that had tricked them.) Rather, their marriage was ground in a type of selfish haunting of each other. 

Addie’s description of Anse as “a tall bird hunched in the cold weather,” (170) portends the buzzards that will eventually follow the coffin, hoping to pick apart and devour the carrion within. Does Addie metaphorically become the buzzard? Watching her family’s slow progression as they subject her remains to one atrocity after another. Is she haunting her family, growing in number as they get closer and closer to Jefferson, her origination point? 

From the beginning their marriage has embodied a type of relational carrion, neither person is fully alive, and both circle the coffins of each other’s flesh waiting to bite off pieces of decaying soul. 

“When Anse finally sent for me of his own accord, I said “He has wore her out at last.” And I said a damn good thing, and at first I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would have to haul her back, by God.” (Peabody, 41)

So after Addie’s monologue we realize that far from a noble quest of an honorable burial in Jefferson, so she can be laid to rest with her family…the burial has actually become an excuse to go to Jefferson to purchase new teeth….something Anse has been waiting for fifteen years to acquire. In some sense he has been metaphorically circling Addie for fifteen years, waiting for her to die, so that he would have an excuse to make this trip and create a new beginning for himself. 

The phrase “I won’t begrudge her”/“She won’t begrudge me” seems to mask the fact that begrudging each other has been the bedrock of their relationship. She tries to curse him with an impossible journey, but her curse becomes little more than an empty threat. Anse takes her body on a six day journey, after waiting three days for the boys to get back from an errand…with each hour that goes by her body begins to breakdown with “little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling.” (Darl, 212) As if even in death she’s attempting to communicate. Attempting to persuade or explain, yet being reduced to a language even more incomprehensible than her last. 

Addie has had a vision of Jewel rescuing her from water and fire. But her monologue is inserted at the point in the narrative where the family is attempting to cross a flooded river, an aggressive and hostile River Styx, not ushering the family to the peace of the afterlife, but to the reality of the hell which they already inhabit. She is already dead and her coffin keeps slipping into the water at risk of being swept away and unmemorialized. Is this what she had in mind? 

Again, through Addie’s monologue we see the struggle and failures of language, which is also her struggle with the modernist world of which she is a part. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold…” there is no center for language. Barthe’s “cultural codes” have been broken, there are no shared symbols or signs in the residual chaos. ‘Spy glass’ means different things for everyone, there is no shared sight or vision. The actual words Addie uses challenge our sense of normative grammar, and the reader is forced to almost physically wrestle with the language she uses, looking for things between the lines, looking for our own spy glass to create a sense of shared intelligibility: 

“I would think how words go straight up in thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doings goes along the earth, cloning to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other.” (Addie, 173)

1. All quotes from: Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Random House, 1992. 

2. Roland & Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism. New York: Penguin Books,1992. pg. 296

3. Yeats, The Second Coming The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The first time I read The Great Gatsby I was less than enthused. I remember proudly stating to my teacher (my mom’s friend that was exchanging literature lessons for babysitting) that “His name isn’t Gatsby and he isn’t even great!” As if I was imparting some gem of understanding and wit. 

I recently read through the book again for a class I’m taking on the Modern American Novel and I was blown away by its depth and substance. This time I took note of how status and power were defined, who had the power to consume or to speak, and how this power revealed each character’s identity. 

In The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions by Thorstein Veblen,Veblen argues that status of individuals within a capitalist society is based upon social stratification rather than upon merit. And similar to feudal systems of past eras the wealth you are born into is far superior than the wealth you must attain and retain. 

This could be the synopsis of The Great Gatsby in a nutshell. Gatsby, although a hard working, Benjamin Franklin sort of self made man…will forever be that: self made. His wealth and status will never be able to compete with the wealth and status of the leisure classes, because ultimately his wealth and status is precariously balanced on a black market industry that relies on Prohibition to pay dividends. 

I’ve seen many references to The Great Gatsby being a quest for the “American Dream.” In his introduction to The Great Gatsby, Malcolm Bradbury describes Fitzgerald’s novels as a general rule following a similar template: 

“An imperfect but interesting man falls unreservedly in love with, and pursues to the end, an imperfect dream, usually embodied in a beautiful and generally wealthy woman. This is part  of a much bigger dream, made out of the American sensibility of expectation, hope and promise, the belief that it is possible for Americans to live out myths that are larger than the life of plain reality or unadorned history.” (XX) 1

Arguably, this book takes place in the interstitial space between the “American Dream” and a world structure built on consumer capitalism, a structure that emphatically relinquishes its soul for the power to consume.  

The first glimpse we see of Daisy, Gatsby’s personified American Dream, she is encased in a cocoon of white billowing fabric. 

“The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few minutes listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”

There are many significant things to this introductory passage. First, Daisy is both an object of her husband’s conspicuous consumption and a sign of his conspicuous leisure. She has the leisure to be unemployed and is well dressed and as such displays his wealth and status. The irony is that even within the post-suffrage age of the liberated woman, life for women remains bleakly the same, if not worse, because now there is a level and expectation of independence and freedom. 

But as Tom walks in the door, the metaphorical floating and liberation comes to a halt and both women are once again tethered to a dreary reality. 

How do I build a case for Daisy’s dreary reality? I took note of all the times characters were interrupted throughout the novel. Daisy is interrupted seven times, twice while trying to talk about her daughter. Although an object of status, she is voiceless. Although a mother, her status as such is overlooked and ignored: 

‘Then she added irreverently: ‘You ought to see the baby.’

‘I’d like to.’

‘She’s asleep. She’s three year’s old. Haven’t you ever seen her?’ 

‘Never.’

‘Well you ought to see her. She’s —‘

Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. 

‘What you been doing, Nick.’

(pg. 10)

Interestingly for a book struggling to come to terms with identity, the daughter is never named. The nanny at one point refers to “Pammy”…but this is obviously a derivative of something else. Instead Tom, who is described earlier as “a brute of a man, a great big, hulking physical specimen of a —“ (Daisy is once again interrupted by Tom mid-sentence), by the end of the novel has become described as a “child.” So in some sense Daisy’s maternal duties have been redirected from her child to Tom.

At one point as Gatsby is dragging Daisy through the nooks and crevices of his enormous house he rouses the sleeping piano player that has been living with him and demands a song:  

“‘One thing’s sure and nothing’s sure

The rich get richer and the poor get- children. 

In the meantime, 

In between time—“

(pg. 78) 

And yet for Daisy, she gets neither. She has neither the freedom to consume independently nor even the power to mother her child. 

Clothing is constantly referenced throughout the novel in great detail. There are pink suits and cream colored chiffon dresses. At the end of the book, a caller asks for the shoes he has left at one of Gatsby’s infamous parties, while giving his condolences about not being able to make it to the funeral. The shoes outrank the social obligation of friendship.  

According to Veblen “… the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of what is required

for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods is effective and gratifying as

far as it goes; it is good prima facie evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently

prima facie evidence of social worth.” 2

My favorite example of this is Myrtle who is married to a low class car mechanic and also Tom’s paramour. In the span of a few hours she changes her outfit three times. While her sartorial identity crisis references her ambiguous sense of self and her lack of power, it also shows her status as an object of desire and as such secondary wealth. 

“Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.” (pg.26)

This again reminds me of Veblen. In his chapter on “Pecuniary Emulation” he argues that low-status people will attempt to emulate the rich by their consumption. They will consume over-priced luxury items to identify themselves with the purchasing power of the higher classes. When Myrtle spontaneously asks for Tom to buy her a puppy and he does, and when she creates a list of all the new purchases she must make in the near future, she is asserting her place within the pecuniary world. In the end the farce is exposed when Myrtle thinks she has a right to mention Daisy’s name. Tom disagrees and breaks her nose with his open hand. 

Between the lines we see the underlying sterility of this wealth and status. While the right kind of (hulking) men have purchasing power and ownership of this capitalist modern discourse, the wrong kind of men and all women are left marginalized. 

Gatsby is the wrong kind of man, without heritage or legitimacy. But in some sense, Nick Caraway, our pathfinder through this incomprehensible world is also the wrong kind of man. Although he has the right lineage, he does not posses the right wealth. His wealth is not of the leisurely kind but of the “make something of yourself” kind. As such, within this jungle he is equally marginalized. He is the most interrupted male character. While both Gatsby and Tom are described as powerfully standing with their feet on the ground as if expressing a type of general ownership and manifest destiny, Nick is the masculine counterpoint. His presence actually serves to make Gatsby and Daisy feel “more satisfactorily alone.” (pg. 77) 

His first image of Gatsby comes in the evening, as silhouettes make shadows in the moonlight. Nick sees Gatsby standing on his lawn, looking up at the stars: 

“Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.” (pg. 19)

Nick decides to call out to him, and then decides against it. Gatsby’s certainty of universal position is contrasted with Nick’s ineffectual existence. He wants to communicate but can’t, he “involuntarily” glances seaward following the trajectory of Gatsby’s view, yet unlike Gatsby’s vision of destiny and ownership of the local heavens, Nick “distinguishes” nothing. Our narrative guide is figuratively blind. When he looks again Gatsby is gone and Nick is alone in the “unquiet darkness.” (pg.20) 

From Nick’s narrative viewpoint Gatsby is enigmatic. A self made man, confident in what he has created: 

"The truth was that Jay Gatsby...sprang from a Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about his Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” (pg.80)

Nick on the other hand is less sure of himself. After Gatsby’s narrative of exchanging his ‘divinity’ for Daisy, Nick is rendered speechless/ voiceless. 

“Throughout all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.” (pg 91) 

Interestingly when Myrtle calls Tom at home he picks up the phone, but toward the end of the novel when Nick calls Gatsby (four times) his call doesn’t go through and the operator tells him the line is being kept open for a long distance call from Chicago. Another example of the impotence of Nick’s voice. 

Nick, in some undefinable way is “other.” He is the counterpoint to the definitive masculinity of both Gatsby and Tom. Unlike Gatsby and Tom he has no “girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs…” Unlike Daisy he does not have a voice “full of money”…his status is ambiguous and intangible. Ultimately he is the only character that seems objectively not consumed by the culture of consuming and the drive for status. 

He pursues a career after his family agrees it’s the best choice. He lives in an unassuming house in West Egg, and devotes himself without much ambition to a career in finance. By being neither an idealist (like Gatsby) or a pessimist (like Tom) he manages to survive as a realist. 

In his essay “Fitzgerald and the Collapse of the American Dream” Marius Bewley describes the Great Gatsby as an “exploration of the American dream as it exists in a corrupt period, and its attempt to determine that concealed boundary that divides the reality from the illusions.” 3

I would argue that America has always existed in a period of corruption, the specificity of the corruption just ebbs and flows and recreates itself for each new generation. The “Dream” has always been limited to a few while rhetorically accessible to everyone: 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

As hypocritical as this statement was in 1776, it was equally unaccessible in 1925 despite both the 13th amendment (outlawing slavery) and the 19th amendment finally granting suffrage to women. The 1920’s were less interested in an ideological “American Dream” and more interested in their right to consume. The Roaring Twenties became an era of avaricious consumption, people were encouraged to buy on credit and recognize their identity in their ability to consume. Like Gatsby, America nourished the “colossal vitality of this illusion.” 

The Great Gatsby was not a financially successful book. It was not the breezy college boy novel that gave Fitzgerald so much success and notoriety as his previous books had. But then the financial market collapsed, and what had initially seemed like a bit of a depressing take on exceptionalism became a clarion call for the illusive hopes and dreams of the middle class and the empty sterility of the wealthy. 

This narrative plays out over and over again. Culturally we define status and identity in terms of consumption, the consumption is encouraged beyond the sustainable means of the middle classes who begin to consume on credit, until eventually the market collapses and the cycle begins again. We see a similar quest for the American Dream, in slogans like “Make America Great Again” as if there was a time when America was ever truly great while simultaneously glossing over the specifics of how to go about getting to that place “again.” When we begin to define that greatness in smaller and more contained definitions we destroy the thing that makes America truly great: its resilience and diversity, its multiplicity of voices and perspectives, and its hopefulness that there is always a better more equitable future around the corner. 

By being an emasculated voice, Nick allows the reader to navigate these hopes and illusions for ourselves, forcing us to choose which reality we will pursue.  

1. All quote from The Great Gatsby are found in: Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Everyman’s Library, 1991.

2. Veblen, Thorsten. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. 1899, pp.78.

3. Bewley, Marius. “Fitzgerald and the Collapse of the American Dream.” Modern Critical Views: F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp.32.

Here's a link exploring some of the great cover art of this book over the years!

The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield’s short stories are permeated with an almost tangible sense of disorienting tension, filled with misunderstandings, missed opportunities and heroines that remain frustratingly invisible. 

I had never heard of Katherine Mansfield until this past fall when I was taking a class on Critical Reading and had to pick a piece of writing to analyze. Mansfield was on the list so I decided she would be perfect…I was unprepared for her writing. 

One of the things that makes Mansfield's writing a challenge is she’s hard to categorize. Born in 1888 in New Zealand (Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp) to a prominent commercial class family, at first she seems to be the poster child for post-colonialism. At 19 she left New Zealand to study at Queen’s college and becomes a part of the modernist literati…but her medium (the short story) is something never fully embraced by the modernist circle. She marries a man, (a singing teacher, George Bowden, 11 years her senior) but then hastily breaks it off, she has at least two lesbian relationships, all of which leave her semi-marginalized, existing in a tribe of her own.  

She is described by Elleke Boehmer (1) as a “woman between worlds,” which is also a fitting description of her protagonists, all of which are marginalized characters on the fringe of society or alienated within the culture they are a part of. 

Last month I looked at “The Garden Party” (1921) in which the protagonist is an adolescent girl, existing in the liminal space between adulthood and class distinction vs. childhood and invisibility. The main character, Laura, must navigate between being seen for who she really is, a sentimental girl that likes flowers and trees and whistling and eating her bread outdoors…and the cultural expectations of a wealthy British scion. It is unclear whether or not she navigates this successfully. The reader is left almost mid-sentence, mid-story…wondering what happens when Laura and her brother return to their house after dropping off food for a bereaved and impoverished family. Laura’s response to death and bereavement is disconcerting, and this defamiliarization is Katherine Mansfield’s specialty. 

In “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding” (1910) there is the same transient sense of displacement. Here’s the opening line: 

“Getting ready was a terrible business. After supper Frau Brechenmacher packed four of the five babies to bed, allowing Rosa to stay with her and help to polish the buttons of Herr Brechenmacher’s uniform. Then she ran over his best shirt with a hot iron, polished his boots, and put a stitch or two into his black satin tie.” 

This opening contrasts to Mansfield’s later writings where she takes her time introducing the protagonist. In “The Garden Party,” Laura is introduced fourth, as almost an after thought or the last possible option. In “At the Bay,” (also 1921) the reader is languorously introduced to the New Zealand landscape and then the cat, Florrie, is given the first line: “Ugh! What a coarse, revolting creature!” (an assessment of the old sheep-dog…but an appropriate appellation for the rake at the closing scene.) 

In 1910, Mansfield gets straight to the point. Frau Brechenmacher has been tirelessly preparing for this wedding all day, with less recognition than an old work horse. She plows through the details only to have her husband race in the door last minute and cry: 

“Now, then, where are my clothes?” cried Herr Brechenmacher, hanging his empty letter bag behind the door and stamping snow out of his boots. “Nothing ready, of course, and everybody at the wedding by this time. I heard the music as I passed. What are you doing? You’re not dressed. You can’t go like that.” 

Frau B. exists in the residual shadow of her postmaster husband. He’s important and significant and she’s invisible and voiceless. She’s caught between slaving alway for children that don’t appreciate her and a husband that doesn’t see her. As they hurry to the wedding, her spouse lunges ahead of her and she’s left slipping in the ice and snow, alone and abandoned. 

“She had not been out of the house for weeks past, and the day had so flurried her that she felt muddled and stupid - felt that Rosa had pushed her out of the house and her man was running away from her.” 

Finally they get to the wedding, and after making the rounds, the honorable post-master and his wife, she finds that she is enjoying herself. The air is warm and full, and she puffs out her chest a little with pride…only to be pulled aside and told that the back of her dress has been undone the whole time. She then sits and watches her husband become inebriated and ridiculous. 

Ultimately the Frau is powerless. She watches as the wedding crowd laughs at her husband and his ridiculous pontificating, and somehow it is directed at her, it is the result of their strength and her weakness. It’s not just her husband that dominates and controls the minutia of her life, it is the world, and she’s trapped, endlessly spinning down a drain that refuses to empty. 

She goes home (following behind her husband once again) and prepares a small dinner, which her husband takes as his due. Then after cleaning up she wanders into the children's room, pulls down the bedding to make sure they are all still dry and then prepares herself for the end of the day routine. She takes off her dress and lays down on the bed: “[putting] her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in.” 

Yikes. 

Another contrast between Mansfield’s early and later writing is the narrative perspective. In “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding” the narrative voice (third person omniscient) hovers just above the head of Frau Brechenmacher…it is only her perspective and her voice that we are interested in. In Mansfield’s later writing the reader is saturated in a cacophony of voices (to include family pets) we see the men having their own misunderstood trajectories and while still offered as examples of the ridiculous and often stupid, they are more dimensional, filled with insecurity and their own sense of alienation. 

“At the Bay” is a good example of this. Stanley has all the strength and presupposed valor of the truly masculine. He is introduced (after the cat) taking his morning swim, the exemplar of virility. He has a job in the city which gives him financial independence which he exemplifies by his conspicuous consumption.

Short aside: In any other environment the conspicuous consumption would be just that, and each artifact would be another building block towards status and acceptance, but Mansfield’s writing take place in New Zealand, her characters carry with them the heritage of colonizers. Therefore their purchases reflect another element to their quest for identity:

“Jeffery Meyers draws a picture of the intellectual environment prevalent in New Zealand towards the end of the nineteenth century, and points to the fact that a settler community is bound to be concerned with material rather than intellectual matters because the material comfort was the main motivation for most settlers.” (2)

 In “Prelude” (1918) the Burnell family is first introduced and Stanley purchases cherries out of season, in “At the Bay” he hurries home to profusely apologize to his wife after leaving that morning without saying goodbye to her. His apology is overly dramatized and as he talks about how she was all he could think about all day, how their parting disagreeably left a pit in his stomach, how he’s “suffered all day”… she notices he’s wearing new leather gloves. 

He sheepishly justifies his purchase, old Bell had a pair on this morning etc… but the moment is lost. 

“Stanley wanted to say, “I was thinking of you the whole time I bought them.” It was true, but for some reason he couldn’t say it. “Let’s go in.” He said.”

Like one would expect from a modernist text, the voice of the focalizer is constantly shifting, and the narrative voice is passed from character to character like a baton. There isn’t a clear protagonist, instead there are themes that come to the fore as each character wrestles with being misunderstood; their own ignorance and the ignorance of others; and their own experience or lack thereof. For each character the day to day moments offer crushing defeats or exhilarating joys, but there is no shared language or vocabulary and they are left alienated within their own spheres. 

In “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding” the plot structure is somewhat simplistic and the narrative is almost set up in binary oppositions. The powerful vs. the powerless, dominance vs. submission, the male sphere vs. the female…etc. as one would expect from a feminist author. But by 1918 Mansfield has added dimension to her story telling, the themes are still there, but they have taken on an almost Joycean complexity. The diametric oppositions are not as simple as the powerful vs. the powerless…instead each character is met with moments of power and subjugation. All exist in the pointless fray of swirling meaningless fate. 

In “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped” (1912) the plot circles around a misunderstanding. Again, similar to “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding” Mansfield gets right into the narrative and introduces the protagonist within the first sentence: 

“Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes.” 

Unlike our protagonist of “The Garden Party” who is an adolescent and play acts at being her mother (wearing her clothing, talking in her voice) Pearl Button is still young and impressionable, a tabula rasa, and we get to trespass into Maori culture from the unsullied, un-colonized, perspective of a child. 

Her “kidnappers” are two large Maori women, shoeless and in good humor, it’s hard to tell which aspect Pearl finds more intriguing, but within moments all three are standing at the gate smiling and laughing at each other. 

“The women smiled at her and Pearl smiled back. “Oh,” she said, “haven’t you got very white teeth indeed! Do it again.” The dark woman laughed, and again they talked to each other with funny words and wavings of the hands. “What’s your name?” They asked her. “Pearl Button.” “You coming with us, Pearl Button?” We got beautiful things to show you,” whispered one of the women. So Pearl got down from the gate and she slipped out into the road. And she walked between the two dark women down the windy road, taking little running steps to keep up, and wondering what they had in their House of Boxes.” 

Pearl obviously doesn’t think she has been kidnapped. This is potentially the greatest day of her life. She is surrounded by people that interact with her and find her fascinating, they share their food and time and look at her like she’s an exquisite specimen of humanity. Later as they make their way to the beach, Pearl sees the sea for the first time and screams. The most frightening part of her day is part of the natural landscape, a landscape she has evidently been deprived of exploring. 

“And down at the bottom of the hill was something perfectly different- a great big piece of blue water was creeping over the land. She screamed and clutched at the big woman, “What is it, what is it?” “Why” said the woman, “it’s the sea.” “Will it hurt us- is it coming?” “Ai-e, no, it doesn’t come to us. It’s very beautiful. You look again.” 

Eventually Pearl makes her way to the shore and after working up the confidence to touch a body of water for the first time, conquers her fear and realizes there is nothing to be afraid of. In a euphoric rush of gratitude, she flings her little arms around the neck of the woman, kissing her all over. This has been the greatest day of her life! And over the shoulder of the woman she sees a swarm of policemen, racing toward her to “rescue” her and bring her “home.”

This is perhaps one of Katherine Mansfield’s many concurrent thesis statements: look again. 

Her characters frequently have epiphanies where they come into a new form of realization, only to have the moment snatched away by obfuscating ambiguity. In “The Garden Party,” Laura is pleading with her mother to cancel their party out of respect for the grieving family that lives on the edge of their property. It seems cold and heartless to be so merry on such a devastating day for their neighbors. Laura’s mother thrusts a hat upon her head (the mother’s own hat) and then changes the topic by the new distraction of the hat and Laura’s beauty. It isn’t until Laura turns around and catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror, where she has her epiphany. She is beautiful. She is a part of this family. She does belong. 

The epiphanies frequently lead to faulty knowledge, for example, a shared moment in the moonlight with another woman, thinking she’s communing with your soul…only to realize she’s been having an affair with your husband. The realizations are almost always slightly off, so it’s not a mandate of “look again”…but rather a clarion call to change how we see. Where does the threshold of belonging really lie? And is it possible to cross it? 

Mansfield takes of the cry of the modernists, wondering how we make sense of this crazy amorphic world in which we find ourselves and posing the question: what is our identity in a society that is always in flux, always ebbing and flowing beyond our ability to pin down and make sense of. She doesn’t offer advice on how one makes sense, but rather challenges who we give narrative status to and ultimately who we see. 

1. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 127. 

2. Marit Skaatan, “The Writer in Exile: States of In-Betweenness in Two Short-Stories by Katherine Mansfield” 2011.

Resources: 

Most of her Short Stories are available here- http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/short-stories-by-katherine-mansfield/

A Structural Investigation of the Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield 1974

The Garden Party - Katherine Mansfield

I'm going to do something a little different this month, I recently took a short course on Critical Reading and one of our projects was to practice close critical analysis of a text. I chose a few paragraphs from Katherine Mansfield's short story "The Garden Party". Next month I will zoom out and discuss Mansfield a bit more generally, talk about more of her works and her context situated in-between modernism and post-colonialism. Super fun! But for this month a perspective microscopically from within the text itself: 

In “The Garden Party” Katherine Mansfield uses the image of the Karaka trees being hidden behind a marquee as a metaphor to highlight the complexity of identity for an adolescent girl hidden behind artifacts of class. 

Like most modernist texts, the action in this short story is not conclusion driven, but follows the minutia of the everyday lives of a wealthy British family, living in New Zealand, as they prepare for an afternoon garden party. The tone of the text is filled with the tension and ambiguity of in-between space and the confusion of a multiplicity of voices. The characters are driven in and out, up and down, within the protected confines of their estate and out into the bleak and poverty stricken surrounding neighborhood; hidden between the lines is the question of who has an authoritative voice. 

The adolescent girl, Laura, becomes the unlikely heroine of the story when the other options are exhausted. Her mother and sisters are too busy to go meet the workmen and Laura is obliquely introduced with the words: “You’ll have to go, Laura; you’re the artistic one.” 

Laura quickly complies:

“Away Laura flew… she loved having to arrange things; she always felt she could do it so much better than anybody else.”

Later we learn that Laura’s sister Jose: “loved giving orders to the servants, and they loved obeying her. She always made them feel they were taking part in some drama.” As we will see, Laura has virtually no power to arrange anything. She hurries to obey the women in her family that clearly outrank her, only to find herself equally outranked by the workmen. The motif of trapped birds is a recurrent image and it is interesting that the first verb associated with Laura is one of flight. 

One of the workmen is described as having “a haggard look as his dark eyes scanned the tennis-court.” The OED defines haggard as “(of a hawk) caught for training as a wild adult of more than twelve months.” A trapped adult bird. Later, when Laura visits the surrounding neighborhood, this imagery comes up again in the dismal description of the cottages, where one man has “studded” his house front with “minute bird-cages.” The inhabitants, both human and fauna are trapped, their lives are  “shreds and rags” in contrast to the “silvery plumes” of the Sheridans.

My close critical analysis will focus on the three paragraphs beginning with “Against the Karakas….She felt just like a working girl” to explore how the Karaka trees symbolize the isolation that Laura exists within, being both unseen and unheard. She is commanded to do things eight times throughout the short story, by both family members and the impoverished neighborhood women and always obeys. She has little agency and no volition. 

“Against the Karakas.” The text is filled with truncated sentences that create an overall feeling of tension, but this simple sentence also names the trees. They are not just foliage used as a demarcation between the Sheridan’s property and the surrounding neighborhood, but they are an identifiable species, with a history and a name that predates the arrival of the Sheridans. 

“Then the Karaka-trees would be hidden.”  Being hidden in plain sight is Laura’s predicament.   Her family bosses her around like a servant, they shame her for being “overly sentimental”…she feels different from them and they only exacerbate that difference by continuously pointing out her short comings. Her emotional response to the lilies is later referred to as “low class.”

The narrative voice (third person omniscient) slips into FID and we overhear Laura’s mental assessment of this plan:

“They were so lovely…Must they be hidden by the marquee?”

Why does Mansfield specify the Karaka tree? All of the research I have done about indigenous trees of New Zealand has emphasized the significance of the Karaka tree for the Maori people. Using a tree with a rich cultural history that is invisible or insignificant to the Sheridans emphasizes Mansfield’s point: the tree is prized for its visible surface but its nature and significance is unacknowledged. Now the tree exists in a highly codified world where the will of the horticulturalist is imposed, and the trees are forced to bend to the aesthetic demands of others.

In order to be “proud” and “solitary" the Karakas must be removed to a desert island, outside the boundaries of the reality in which they currently exist. This symbolizes Laura’s own struggle. It is impossible for her to imagine herself, proud and solitary, lifting her own “leaves and fruit” in a kind of splendor, while trapped within the confines of her family’s estate. 

The Karaka trees are described as having lovely “clusters of yellow fruit.” Here Laura stays at the visible surface, ignoring the toxicity of the interior pits and ultimately disregarding the nature of the fruit itself. 

“ Must they be hidden by the marquee?”

“They must.”

While technically not enjambment, the question pauses at the end of the paragraph elongating the space that waits for an answer. This pause and temporal stretching emphasizes that this decision is beyond Laura’s control. She is ultimately powerless. Like the trees, fated to be hidden, her own invisibility is outside of her control. She must be hidden as well. 

Like the Karakas with a toxic pit hidden beneath the surface, Laura’s genuine concern for others is slowly buried under the surface of a different object: the hat. Similar to the trees, who have no voice in the decision to be hidden, Laura has the hat thrust upon her against her will. In the same way the trees are hidden by the marquee, an artifact of class, Laura is hidden by the hat: a symbol of status and the power of consumption. 

“She would get on much better with men like these.” As one of the workmen bends down to “pinch” a sprig of lavender, she recognizes a kindred spirit. Behind the surface expectations of his class, behind his freckles and straw hat, is hidden a man who cares for the smell of lavender. This gesture reveals a character who “sees” the beauty hidden within even the smallest things, an attribute beyond the “silly boys” of her own set that seem intent to occupy themselves with the trivialities of dancing and eating.

The next paragraph has another significant pause in progression as the tall fellow’s action is forcibly situated in the middle of the sentence.

“It’s all the fault, she decided, as the tall fellow drew something on the back of an envelope, something that was to be looped or left to hang, of these absurd class distinctions.”

The “absurd class distinctions” have trapped people of both sides into expected behaviors and individuality has become a type of collateral damage. While the workman displays sentimentality in his appreciation for lavender, Laura’s appreciation of the lilies will be ridiculed, and the workman’s gesture seems somehow out of place. Neither of them are allowed the freedom to be sentimental, and instead are isolated being almost cursed with the ability to see and appreciate the world around them. 

“Well, for her part, she didn’t feel them. Not a bit, not an atom…” In the midst of the workmen, she finds a longed for camaraderie, she is not constrained by the “absurd class distinctions.” While this is an endearing sentiment, the ellipsis emphasizes a tension between what she perceives and her reality. The class distinctions don’t define her because as an adolescent she exists in a liminal state where everyone outranks her, she has no purchasing power and therefore belongs to neither class fully, having no voice or identity that is recognized. 

Her thoughts are interrupted by a cacophony of sounds. The “chock-chock” of the hammers, a whistle, a song. Mansfield frequently uses onomatopoeia as an aural effect to plunge the reader into the soundscape. This short story isn’t quiet and contemplative, it is loud and confusing. There is almost a type of narrative chiasmus between Laura’s dreams and hopes of belonging being interrupted by a supporting orchestra of friendly companionship in contrast to her sister loudly playing the piano “Pom! Ta-ta-ta Tee-ta!”  and then doing her best impression of sentimentality as she sings a song about the weary life where hope comes to die. Hope followed by music, and music followed by dying hope. 

“She felt just like a work-girl.” In these three paragraphs we see Laura at her happiest and least constrained. She would gladly exchange her class and presumed status to simply belong to anyone, but it is her overwhelming isolation and her need to belong that ultimately control her. When Laura begs her mother to reconsider postponing the garden party, her mother redirects the conversation by placing a hat upon her head.

The adjectives used to describe her before the hat were all pejorative: absurd, extravagant, sentimental. But now with the hat she has become stunning, becoming, striking. The hat gives her purchase, it is an artifact of belonging. Laura doesn’t take the hat off, she doesn’t fight to be heard or seen, instead she sees her reflection in a mirror and has an epiphany: with this hat she can be seen! She can belong to her family. 

These absurd class systems are ultimately responsible for burying identity behind artifacts of class. The tree is buried, unseen behind the marquee and Laura is buried beneath her hat. Ultimately, when she meets the dead man, she apologizes for her hat, for choosing to belong rather than choosing to care. The narrative ends abruptly, almost mid-sentence, as Laura says “Isn’t life-“ and then is unable to finish her thought. There is no happy conclusion, and the reader is left in an atmosphere of tension wondering if she’s made the right decision.