An Analysis Of Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party

1.1 A brief description of New Criticism

The new criticism is one of the most influential criticism of modern British and American literature, which began in the 1920 of the 20thcentury in the United Kingdom and formed in the 30th in the United States and became a trend about 40th to 50thin the United States. In the late 1950s, the new criticism gradually declined, but advocates and practice of the new criticism which based on the analysis of text is still the basic one of the literary criticism of the semantic. It has a profound impact on today's literary criticism especially on poetry criticism.

The innovation of new criticism literary theory is increasing the importance of language to the ontological level. Authors’ experiences can only

It depicts a young girl, Laura, from a rich family, the Sheridan, and tells about her growth. On a fine summer morning when the Sheridan were preparing for a garden party, Laura heard a piece of horrible news that a workman called Scott died in an accident in their neighborhood, leaving his poor wife and five little children. Laura then tried to persuade her sister and mother to put off the garden party, but they disagreed with her. The party was still successfully held in the Sheridan’s garden that afternoon. Laura sent some food to that dead workman’s wife and kids after the party. When Laura saw the young workman’s wife and his body in Mrs. Scott’s house, she felt guilt and sad. After her experience of the poor people’s life, Laura came to understand another side of life: poorness, death and sadness, even negative side of socialization like oppression and flattery. Happy party is short. Life is not ideal and perfect. And she sensed the distinction and inequality between her class and the working people. Her experience of another world of the poor becomes a turning point in her growth. Readers can see a lot of Laura’s traits. She’s an innocent, lively, kind, sympathetic, artistic, idealistic, sentimental, imaginative and adventurous young girl. The story displays Laura’s likes and dislikes, happiness and sadness, confusion about adults’ and her class value, and struggle between right and

Also, close reading which is a method of new criticism, is used to analysis the Garden Party in the thesis. According Rene Wellek, it is inevitable to adopt close reading in literary criticism, for any intellectual progress made and can be made depends on careful observation under the microscope. (Concepts of Criticism: 9) Close reading is a widely used method that has been popularized by New Criticism. A reader closely examines a text through analysis of its imagery, motifs, metaphor, symbols, structural patterns, choice of narrative perspective, oppositions, prosody, even its mood and implication, etc. to identify its features of ambiguity, tension, paradox, and irony. Thus the purpose can be achieved of understanding the text as an intrinsic organic whole. The best textbook for close reading is Understanding Poetry.

The structure of this thesis is simple, dividing into four parts and the second and third part of thesis is the main part to analysis the Garden Party by the New Criticism. This article is analysis the psychological change of the little girl Laura through the conflict by tension in theme and scenes as well as the images in the story. The last part of the thesis is a conclusion to sum up that all the changes and conflicts made a little girl change her mind from a purify girl to a realistic human being who no longer lived in her fantastic