Episode 333: "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield - Short Story Summer Remix

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast

Episode 333: "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield - Short Story Summer Remix

Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins
Date: June 16, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode, Angelina and Cindy embark on a detailed, layered discussion of Katherine Mansfield’s classic short story, "The Garden Party." As part of their "Short Story Summer Remix," the hosts break down the structure, themes, symbolism, and literary context of the story, focusing especially on its parallel to Louisa May Alcott’s "Little Women," the movement from innocence to experience, and the subtleties of class and reality.

The episode celebrates the ongoing journey of literary discovery, encouraging slow reading, careful attention to detail, and the communal joy of unlocking literature’s layers—emphasizing that great stories keep revealing themselves the more we look.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Parallel Reading Identity: “Little Women” and “The Garden Party”

• [24:25] Cindy shares her major insight: the character parallels between “Little Women” (Meg, Jo, Amy, Beth, Laurie) and those in "The Garden Party." Names and roles overlap—Laura, Meg, Jo(se), Laurie.
  • Cindy: “It just seemed to be a parallel story to Little Women to me... At the end of the story... Laura is taking a basket to some poor neighbors.”
  • The connections run deep: both stories feature a well-meaning, slightly removed mother; sibling dynamics; and acts of charity.
• [28:26] Discussion: Why might Mansfield intentionally echo "Little Women"? Is she critiquing its idealism or exploring modern tensions of innocence and reality?

2. Story Structure and the Epiphany Model

• [30:52] Angelina lays out the modern short story “epiphany” structure, where a character is brought to a moment of awakening or revelation.
  • Angelina: “We’re going to give you this slice of life... leading up to some moment of realization about something.”
  • The hosts note that the story’s ending is deliberately ambiguous, reflecting a modernist sensibility—some insights, Angelina observes, can’t be fully articulated.

3. The Garden as Eden, Innocence, and Exile

• [32:33] Angelina immediately zooms in on the Garden of Eden motif in the opening lines—a place of innocence, beauty, and seclusion, with the garden party symbolizing fantasy and insulation from reality.
  • Angelina: “I immediately said, oh, okay, we got a Garden of Eden. This is a Garden of Eden...”
• [35:24] Later, when Laura leaves the garden and the gates close behind her (after the death across the road), Angelina asserts: “That gives us some insight into what her epiphany is. The story ends with her outside of the garden, door shut... Garden of Eden, exile from the Garden.”

4. Coming of Age: Movement from Innocence to Experience

• The narrative’s emotional heart is Laura’s journey from sheltered innocence toward a painful but profound encounter with reality.
  • Cindy [34:21]: “This is a pretty standard setup for a coming of age story... a character who's childlike and innocent and who's going to be ushered into some adult experience.”
• The descent into “the real world” is literal (walking down from the garden/estate to the poor neighbor’s house), and figurative (leaving behind illusions, childhood, class separation).

5. Class Critique and Social Blindness

• At the garden party, Mansfield skewers upper-middle-class insularity: the family treats the death in the lower-class lane as inconvenient background noise.
  • Angelina [48:07]: “Zero compassion... that’s an eyesore for us in our garden... Mother's adulthood was like the garden—isolation and a fantasy, sheltered and not in touch with reality.”
• The cream puffs and lilies meant as consolation are patronizing and illustrate the obliviousness of privilege. Mother’s refusal to go herself, sending Laura instead, echoes yet subverts "Little Women."

6. The Symbolism of the Hat

• [49:31] The moment Laura dons her mother’s hat becomes a focal symbol of her struggle:
  • Angelina: “The hat, I think, is a big, big symbol in the story... as soon as she sees herself in the hat, that vision of herself changes her whole view. ‘I hope Mother's right. I hope we don't have to cancel the party. I look so nice...’”
  • The hat embodies the seductive comfort of illusions and the pull to remain insulated—an identity she must shed.

7. Descent Into “Hades”: Death as the Real

• The journey outside the garden—into darkness, with the Hades-like “dog” and through the “gate” with closing “shadow”—culminates in her encountering death not as horror but as “the real.”
  • Cindy: “So she's now awake... that's right... she's now had some kind of epiphany which has filled her with a deep understanding that she can't articulate.”
  • Laura’s apology to the dead man (“Forgive my hat”) is both literal and metaphorical: a request for forgiveness for the blindness of privilege.

8. Ambiguous Ending and the Need for Community

• The episode ends with Laura’s inexplicable tears and her inability to articulate her epiphany, but Laurie intuitively understands.
  • Angelina [70:16]: “There's some deep understanding between the two of them…”
  • Cindy [70:44]: “So she's not going back alone... she's not going back to this world where nobody understands her.”

9. Why It Resonates: The Craft of Slow Reading

• The hosts emphasize how parallel scenes, small symbols (like the hat, the lilies, the closing gate), and references to older works clue careful readers into deeper meanings.
  • Angelina [77:11]: “Always be looking for those parallel scenes, those doubles. They're everywhere... it's going to open up the story to tell you what is she's doing with all of this.”
• They encourage readers to look for both structure and allusion as a way to unlock stories.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the limits of reading:

  “On the Day of Judgment, surely we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done; not how well we have spoken, but how well we have lived.”
  — Thomas à Kempis, quoted by Angelina at [13:07]

• On book lists & pride:

  “I just know my black heart... that would damn my soul to hell. That would be such an act of pride. I would spend all year thinking about the public persona of my reading lists.” — Angelina, [16:55]

• On class and blindness:

  “A movement toward blindness is never going to be good in a character... the image of the dead man, his family, began to seem unreal to her, like a picture in a newspaper.” — Angelina, [52:27]

• On story structure:

  “The story will tell you how to read it... where there’s a repeating scene... look for those parallel scenes, those doubles. They’re everywhere.” — Angelina, [77:11]

• On epiphany and ambiguity:

  “You know she's had some kind of epiphany... but it's not something that can be articulated.” — [70:55]

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Important Timestamps

• 13:07 — Angelina’s commonplace quote from Thomas à Kempis on virtue vs. knowledge
• 19:12 — Cindy’s commonplace quote from C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory) and the theme of disillusionment
• 24:25 — Cindy introduces the “Little Women” parallel
• 32:33 — Eden/Garden motif identified by Angelina
• 40:54 — Mansfield’s complex treatment of class realism begins
• 49:31 — Symbolism of the hat—and what it means to “grow up” in this world
• 58:51 — Exile from the Garden; moving into darkness, real encounter with suffering
• 65:51 — The memento mori moment: death as real, beautiful, universal
• 70:16 — Laura and Laurie's understanding—ambiguity, experience beyond words
• 77:11 — How to “read well”: using parallel scenes and allusion

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Tone & Atmosphere

• The tone is intimate, reflective, confessional, friendly, and at times self-deprecating. The hosts model the humility of lifelong learning and the excitement of literary discovery. Discussions are layered, enthusiastic, and passionate—marked by gentle teasing and “aha!” moments.

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Takeaways for New Listeners

• Mansfield’s "The Garden Party" reveals its riches most to those willing to read slowly, look for patterns, and be unafraid to revisit and wonder. Personal stories from the hosts about family, reading journeys, and even funerals ground the analysis and invite listeners to connect literature with life.
• The story ultimately encourages us to move beyond the fantasy “gardens” we create—to see, mourn, and marvel at reality as it is—and to do it together.

For More Discussion:
Join the conversation at the Literary Life Podcast’s Facebook discussion group or Patreon forum.

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(Episode skips ad/promo sections and official intro/outro; all analysis above covers only core content.)

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast, where your hosts and Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins explore a life shaped by books, stories, and poetry. Each week, we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Hello, and welcome to episode 13 of the Literary Life Podcast with me, Angelina Starre, and my partner in crime, Cindy Rollins. Hey, Cindy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Hello. I guess we're at the unlucky number here.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's ominous. Yeah, the floor in the hotel that doesn't really exist so that no one has to be on floor 13.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Here we are. Here we are.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. That's right. Thank you to our very brave listeners who tuned in for episode 13. Just don't listen to this under a ladder or while holding a black cat. You should be fine. Cindy, how you doing?

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm doing well. I've had a good week and lots of company, so I'm a little worn out from that, but always glad to have people visiting.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's good. I had a really good weekend, Mr. Banks.

[Cindy Rollins]

I saw my YouTube. That's right.

[Angelina Stanford]

We went to McKay's and had a fabulous time and came back with quite a haul.

[Cindy Rollins]

So McKay's is a used bookstore that's kind of popular in the south, and they're just huge books. They have records, they have CDs, and they have games, but they mostly have books.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, right. So all these years, I have listened to you talk about McKay's in Chattanooga, and I knew there was a McKay's in Nashville, and it was always like, you know, this kind of Mecca. Right. I gotta make my pilgrimage to McKay's. But then I recently found out that where I'm living in North Carolina, that there are two North Carolina McKay's locations. Same, same McKay. So they've got the Tennessee and they've got the North Carolina location, and both of them are 20 minutes from my house in two different direct.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

So when I discovered this, of course, I turned to Mr. Banks and said, you want to go to the bookstore? Of course, he said yes. So we went to the first one this weekend, and we decided that we needed to wait one month before we go to the second one. That's how many books we bought.

[Cindy Rollins]

Some money comes in. And you've actually read some of the books? Yes, I have my latest, McKay's Mike hall, over. Sitting over here also. I'll have to post that maybe.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. See, maybe we should say, please, Patreons, please sponsor our show so we can continue to buy books and learn more about literature.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, definitely. So I am doing that, trying to learn more about literature, since you're such an expert.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't think I'm an expert at all.

[Cindy Rollins]

I don't think you're insightful. I think you have some knowledge and you also have insights, and you put that together. Very helpful.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I hope so. I hope so. I think I'm a pretty good reader, but I don't know that I'm ready to say I'm an expert. I. I feel like I'm painfully aware of the gaps that I personally have, you know.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. Well, yeah, me too. Me too. I'm painfully aware of my own.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm sure, you know, and that. I suppose that's, you know, that's. That's good that we brought that up because, I mean, yes, in one sense, I have spent a lot of time studying books, and I know them and understand stories probably better than the average person does, since I have made this my life's. I don't know that I made it my life's calling. It is my life's calling. How about that? But sometimes I'll hear people say things like, oh, there's just so many books I haven't gotten to. I'm never going to understand these books fully. Well, I feel the same way. Everyone feels the same way. You never get to the end of a classic. It never stops showing you new things. So, know, I think we can. I try to look at reading as a skill, and I think that we can get better and better, but it's not like there's a finish line out there. We need to be discouraged because we think we're so far away from the finish line. I am hopefully very far away. I want to live a long time and keep learning.

[Cindy Rollins]

Me too. Me too. And I've read a lot, but I haven't had a lot of knowledge to go with it. But it does, you know, I can hold on, hold on to some things when it comes up. So I'm always excited to hear what you have to say because, like, with this story that's so rich that we're going to get to today as far as rich being so rich in detail, I felt like I could use some hand holding. I'll tell you the truth, what I did. So Alex, my son, he got home from Africa and he wanted to watch Stranger Things Season 3, which we had not. You know, I only watched with if I'm with him or something. So the whole time we watched the first episode, I'm thinking, boy, I wish Angelina was here. So you could, could have been helpful in a movie also, not just the book. So that was a fun episode. I kept seeing all these little things that I got from the 80s. Like I'm like, this has got to be from that. This is from that. And then Alex even said there's, there's sandlot. And of course it was, it was a homage, homage to sandlot. So it was fun.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that, that's a lot of fun. I'm glad you thought of me while you were, while you were watching. I actually get a lot of messages like that. Like I read this and wished I had you with me for that. Or I saw this movie. Sometimes I get emails like that from my students, which is always really, really fun. Like I wish you had watched this movie with me.

[Cindy Rollins]

Tell me what it means because it's story. These are stories.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely. It's story. But you know, Cindy, you are, you are seriously one of the most well read people I' I've ever read. Met. I mean, you've read all of Shakespeare more than once. I have not. So here's, here's, here's True Life, Confessions Within, Dim the Lights and I'll put on my nighttime DJ voice and give you my confession here for lit Life after After Dark. But I have never read all of Shakespeare's plays once. I am as a reader am far more likely to abstain over one or two things go crazy like researching it and chasing the footnotes and all that and really trying to understand this one thing than I am to read more widely. This is true about everything. You know, I've read Pride and prejudice 11 times and I read the rest of her books a mere one time. Well, that's not characteristic. I've read Emma more than once. But like. So I'm not the kind of. Now I'm saying this as a flaw. I'm admitting a flaw here. I'm not the kind of reader who I fall in love with one Shakespeare play that makes me want to go to list to hear all of them. It just makes me want to do that one over and over and over. I'm like this about everything. Music, books.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I think you're a detail person then. And I'm a big picture person. I'm definitely a big picture person. So this is a good combination, hopefully.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, it is. It is a good combination. And I'm inspired by you. Actually. Tom and I are going to start reading through Shakespeare's plays together because he said. And he is extraordinarily well read. He said, you know, I was telling him about how you've read all of them more than once, and he said, I think there's like two or three I have never read. So we're inspired by you. We're gonna have Shakespeare nights over here. And inspired by.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, you only have to read a little bit of Shakespeare every day to get through the canon. And, you know, eventually. No, that's true. Yeah. And the thing about me is I'm just like you, except for what happens to me is when I read one book and it talks to another book, then I have to go find other book and read that. Mm. If it talks about another book. I mean, I started out in high school, like, we talked about reading Little Women, and they're talking about Pilgrim's Progress and they're. And that. And I'm feeling like something's wrong. I haven't read these books, so I've just been on a lifelong quest to catch up.

[Angelina Stanford]

What a beautiful quest. I mean, it's the quest for all. It's the quest for all on. This is just so much fun to me. And I'm reading stuff that's out of my comfort zone right now with these. With the story Today, for example, we have chosen. We have chosen in almost all modern short stories, which is way out of my comfort zone. That is not my time period at all.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely, Absolutely. Yeah.

[Jen Rogers]

I hope you're enjoying today's best of episode of the Literary Life podcast. Because this episode was recorded many years ago, I wanted to let you know what we've got going on right now. This podcast is always available for free,

[Angelina Stanford]

but for people who want to go

[Jen Rogers]

deeper or explore different topics, we've got a great summer lineup for you of webinars and mini classes. The May webinar was Mary Poppins, Venus in a Blue Coat with Silver Buttons, which takes a look at Mary Poppins as goddess slash Celtic fae. Who is there to enter us into the world of fairy through these books was fantastic. In June, we've got a mini class coming up. Frankly, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled about our entire summer lineup.

[Angelina Stanford]

But Ms. Jen Rogers is going to

[Jen Rogers]

be bringing us a mini class called the Chronicles of a Complete Transmutation. And she's going to be looking at the Chronicles as a whole and showing us what Lewis is trying to accomplish with the whole series and how it works as one story. In July, we've got a mini class called Players on a Cosmic the Grammar of Nature in Shakespeare. If you enjoyed Ms. Ella Hornstra's classes and webinars on the symbolic meaning of nature, you're going to really love this class where she's going to go through the images of nature in Shakespeare and show us that once again because we are so disconnected from nature and disconnected from symbolic language that we miss major things going on in Shakespeare's work. So even if you haven't taken those other classes, you'll be able to start here. I'm really looking forward to that one. In July, we also have a webinar, what Became of the Weaving Maid, an introduction to Chinese Folklore. That's going to be fantastic. And we're going to continue to explore the ways in which the Tree of Tales has roots in the east as well as the West. And in August, I'll be rounding up the summer lineup with the next installment of my Harry Potter Gateway to the Literary Tradition course, and I will be covering the Half Blood Prince. I also encourage you to check out our publishing wing, cassiodoraspress.com to see the latest from Dr. Jason Baxter. He's got a new book out with us called Falling Inward. You can also check out his other book, why Literature Still Matters. He's also got an audiobook read by himself and get on the mailing list there because we've got some exciting projects coming out in the next couple of years. There may also be one or two more surprises this summer, so keep checking back to our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and remember all all of our purchases are available live or later. You also might notice we have a brand new dashboard set up on the website. We're continuing to move all the classes over to that, but I think you're going to really, really like the new setup and how user friendly it is. It's just going to make taking our classes even easier and even better. So thanks so much for listening. Let's continue with the.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, Commonplace quotes. Yes. Who wants to go first? All right, I'm going first. Okay, so we've been talking on this show a lot about the different ways that we commonplace and for a long time I would just write down whatever quote I was reading on Facebook. So Facebook's sort of my commonplace book. So on my Facebook memories, a lot of times a quote will come up, which is so fun to see. What was I reading, you know, eight years ago? And so this, this. This came up on my Facebook commonplace book. Ok, going to rename Facebook. So this came up as my memories. I was reading this book 10 years ago, 2009. I wrote this on. On. On Facebook. I shared this quote. This is from Thomas A. Kempis Imitation of Christ, which is one of my favorite books. And I had read it very slowly and devotionally back in 2009 and was commonplace in my way through it. And this was. This was the quote that had really struck me. And I think it's very apropos to so many of the things we talk about on this podcast. So here it is. On the day of Judgment, surely we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done. Not how well we have spoken, but how well we have lived. And that's from book one, chapter three of Imitation of Christ.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow, that is amazing quote. I mean, I think we could have a whole podcast on that quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, right.

[Cindy Rollins]

It would be amazing to think about because we're always talking about all these imaginative literature, poetry, wonder, and virtue, because that's really our ultimate goal. But sometimes we are so busy talking about these things that we don't make the connection to actually being these things.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And I'm hoping to unpack some of this in my talk, because I do think there is a connection between what we read and. And virtue and how it affects us. I don't think the connection is always what we think it is. I know you agree with this. Books don't make us good. Right. There's no. Well, my kid needs to learn how to stop lying, so I'm gonna read this book to him, and now he's gonna stop lying. That's not how it works. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

Victorian children's literature.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, Right. And so there's a whole other process that's happening that I think does. Can. I should say I think can help us live virtuous lives. It can be part of that, should be part of that, but doesn't work quite the way that we. It's not input, input in, output out. Right. But this is such a good reminder, though, that it's not enough to just read all the great books. Right. There's something else that has to be happening to it. If we're not reading him and being changed by them and changing the way that we live our lives, then Then there's no point. I kept thinking of Paul and the clanging symbols. You know, like the books we read are just going to be clanging symbols if it doesn't lead to something else. It's not, the books are not end in themselves. I think about the dragon sitting on their hoard.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

We don't want our intellectual lives to be like that where we just really good hoarded all this knowledge and we're sitting on top of it. That, that's death. That's a picture of death.

[Cindy Rollins]

And we know like, and we think about the Dawn Treader, what happens to the dragon on the, on the thing. You know, it's a painful transformation and, and it's worth all to go through that transformation really. I mean, I don't. We could get really deep here and I don't want to do that right. When we're just talking about a commonplace quote, a Facebook commonplace quote of all things. But you know, there's the role of the Holy Spirit in all of this. And so if we have the Holy Spirit, then everything we read has the potential to change us. And he really. We're giving our children and ourselves hooks for the Holy Spirit to use, but without his actual enlivening us, we're unable to make good use of that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely. And you know, it makes me think of that quote from Mortimer Adler. It's not how many books we get through, it's how many books get through us. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's not. Yeah, we, not, we don't want to just hoard this stuff. It's got to, it's got to transform us in some way.

[Jen Rogers]

Our.

[Angelina Stanford]

What is the point? And I find that a very good reminder for myself personally. It's very, very easy to. This is one of the reasons that I don't post year end reading lists. Not that they're wrong because I know a lot of people ask me to do it and a lot of people enjoy seeing what other people read because it gives them ideas. I'm just, I just know my black heart. This is just about Angelina's wickedness here. This isn't about any, it's not about. I'm not drawing a big picture here about it's wrong to make reading lists. I'm just saying I know myself and if I start putting a December 31st, here's all the books I read this year post that would damn my soul to hell. That would be such an act of pride. I would spend all year thinking about the public Persona of my reading lists.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, that is true for me. I found when I was blogging that it really helped me to know that I had a place to talk about the books. And that is how I've used Goodreads and how I've used. I blog through books. It was.

[Angelina Stanford]

And your reading lists have helped so many people. I'm not. I'm just.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, no. But I know I've said it a lot of times that there is the danger of being like David and numbering the books, like he numbered the people. I definitely think that is a danger that we have. And I. So I agree with you. I don't think it has to be, but I definitely think that it can easily become that without us even being aware sometimes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, yeah, we have a remarkable ability to turn everything bad.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, we do.

[Angelina Stanford]

And also, I never wanted my reading list to make someone feel discouraged.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. That is true. The reason I don't think that is I'm pretty sure that I am not like. Like, reading through Shakespeare. That's not because I miss scholarly. That's because I miss. Plug away, plug away, plug away. And I like to encourage people that I feel like that's encouraging. Oh, if you just read a tiny bit of Shakespeare, you eventually get through all the plays. Read a tiny bit of the Bible. Eventually you get through the whole Bible. I mean, like, you can read the Bible a minute a day, and eventually you would get to the end. It. As a matter of fact, it would be about six years. So it's. I look. I like to look at it from that angle. Not the, you know, the other. The other side of it, where. The prideful side of it, where, oh, look, I read all of Shakespeare.

[Angelina Stanford]

I found at one point in my reading life that when I knew people were gonna ask me, how many books did you read this year? That was affecting the length of the books I chose to read.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, true. That is so true. Yes. Yes. I've had that happen before. Also where I pick it. I don't want to pick a long book. I don't want to read Middlemarch this year because it will take me the rest of the year.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. You could read three other books.

[Cindy Rollins]

No.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. Same. We are getting some therapy right here on the Lit Life podcast.

[Cindy Rollins]

We've only had one commonplace quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, Sydney, it's your turn now. Go ahead and convict me with your commonplace quote.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, here's mine, and it's not really that far off from yours. This is from CS Lewis in the Weight of Glory. And he says, if we had foolish, unchristian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned and not a moment too soon away to glory.

[Angelina Stanford]

Cindy, that's the story we read.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, it is.

[Angelina Stanford]

Holy cow. That is the story we read.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's every story for me. I just. That quote is. That quote just, like, sits on my back all the time. Oh, that reminds me. You know, what if we. Yes, I'm disappointed. This person disappointed me. These people disappointed me. But you know what? It's not a moment too soon.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, you know, and I think that brings up a good point. And we saw that with Araby, that disillusionment does not equal despair. It doesn't have to. You know, it depends what you've been disillusioned by.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. We should be disillusioned sometimes.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. Because not all that glitters is gold. And if you realize that now, you can. You can. You know more. You're more able to recognize the real thing.

[Cindy Rollins]

You can stop looking in false places for things that aren't there, looking for them where they really are.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I think that I really felt that vibe from Joyce's story that we covered a couple of weeks ago that he's disillusioned, but it's not a despairing, dark disillusionment. It's painful. Disillusionment is always painful.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And that's why when we came to this story, I thought, I hope our listeners. So a lot of people were like, oh, that Araby. I didn't get it. I didn't like it. But then all of a sudden, we started taking the layers off of it. Not just me and you, but other people.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, no. Our readers took it and ran. I was so impressed with the.

[Cindy Rollins]

And then suddenly it's an interesting story to all of us, and I hope that we can stick with this, because I'm amazed. I love interacting with all of you guys because you're bringing the story alive to us, too.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, I was so excited. Actually was reading some of the Facebook posts to Mr. Banks the other night because I was so impressed. And I said, once you really approach reading as a skill, and not that literature is some subjective emotional experience and we can make it mean anything we want, but once you say it's a skill and this is the skill, and said just. Just focusing on that One thing. Look up all the proper names. Right. That one thing opens up the stories. And I was just blown away by the research everyone was doing and naming all the things, you know, the poem, the song, the name of the fair, and the way that. That just blew up the stories. The layer started peeling off because there were all these. These signs and indications inside the story for how to read it. I was just. I was cheering you guys. I was applauding. I was so. I felt like such a proud little mama chick. I look at.

[Cindy Rollins]

This is so good.

[Angelina Stanford]

But not. That sounds condescending. I didn't really mean it that way because I learned. I learned that people were bringing up points that I had not thought about, and that's very, very exciting for me.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And I think this story is. We're not going to be able to cover everything in this story either, because we won't have time. And it's just, you know, it's a little bit longer. And so we're going to need help. We're going to need help.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm curious. So Araby was my pick, and the Chesterton essay was a Mr. Banks pick. But this story I had never read before. You read it a few weeks ago and messaged me, I want to do a podcast episode on this. So what was it. What was your moment with this story that made you think, no, we have got to discuss this?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, number one, I wanted to talk about it with you because I thought there was a lot here. And I thought, well, this would be a great story to do because there's a lot of the figurative language that. That comes into play and stuff I thought I felt like I was missing, but I actually read it, the story first in the book, how to Read Like a Professor, I think it's called something.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

And he had this story at the end of the book, and then he had some analysis of the story by three different readers, people who had been learning from him. And he asked them each to look at the story, and they each had a different take. And all three of them had a different take on the story than what I took away from the story. And I started seeing a lot of things in the story, and I decided not to go looking all over the Internet. That's the danger of. I don't want. I'm not getting on here and pretending to be someone I'm not. I mean, there is a time and a place to get some background knowledge, like on Kathryn Mansfield or, you know, that. That type of thing. But I thought, I'm not gonna go find out what everybody thinks about this story so that we can talk fresh about it. But the thing that hit me right out of the gate, if you want me to say that, go for it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Is that this seemed to be a parallel story to Little Women to me. And the farther I went in it, the more and more and more nods I saw to Little Women. And so I thought as we go, I'll just bring up what I saw here and there. I mean, the story starts out in the middle, basically. There's two things I noticed about the story. One, it just, you know, we just start into the story. What is that called? In media res?

[Angelina Stanford]

In media res. Uh huh.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. But then there really isn't a garden party in this story. The garden party never appears. What we hear about the garden party, we don't even get even the slightest detail about how off stage isn't it? Yes, it is. So I thought that was super interesting. But we have this family and they have their mother and their mother is. She's a very overseeing person who's trying to take a backseat. You know, she's not really trying to take a backseat, but she pretends to be taking a backseat.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mother, I thought you were going to let us do everything.

[Cindy Rollins]

And then right away we. And this is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. So. So I'm making a connection to the story Little Women. We have Meg. We have this oldest daughter, Meg. And so right away I'm like, oh, Meg. That's Little Women. That reminds me, you know, Mother, Meg. And then we have immediately Jo's. So there we have another name that's very, very similar.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, and Laurie. Yeah, you're right.

[Cindy Rollins]

So then we have the next name we see is Laura, but it says you are the artistic one. That's Amy, but her name isn't. But so we don't have this straight analogy, but we have so many reasons to think this is. And she and Amy, not Amy. But Laura always felt she could do it so much better than anyone else. And that's Amy. Then we have a girl who is. Then we have a piano later on in the story, but there's nobody to play it. And I mean, they do play it, I think at one point. But the piano to me is a representation of Beth, who is not in the story and as she died in Little Women. And sorry, spoiler alert if you haven't read Little Women. But then we have this father who is just sort of, you know, not there. And we have a brother figure Named Lori. I just felt like that was too many connections. So Amy and Laurie spend a lot of time. I'm Amy, Laura. She's so Amy to me that I can't separate that in my mind. So then we have Laura spending. You know, the person who helps her the most is the brotherly figure, Lori, who is not, you know, the next door neighbor. But what was Laurie in Little Women if not a brother. A brother. And there's many. There's other things.

[Angelina Stanford]

Becomes the brother in law.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes. So. So there's a lot going on here that I feel like we have. Well, we have. At the end of the story, what. What is Laura doing? She's taking a basket to some poor neighbors.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, my gosh. Yes, you're right.

[Cindy Rollins]

So she has. We have the same. When I get to that part, I'm like, like, no, there's got to be a connection here. This cannot be a coincidence. She's taking Little Women and she's, you know, she's making whatever points she wants to make about, you know, the class consciousness and all the different ways you can go with the story, Crossing the River and the Shadow and all that. But I just feel like she's doing it within the context of the story. Little Women.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, that's fascinating. I did not see any of that, but I am totally sold. That's fascinating. So then the question I always ask of my students is, it seems. I completely agree with you. She is asking us to think about Little Women. Okay, so then why. Why that?

[Cindy Rollins]

I did not get that far in my mind. I could not figure that out. Was it an idealized life compared to the truth? The underneath part?

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, that's my first guess. As soon as you started saying that, I started trying to figure out how the Little Women element played in with my interpretation of the story. This is. This is fantastic. Let's. Okay, so first I just want to say, anybody who doesn't know Kathryn Mansfield, this is a modern short story. Modern not meaning contemporary like five years ago, but modern as in the modern literary period. She's a contemporary of D.H. lawrence and Virginia Woolf and was friends with both of them. She was born in 1888, died in 1923, very young of tuberculosis. And she's in New Zealand. Writer, but spent a great deal of time in London. It was kind of in that London literary set. She likes to write stories about children who are artistic and creative and have some sort of insight because of that. And this story follows the same structure as Araby, that epiphany structure that is so we're gonna, we're gonna give you this, this slice of life in this character, and it's gonna be leading up to some moment realization about something. So we see a lot of the same sorts of things that we saw in Araby. In fact, I started to wonder, you know, is that structure inherent in all short stories? And I kind of threw that out to Mr. Banks yesterday. And we kind of tried to figure out like every short story we could think of. We were like, yeah, young Goodman, Brown. We just started tossing around stories and we're like, yeah, they all kind of build up to that. So I don't know if I'm ready to say all short stories follow that structure, but I think we can say a great many short stories follow that structure where the character is being led towards some sort of epiphany. Now these, these modernist writers want to leave that epiphany a bit open ended, and I think that's probably why you had so many interpretations. So I think we can look at the story, we can look at the structure, we can look at the things that Katherine Mansell is drawing our attention to, and then we can ask the question, what was the epiphany? Because she does not spell it out for us.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I found myself wondering if that, if that open endedness is perhaps not a little bit inherent with modernist philosophy. Like, maybe some things can't be expressed, some things can't be known. Perhaps epiphanies are individual experiences. You wouldn't see that sort of thing in a medieval story where, you know, if somebody goes on a quest and has a vision, they can tell you what the vision is.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And that was very disconcerting at the end because you're like, like every time you read this story, you've got to make a little leap there at the end and say, do I, you know, is it obvious? Did I miss something? You know, I don't. I'm not really sure what her epiphany was. I mean, I know she had one, that's for sure, but I don't know for sure what it was.

[Angelina Stanford]

So I think if we very carefully look at the story and look at the parallels between the beginning and the ending of the story, which are very deliberate and just really jumped out at me. Look at the light and dark imagery, look at the movement of the narrative and the movement of the character, that may give us insight into what is this journey she takes and what is the epiphany she has.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, well, good, good. That's good.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's gonna be my approach. I might get it totally wrong, but this is how to read.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, well, no, that's what we need to know. And I definitely. I feel like I had a lot of insight and a lot of confusion, so I thought you would be really helpful with the confusion.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, awesome.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's a lot of pressure. Let's see. I'm gonna end up like the mom in this story and just disappoint you horribly.

[Jen Rogers]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

You're sitting back going, no, Cindy, you're gonna have to do this story all by yourself.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that. Okay. So I'm fascinated that what jumped out at you first was the little women. That was so good. And I did not see that at all. What jumped out. I. Of course, this is how I read. Right. What jumped out at me. I'm looking at all of the images in the opening sentences because I know that that is how the author is going to set things up. So I'm reading that opening paragraph, and I immediately said, oh, okay, we got a Garden of Eden. This is a Garden of Eden.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And with. With. So, I mean, she says it's like the archangels were looking over the flowers. And it's very, very heavy language. Right. So everything's blooming and beautiful, secluded, perfect, happy. There's. There's not even a hint of a serpent in this garden. Right. Everything is just lovely. Now, of course, Kathryn Mansfield's gonna be raising the question of, is this real? Is this Garden of Eden real? Is this reality? But it definitely starts off the Garden of Eden. Now, when you raise the question, why is it called the Garden party when the garden party is not even in the thing? That was the first time that I had thought of that. That was a great question. I immediately thought, okay, well, it's because she's making the Garden of Eden be the central issue of the story. Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

The garden is here, but the garden party is missing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. But maybe the garden. The garden party. Well, I don't want to get too. I'm not going to tell you my conclusion just yet.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Let's just keep going. So we're got all this Garden of Eden stuff, and then we've got the mother wanting to step aside and let the children plan the party. So we've got all these images of childhood and innocence and youth. Okay. So I'm thinking this is a pretty standard setup for a coming of age story. That we're gonna have some kind of character who's childlike and innocent and who's going to be ushered into some adult experience.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Which, of course, is what happens. But I didn't know at the beginning of what that experience would be. Just that we're being set up with sort of the scales tilted in one direction, and the movement of the story is gonna carry it away. I was kind of hoping it wasn't gonna turn out to be anything too horrifically horrible. Like, if this was a Flannery o' Connor story, it'd be something violent, right? That would happen.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. It would be something hate everybody in the story.

[Angelina Stanford]

Now, there is something violent that happens in the story, but it doesn't happen to her. Right. She observes it and it's changed violently.

[Cindy Rollins]

But you do feel ominous as she's leaving. You have this feeling of ominous scariness as she. At the end of the story. Now, the other thing I want to say real quick is, before we get started, this was written in three parts, so it was like a serial. I don't know if she wrote it all at once or if she. I'd be curious to know where she, like, stopped each time.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's interesting. You know. And this was also published a year before she died. Yes, she died of tuberculosis. So it was a long and painful deterioration of her health. May help us to understand the way that death is presented in the story.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that is a good point. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

She's facing her own death, too. And perhaps, you know, working out, feeling like that's going to be the most real thing she ever encounters. She's going to leave the illusion of this life behind and encounter what's real in death, which, of course, is true. So, anyway, you're absolutely right to read that sense of ominous. I mean, the way that it turns ominous, okay, is there's a. There's quite a few things. She exits the garden and the gates shut behind her. Boom. Garden of Eden, exile from the Garden. In fact, she never goes back into the garden in this story.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

That gives us some insight into what her epiphany is. The story ends with her outside of the garden, door shut, and then she goes down the hill again. Garden of Eden is on a hill. She's going down the hill. The light, all the imagery changes at the beginning of the story. Everything's light and bright and sunshiny and happy instantly. It's shadows and shade and dusky and dark. A black knot of people in the corner. Everything's dark. Right. So you. You picked up on that right away, that she's. It's a descent both literal and figuratively. Right. She's Descending down from her on high to the. To the quote, unquote, common people. Right, right. That's what's happening now. Whether or not Catherine, you know, again, we have to hold on to see what she's saying about that, because perhaps the descent to the. To the real people was actually an ascent to reality.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because she seems very happy by this. About this epiphany. Right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, at the end she does, but it's in the middle of it, she's pretty scared. It's pretty scary as she's going through it, but then afterwards, she took something away from it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so. So we've got the set up with the light in the dark. We've got the set up with. She's young and innocent in this perfect Garden of Eden.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so. So, okay, so where does that go? Well, first of all, she. She's the one who. Okay, so of all the kids, which one is the one trying to step into mother's role?

[Jen Rogers]

Laura.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'll go out and talk to the workmen. I'm gonna handle this. Mother, you said you were gonna let us do everything. You step aside. She's.

[Cindy Rollins]

She.

[Angelina Stanford]

Even the first thing she's described as is she walks out and she tries to put on mother's voice when she talks.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes, yes, I did notice that.

[Angelina Stanford]

So if this is a coming of age story, at the very beginning, what's being presented is a child trying to be like her mother. Yes. Okay. So I actually thought the story was gonna go a whole different direction than it did. So well done to Kathryn Mansfield there for kind of going in an unexpected way about what the mother represented and whether or not that was the path toward experience and adulthood that she needed to take. So she. But immediately when she tries to sound like the mother, she feels ashamed by the voice that comes out.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Stammers and realizes she's just a child. So there's all this tension here of trying to step into this mother role, and it being really awkward and even condescending.

[Cindy Rollins]

And she. She. I feel like she recognizes that a little bit. Like, she stammered and was ashamed.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think she was ashamed because she was seeing that she was looking down on these people and she's trying to relate to them. Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm. And she's got the bread and the butter.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Which I think is. That's childish. It makes her feel like she's. I'm just. I'm out here eating like, you know, this is not how adults. My mother would have not come out with her breakfast in her hand.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So she's very aware that she doesn't measure up. Okay, so yes, let's talk about the workman. That's an extremely romantic encounter with them.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Not romantic like I'm in love, but romantic idealized. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

Like she's wanting to be like them. She's wanting to relate to them. She's wanting to figure them out and be broad minded. Maybe.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. You have to compare this scene with the scene at the end because she's watching these men. Right. She feels a sense of wonder about them and a common humanity. I'm one of them. I feel very much like a working girl right now. Which of course means something different to her than means to us. But, you know, a working class person and not like a rich person who's never gonna have a job. This is totally parallel to at the end when she's watching the dead body of a working class man and she feels that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes, okay, that's a total parent working man living. And then later she sees a dead working man.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Who somehow still seems more alive to her than her friends of the same class. Right. So she looks at these working men and she says, why can't the boys that visit me be like that? They seem more real to her right now. I was very curious. So that kind of romantic idealization is happening in the Garden of Eden. And I wasn't sure which way this story was gonna go. I wasn't sure if the disillusionment was gonna be. There's nothing romantic about a working class man. He's just a regular human being.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. I figured that was where it was going.

[Angelina Stanford]

I really thought that's where it was gonna go. But that's not where she took it. And again, that. That's the artistry. Right. But she's working within the confines of the structure of the story and up very clearly setting up certain tensions. But that doesn't mean, you know, where she's gonna go. And then so that the scene with the lavender and he smells and she just feels like that's such a real. They're just more real to her.

[Cindy Rollins]

And she's very.

[Angelina Stanford]

And everything else about her life is very dreamlike. So then she starts talking about class distinctions. Now what's interesting to me in that conversation is what she's doing is contrasting her view with her mother. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mother would say this and this, but this is what I say. And so now you're seeing some hesitancy, like, so she wants to be like her mother, but she's also not like her mother.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. So you've got this little Garden of Eden family here, but who are the characters who go out into the world?

[Cindy Rollins]

You mean in the. At the end of the story or

[Angelina Stanford]

at the beginning of the story?

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, who. Who goes out into the world? The workmen.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, the father and the brother.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, the father and the brother, yes. Because they're not really around.

[Angelina Stanford]

So they're described as they're headed out the door, they're going to the office, they go out. So they are the characters who go out and come back in. So both Laurie and the father are a little more in touch with reality than the mother is.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Mother is completely out of touch with reality.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So when they have the discussion about should they cancel the party? And her just insane response shows you how disconnected with reality she is, that what's real to her is the bubble of the garden party, the bubble of their little fake Garden of Eden. But it becomes more and more apparent through the story that that's not reality.

[Cindy Rollins]

And, you know, and this goes along with the Lewis quote, too. And I don't mean to take it out of what you're going. I don't want to mess up your flow here.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, go, go.

[Cindy Rollins]

When you think about. I know that my husband felt that way about me a lot of times. So I'm raising these eight boys with a lot of romantic ideas about life. And my husband was going out and working 12 hours a day in the real world and coming back, and there was a dissonance there between my romantic ideals and, you know, what he was seeing in the real world. And I do think sometimes that. And then I was not always willing to listen to his ideas because I was very wrapped up in the romance of it all. And later, of course, I realized as the boys started going out into the world and they started shedding the romantic views that I had, and I don't mean this in a rebellious way at all, but I had to wake up and see, no, I've got to prepare these boys for the real world, not the pretend world that I think I'm pretending to prepare them for. And I just think that is often what happens in a home with the mom. Mom doesn't want to trust dad because he has a broader view, maybe because. Because he is going out into the world. And I don't know. I just think that I would have been better off to listen to my husband in those early years when I was still romanticizing the outside world, which I was. I was inside. It was good it was good to be at home. Home was good, but it wasn't everything.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. In the scene where they say there's been an accident, she says, inside the garden. And they say, no. Oh, thank God. I will confess how troubled I was by the fact that I identified with that. Like, how often am I upset when the real world and the needs of reality intrudes upon my little dream world?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I mean, it's really easy to see, but it's also easy to recognize. Yeah. We do this really. We do this all the time where we are the mother. Many times when we. We can see how bad it is. But how often is that the true reality of the way we live?

[Angelina Stanford]

And I don't think that Kathryn Mansfield is doing anything quite so clumsy as. Fantasy world bad, real world good. Just that.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, And I agree with that. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. It's more complicated. I think what she's. I don't think anybody's bad in the Sheridan family. In fact, it really almost felt like a Flannery o' Connor moment when the mom's like, oh, yeah, we'll just bring him the cream puffs. And you're just like, oh, you know, it's well meaning, but. So Marie Antoinette, so out of touch with Ruth. Just let them eat. I realize she's grieving over her dead husband, is in shock, but it'll be such a treat for the kids, and she'll have something to give when people come over. Just completely clueless.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Meanwhile, the woman's in a catatonic state. That's the reality.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right? Absolutely, yes. And there's just so much imagery going around that, I mean, there's that, the food, the lilies, flowers. The lilies. The canna lilies, which are innocent and pure. I do not like canna lilies. Let me just say this. I don't find them very attractive in a yard.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, but the thing about the lilies that was so interesting is the mother says, take her the flower. That class is always impressed with lilies.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. But yet she had wanted them so desperately, too. How does that fall in with that?

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly. And then. Oh, but don't let. Don't. Don't actually take it to them because it'll mess up your dress.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, that was funny. I mean, that was. That was, you know, shameful and funny. Oh, okay. Well, we'll leave those because we would like them, but we wouldn't want to mess up our dress.

[Angelina Stanford]

Done that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And what about the hat? I mean.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yes, the hat. Let's talk about that. Okay, so Let me just keep going here. So, okay, so the women are all very, very sheltered. I thought the scene with the song really highlighted that. She's. Jo sits down to sing about the weary life.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Smiling and singing about the weary life. It stops this. Doesn't my voice sound so good, Mummy?

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, just. Just the total disconnect of what she's singing and what she's thinking about.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So it's just. They are just living in a. They are out of. I'm going to say it over and over.

[Cindy Rollins]

They're just out of touch.

[Angelina Stanford]

Now, the cream puffs is what happens next. And Laura and Joe's had been saying how grown up they are. And there's a line that says, the cream puffs arrived, but Laura and Joe's were too grown up to care.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

But then when they get offered to have them, they eat them.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

With relish. Right. So again, you have that tension of, you know, they're right at that. Not adult, not child, kind of struggle, age. So then death enters the garden. Well done. Right. Somebody carries in the news. Death, death has entered the garden. And Laura's immediate response is to want to call off the party. And so then we see her going through a series of conversations where she's like, but isn't it. Isn't it wrong to celebrate and party and have a band playing when these people are grieving? And then you see the family's response to that. Right. Joseph's thoughts are just very, you know. Well, they don't really care about those things. They this, they that. It's, you know, and the assumption that he was drunk, the assumption that he somehow brought this upon himself, that's very. That's a common criticism of that kind of class distinction that you think, well, if they're in poverty, they've done something to deserve that.

[Cindy Rollins]

And they say it. They say, you know, I don't even know how these people live anyway. Yes. You know, so that.

[Jen Rogers]

What.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, so one of them died. Of course they died. They're gonna die all the time, and we can't help that. And then she says, don't be extravagant. Which is. Don't exaggerate is what she's basically saying in our language. But she had. She said, well, the man's right outside our front gate. But, you know, and then we hear, what in the world. Why would they even have that neighborhood? And out there.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So there's zero compassion. And just. That's an eyesore for us in our garden. To have to even know that's out there. And so that speech was the first time that I realized Mother's adulthood was not going to be the thing that the character was going to be moving toward. Because Mother's adulthood was like the garden. Isolated and a fantasy and sheltered and not in touch with reality. So that was probably going to be a movement in the wrong direction. So she can either become an adult like Mother or something else. That seemed to be what the story was setting up. So Laura is. She hears Mother's position and she starts to be influenced by it, but she still feels like something's wrong. Then Mother gives her the hat. All right, so here we are. The hat, I think, is a big, big symbol in the story. What do you think's going on with the hat?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I don't know. That's what I want to know. I know it's a big symbol, but. And I know it's. It. Maybe it represents her mother and her world that, you know, like a choice, like, I'm gonna wear the hat and be this girl someday, or. And it's a temptation. It's the temptation to be. To not have the awakening.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, yes, I think you're. I think you're right on. So a few different. If we. If we see this as a story of innocence, moving to experience childhood, moving to adulthood, whether or not she's going to be embracing the world of the garden or the world outside the garden. And again, the hat is a part

[Cindy Rollins]

of adulthood, you're saying?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, because they all say, I've never seen you look so grown up before.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

But this a particular kind of grown upness. Right. It's Mother's grown upness.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because what happens is Mother gives her the hat. Now, Laura has been trying to be like Mother at the beginning of the story. And as soon as she puts on the hat, she takes on Mother's views. Right. She looks more grown up. She looks like an adult. She starts saying people like that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And she sees herself in the mirror, and immediately she saw herself. And she never saw herself look like that before. And then she hopes her mother is right is what comes right after. So as soon as she sees herself in the hat, that vision of herself changes her total, her whole view. Oh, I hope Mother's right. Right. Not maybe Mother's right. I hope she's right. I hope we don't have to cancel the garden party. I look so nice. It'd be such. So terrible that I couldn't wear this hat and the cream puffs would go to waste and how dare this. This man's issues affect our garden party.

[Cindy Rollins]

And she says she's being absurd. Her mother says, you're being absurd. And she says it's not. It's not very sympathetic to spoil everybody's enjoyment as you're doing now. And that just reminds me so much of Sense and Sensibility, where the brother and his wife are trying to decide.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

They start out with, well, we'll give them this much money. And by the end it's like, well, they should actually be paying us money. Because it's very inconsiderate of them to actually be alive so that we have to give them some of our money. But it is that way of justification of how we. How. And Charlotte Mason always says that we. You know, our brains, our function are made to prove our initial thoughts. And David Hicks says, that's a stoic idea. But we give ourselves an official. An initial thought. It's okay that we're gonna have this party. And then we come up with. And then our brain is able to make it okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. Now, when I was trying to figure out. So she puts on the hat, and this is very clear to me that she was putting on Mother.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, Right. Gonna become like Mom.

[Angelina Stanford]

And she starts to sound like mom and think like Mom. When I was trying to figure out if this was a good thing or not. The sentences in the bottom of that paragraph tells us that it's not a positive thing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Because what happens is Laura can no longer see that a movement toward blindness is never gonna be good in a character. Especially if this is a story that's moving to an epistle.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's blurred, unreal.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. So the image of the dead man, his family, began to seem unreal to her, like a picture in a newspaper. Now, I thought that was interesting, because that's a distance thing, right? This is something you just read about in the newspaper. You can just discard that and ignore it or scroll past it, but that's not who he really is, their neighbor.

[Cindy Rollins]

And so she. Okay, so that makes more sense of the first scene. She meets real workmen, and they're real. And then she hears about the death, and that makes it more real because she knows these workmen. And now they're back to being just a blurry picture and a new paper.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very good. Yes, that's exactly right. Exactly right. So she's. She's seeing the world more like how Mother sees, which is to not see these people. They're just. Because when the mother disc. Why does even Buddy even live there? Anywhere there's just this background nuisance to her. Now, I was. You know, when I'm trying to figure out, what does it mean that she tells her epiphany to Laurie at the end? Right. So.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, it is right away she. But we do have the scene with Laurie where she. I'm going to tell him.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, that's what I was getting to. Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. So when we want to know why Laurie, we look to see how Laurie is in the beginning story and see if there's a parallel there. Right. So we say that there's a parallel between her looking at the workman at the beginning of the story and being filled with wonder and looking at the body of the workman at the end of the story and being filled with wonder. And if we know that there's a conversation with Laurie at the end, we see that there is a conversation with Laurie at the beginning. So. Yes, go ahead. What happens there?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, she decided when he says she looks pretty or looks so grown up, and the hat, she decides she's going to ask him because she trusts him. Yep. But then when he tells her how beautiful she looks or cute or whatever, then she decides not to ask him at that point, she just lets that slide. So she never does ask him.

[Jen Rogers]

Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

What he. So.

[Angelina Stanford]

So Laurie is obviously trusted. Laurie goes out into the world. Now, I thought it was interesting that the father, he. The mother thinks he's terribly inappropriate, that he brings up the death.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

But see, Mr. Sheridan has a foot in the real world, Right. And apparently so does Laurie because she trusts him there, and so she's gonna ask him, should we cancel the party? And whatever Laurie says is gonna go, she says. But then he compliments her on the hat. Okay, so, you know, all those things, she's stepping into that role. And so she doesn't ask him because mother doesn't want to know if it's right or wrong.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So she doesn't want to be challenged there. So Laurie is never portrayed as living in a delusion.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay. Okay. So we don't. We don't get to hear him say it's okay to have the party or it's not okay. We.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. She just doesn't ask him. So. So whatever's going on with Laurie, he has not been described as being part of the little bubble of unreality. So she's so enjoying the compliment. She says nothing, then you're right. The party, it's just the party ripened slowly, faded petals closed. That's quite an Image.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's. That's a flower image. It's a death image, too.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. So. So that. That's over now.

[Cindy Rollins]

In.

[Angelina Stanford]

When they're at the party, though, they're just in this little happy bubble.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Completely disconnected. The troubles of the real world. And Mrs. Sheridan. So Mr. Sheridan says, did you hear about the accident? Mrs. Sheridan says, yes, it nearly ruined the party.

[Cindy Rollins]

Now, he was. Was he, like, not at the party? It sort of sounds like he disappears. Like he. He didn't know about the party. Like he went to work and they had a party.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, she keeps saying it's for the children. I was wondering about that, too. So maybe he just comes at the end.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I'm thinking maybe he was at work and he comes back because then he has this news about, you know, he hasn't brought it up all day. Hasn't been there. Mm. But anyway, I'm not sure about that. But. So.

[Angelina Stanford]

But in that conversation, Mrs. Sheridan says, oh, Laura wanted to cancel the whole thing. And then Laura's response is, what? How does she feel in that moment?

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, you're teasing me. Don't.

[Angelina Stanford]

She doesn't want to be teased because now she's. She's identifying with the mother. And so she sees that as some embarrassing, childish thing she had said she wants to be distanced from her.

[Cindy Rollins]

Cared about people. How silly of her. That was not what she should have done.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Cindy Rollins]

Comes back and says it was a horrible affair all the same.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm. And Mrs. Sheridan thinks it's completely tactless of her husband have brought this up. Why? Because you don't want a hint of a serpent in the garden. She wants to pretend that this is the Garden of Eden, and she doesn't want any reminder that that's not reality. Now, you know, Kathryn Mansfield is interested in some of her earlier writing especially really pushed back hard on sort of class reform issues. And so this sort of condescending attitude of the upper class would have been something she'd have been very sensitive to and would have wanted to portray that as a negative thing. So, I mean, we're definitely seeing that here. And then Mrs. Sheridan, you know, has her, well, let's just send them the party food. And like I said before, total Marie Antoinette moment. And that sort of snaps Laura a little bit out of the fog because she immediately thinks Nythe is not a good idea.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And the mom's like, oh, it'll be so much fun and put in a basket and you'll go. And they're gonna. She just has this vision that they're gonna be so grateful. They're gonna be grateful for these flowers that they like special cream puffs. I guess she just thinks that the, you know, the kids in the middle of the grief of the death of their father gonna be like, yay, cream puffs.

[Cindy Rollins]

And because they're giving it to them. Oh, my goodness. How often are we. Yes. It's like it does become this thing where someone is generous to it, us from their perspective. We then suddenly, not only are we going through a hard time, but now we have a new requirement on us. We have to be grateful to them for giving us something that we maybe really didn't help us at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

So then Laura says that she thinks she's different from the rest of the family. And then she leaves. And as we said before, it's all this dark image. And I think it's super significant that the gates close behind her. I mean, that's. That's Adam and Eve cast out from the garden right there.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And right away we start having, you know, we have this dog that comes up. He's a shadow. I mean, what is that? What is this dog? That's a shadow.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I mean, what is it? Is it a. It's not Anubis cerebrus. Is it the. The dog of Hades?

[Cindy Rollins]

That's right. There you go. Okay. Okay. Yes. So she's going towards hell, basically. She's going down, like you said. I got that. I got the damn.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, Good, good. And you got that going into dark.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, I did. And she's crossing over. Doesn't she have to, like, cross the street? So.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's very good. Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

So. Oh, the broad road, which is coming to me like the broad river. Broad is a water term also.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that's really good.

[Cindy Rollins]

And okay, so then she begins to see. Now she's in hell, basically with these people.

[Angelina Stanford]

And. And right. So she's in hell from the perspective of Mrs. Sheridan.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So we don't want to spiritualize this, that the Sheridan was heaven, and she's left heaven and gone to hell, and now she's happy. From Mrs. Sheridan's perspective, the aristocracy is heaven and all these people are just living in this hell.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so she goes down and she has a descent into Hades, essentially.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

As she's going down.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

What's that?

[Cindy Rollins]

A visit like?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, like Odysseus, like you're gonna go and come back. Because she doesn't stay there. She turns around and she leaves.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

And she meets Laurie.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And this is when she's gonna have her epiphany. So she will move from innocence to experience. And this is when she's going to embrace some kind of maturation, but it's not going to be the model of her mother. And we know that because she apologizes is about the hat to the dead man.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

And feels deeply ashamed that she's wearing the hat. So as she's having this descent, she's. She's slowly realizing how out of touch with reality she is. Right. I'm wearing a party dress. I wish I had a coat. You don't wear a party dress to a funeral. I just. She realizes that she's the one in the wrong here. She's deeply embarrassed and humiliated by this. She becomes very self conscious about the hat. Why? Why am I wearing this hat? Anything but this hat. Right? And it's probably a mistake to come, but it's too late. They. They see her and they bring her in and. Okay, so what do you think's going on at the end there now? Now that we've set it up and you've been reading it. Right. So then what happens? She. She has this basket of food. She wants to just leave it in. Leave the basket with them and leave, but they won't let her. They have their own social conventions. Right. That she has to follow. You have to go see the wife. You have to see.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, you know, that is true. So my. My in laws are. Are from the deep South. They were from Savannah. And I remember going to the very first funeral in the family, and everybody's there, and my mother in law came up to me and I did not know the person who died. And. And I was very young. I was like 19 years old. And they were like, you have to go over and look at the body, and then you have to go tell the person that the body looked good.

[Jen Rogers]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is a really weird Southern thing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And I was like, no, I'm not going to do that. And then my husband talked to her and was like, you have to go look at the body. And you have to say, he looked good to people. So that totally freaked me out that we had this social convention and I. It was rather horrifying to me also.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, it is. It is totally. I can remember a lot of funerals when I was little and just standing there listening to everybody say, oh, she looks good. She looks so good. They really did a good job, didn't they? And it's like, she's dead. Y' all realize you're talking about how good a dead body looks, but.

[Cindy Rollins]

And yet I wonder. There must be something to that. Even though it seems absurd. There must be something about that that is in our spirit that they would have this custom.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, it might be connected to the fact that Laura says he looks sleeping. And I think we want to think of our loved ones as released from suffering. Let's say it was an illness or something. Like, you know, they seem set free.

[Cindy Rollins]

They're in a peaceful. They're in a better place.

[Angelina Stanford]

They're in a peaceful.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Their last moment was good. They look good. Yes. Okay, so she's being led down the dark passageway by the little woman in black. Yeah. So you tell me, because I don't know.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, what's interesting is that before Laura leaves the garden, the mother thinks about warning her and then decides it's better to say nothing. What do you think she was gonna warn her?

[Cindy Rollins]

I don't know. That they have these customs.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think she was gonna say, don't look at the bottom.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay. Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't know for sure, but that was my. My guess is that she was. She was going to try to protect the child's innocence, you know, saying, don't, don't go. They might try to make you look at the body, just don't. But decides it's better not to say anything. And I kind of read the better not to say anything as, again, an attempt to preserve innocence. I'm not even gonna make the suggestion of this horrible thing to my daughter, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

And hopefully nothing will happen.

[Angelina Stanford]

But in literature, a hundred percent, if a character says, I should warn this person, but I'm not, it always happens. 100%. That's a literary setup.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm gonna write a story where it doesn't happen.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, good luck with that. Let me see how that turns out for you.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, they'll hate it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, gosh. Like, if you ever read Dracula, every character is like, ooh, should we tell her that we think of vampires outside our window? No, definitely not. That might freak her out. Next victim.

[Cindy Rollins]

Boom.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, Every time. Yeah, well, that's a. That's a whole other motif, actually, about knowledge. And knowledge is power, and withholding knowledge puts people in danger.

[Cindy Rollins]

So.

[Angelina Stanford]

So anyway, yeah, so she. So she goes and she sees the dead man. Now. So we've got all of this set up, light to dark innocence to experience childhood to adulthood. We have all these tensions. We have. And. But we have. The biggest thing is we have the parallel scenes to the beginning. So she looks upon the body of this dead man. And she is just as enchanted by it as she is by the workman at the beginning of the story. Right? And he looks asleep, he looks happy. He looks like he has been ushered into some new reality. In his dead state, he seems more real to her than the people at the garden party.

[Cindy Rollins]

And if she's never seen a dead body, then that itself is an epiphany that he looks peaceful.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

I realized that she had all these horrible visions about this, and now. But look, he's just a peaceful guy,

[Angelina Stanford]

and she thinks he looks beautiful and full of wonder. So she's having this total moment, like, I feel like when she's talking to the workman in the beginning, there's a common humanity moment, like she realizes their common humanity over the. Over the last lavender.

[Cindy Rollins]

Do we not bleed? Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And I felt like the same thing's happening here. She's looking at him and feeling like, yeah, you know, memento mori. Right? We're all gonna die. Remember your death. And before.

[Cindy Rollins]

Can we go back up? I want to ask one question, though. You'd like to look at him, wouldn't you? Em's sister said. And then she. She said, don't be afraid, my lass. And now her voice sounded fond and sly. What does that mean? And fondly she drew down the sheet. Do you think that she was looking forward to this? Like, I'll show this little prissy girl what. You know, it's like she was. She fondly drew this sheet down. She's happy to do it. She's happy to show death to this young, pretty, dressed up girl.

[Jen Rogers]

Maybe.

[Cindy Rollins]

Or is sly. Means something else there. I just. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm not sure.

[Cindy Rollins]

You.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm not sure.

[Cindy Rollins]

All right, well, we'll just throw that out there and see what happens.

[Angelina Stanford]

He looks a picture. There's nothing to show. Come along, my dear.

[Jen Rogers]

Laura came.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So he's sleeping. Dreaming. Never wake him up again. His. His eyes were closed. They were blind under the closed eyelids. Now he's blind, but he can see, right?

Because he's.

He's seeing what's real after death. He was given up to his dream. So it's almost like the garden party is a fake dream, but this guy's in a real dream.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so what did garden say?

[Angelina Stanford]

And seeing that makes her realize the falseness of what she just came from, Right? What did garden parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? Well, what does it matter to anybody in death, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Is she saying it doesn't even matter that I'm Wearing a lace rock right now. I think it's okay. It's okay that I made this social.

[Jen Rogers]

Mm.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mistake.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Because it doesn't even matter. This doesn't matter.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. So she says this too. So he was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing. So she's. She's connecting what was happening at the garden party. The laughter and the band. So the joy, the feasting, this marvel had come to the lane.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Jen Rogers]

So.

[Angelina Stanford]

So at the same time, there's, like, the fake joy and the real that

[Cindy Rollins]

this man had died and was in a better. Had gone on to a better place.

[Angelina Stanford]

Happy, Happy. All is well said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content. But all the same, you had to cry. And she couldn't go out of the room without saying something. So she gives a sob and says, forgive my hat.

[Cindy Rollins]

So she's still thinking about herself there.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, maybe I read it more metaphorically.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

What is forgive me being like my mother. Forgive me that I came here.

[Cindy Rollins]

I was this person when I came.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. And I was this person earlier when I had the party, instead of honoring you.

[Cindy Rollins]

So she recognizes where the problem is. The hat is the problem. That the mother is the problem and not.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. Right. So when she then leaves Hades to go back.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Mm.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it's clear that she. If the last thing she said is forgive my hat, that she's not going back to embrace this life. I think that's the implication, or at least. Well, I mean, it's not like she's gonna run away from home, but she's not gonna live in that delusion anymore.

[Cindy Rollins]

She's. She's now awake and she's.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. That's right. So she. She leaves on her own. She goes past. You know, down the path, past the dark people, and then she meets Laurie. And then we go. He stepped out of the shadow, so Laurie's not in the dark.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay. Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

Is that you, Laurie? Yes. Mother was getting anxious. Was it all right? Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Quiet.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then they have this. This last scene here, and he says, are you crying? And she says, yes. And so here again, parallel scene where she couldn't tell Laurie last time because she was wearing the hat.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Now she has said, you know, forgive the hat. And she is telling him, and she's crying, and she's telling him what she genuinely feels. Okay. So, no. Was it awful? No. Sobbed Laura. It was simply marvelous. But Laurie, she stopped. She looked at her brother Isn't life? She stammered. Isn't life what life was? She couldn't explain, no matter. He quite understood. Isn't it, darling? Said Laurie.

[Cindy Rollins]

So that's very satisfying, that part, because it's. It's. Somebody understands her.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And we see she's had that common humanity moment with her brother. There's some deep understanding between the two of them.

[Cindy Rollins]

So she's not going back alone. She's not going back to this world where nobody understands her.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. So we know she's had some kind of epiphany. We know she's moved from light to dark, back into light, because at the end they're not in the shadow.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

We know that she has rejected whatever her mother represented. And she's had some kind of epiphany which is. Has filled her with a deep understanding that she can't articulate. So what does that have to do with Little Women? Cindy?

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow. You just love to ask me these really hard questions, like, you get something, you catch something. Then I'm like, my brain doesn't work. Yeah. I'm so old. So what does that have to do with Little Women? I don't know. What? What?

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I don't know. I don't know.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I don't know what that has to do with Little Women. I think that. I think. I mean, that's a good question. I'd like to think about that for a while.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. So here's my first thought off the top of my head. Could be completely wrong. Louisa May Alcott was a transcendentalist and lived on a commune where they were going to create heaven on Earth and make and live in a Garden of Eden. And it blew up in their faces.

[Cindy Rollins]

Ah, it did shock.

[Angelina Stanford]

I know. Story at 11.

[Cindy Rollins]

Have I ever heard that story before?

[Angelina Stanford]

So, you know, maybe there's something about that disillusionment.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. If it's going back to Louisa May Alcott, that broadens it out a little bit. I definitely think she's. Maybe she is going back. Maybe she is talking about the transcendentalists and saying this beautiful world and.

[Angelina Stanford]

Or maybe the only way you can transcend this world really is through death. We're always gonna have to be living in that tension, I guess, between the dream state and reality.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. I mean, it could just be as simple as that. She was pointing out that the Eden isn't found in the family. Maybe that's what she's trying to say, that we have to find our own Eden and it won't be found. Because in Little Women, we definitely have. This family is the Eden, and. Oh, and the individual is not. I mean, each of the girls are very individualistic, though, so I don't know. I don't know.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, Jo definitely goes her own way. That's a really interesting connection. I mean, I haven't read Little Women in a million years, so I don't know off the top of my head what it would be. But, yeah, I think. I think. And I think the class issues. I don't remember that being a huge thing in Little Women, but I might just not remember.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, the interesting thing, when the mother and Little Women take. And I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about this because I didn't have time, but the mother and Little Women, she puts the basket together and she goes off and she. The girls give up their. They give up their breakfast so that other people can have their breakfast on Christmas morning. And then later, Lori's grandfather replaces their breakfast with a much better breakfast.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, maybe that's it, Cindy. Maybe it's the. That we're supposed to think of Little Women and it's supposed to stand out to us that Mrs. Sheridan herself does not go.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, that's true. Yeah. So Laura goes instead of Mrs. Sheridan, and that was different. So that's one of the things about story. Like, there's no doubt in my mind she's giving a nod to Little Women. I just don't see how there could be any other way about it. Well, you've got me convinced, but there is not. It's not a direct parallel. It's. It's like she's asking us to look at it, but she's not. She's. She's not. It's not a copy of Little Women, so. Yeah, so maybe there is something there. It fascinates me. Like with Araby, after we read it and we talked about it, then we realized that I didn't know that he had gone to the fair in real life, James Joyce had gone to Aries. And that came back later. And I think, you know, this is another one of those stories where it's just. There's a lot of layers here. And I don't think we've gotten to them all, and I don't think we will. But maybe we'll get further. You know, there'll be. There'll be some times, there'll be some people who see some things.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm glad you brought that up, because that's a very fine point. I mean, you and I talked for, like, another week about Araby.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

So these, these podcast conversations are not the end all discussion. This is just. We're just trying to open up some of the latest. But yeah, we saw a lot more. People were showing us research about the way that the Irish felt about the English, and that seemed to be much, much more of a part of the story than I had realized. So that was really interesting to me. And I think we'll see the same thing here. I think you're right that the Little Women nod is pretty clear what she's trying to do with it. Exactly. I don't know. But anytime that an author is making that kind of reference, they're wanting you to do a compare and contrast. Just like. Like the. So that would be a comparison to something in the story to outside the story, but there are also comparisons inside the story to other things inside the story. And that would be things like your double scene. So the beginning scene.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

So this is when I say, you know, the story will tell you how to read it. This is one of the many ways that it does that, where there's a repeating scene. So you have two scenes in here repeated.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

You have. Well, maybe more than two, but for sure. To the workman at the beginning, the workman at the end, and the two conversations with Laura, that's very deliberate. She's bookending the whole story with that. And she wants you to say, how is this the same? How is this different? And that's going to be what's going to open up the story to tell you what is she's doing with all of this. Because it's a different. It's a very, very different conversation with Laurie at the end than earlier when there's no conversation in Little Women.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amy, Laura, Amy, if they're similar, marries Laurie, and then here at this story, they end up together at the end. So I think there's some stuff going on there. I just haven't been able to wrap my mind it. So it'll be fun in the coming weeks to see if my mind works out some of this or if you're somebody else's mind works out some of this, I think that'll be fantastic. I can't wait to hear what people say, because it'll be very helpful.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I think that when you said that you think in Little Women you've got a family being represented as an Eden, I think you're probably very, very close to getting at what Kathryn Mansfield's getting at.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, Maybe she's just saying the individual. It's more of an individual thing. I don't know. I think everybody gets excited now because you're teaching us this way, Angelina, so that when we each of these stories, maybe we'll do better and better. I feel like, oh, this is like doing a logic puzzle. So much fun.

[Angelina Stanford]

It is so much fun and it's exciting. It's very, very rewarding to me when I see people on the Facebook page expressing that, okay, I took this thing you taught us and it opened up this story in this way that's, that's really, really exciting to me. So, yes, always be looking for those parallel scenes, those doubles. They're, they're everywhere. They're everywhere. And in a short story, it's so easy to find them because you're dealing with such a short, compacted moment. It's. It can be more difficult in a long novel because you forget what happened at the beginning. But if you're really careful about looking at the structure, you will see that there's almost all, you know, all of the stories are. The author is setting up a bunch of stuff at the beginning and, and then answering it at the end.

[Cindy Rollins]

Always Right. Very good.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcast, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks,

the Truly Great by Steven Spender. I think continually of those who were truly great, who from the womb remembered the soul's history through corridors of light, where the hours are suns endless in singing, whose lovely ambition was that their lips still touched with fire should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song, and who hoarded from the spring branches the desires falling across their bodies like blossoms. What is precious is never to forget the essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs, breaking through rocks and worlds before our earth, never to deny its pleasure in the morning's simple light, nor its grave evening demand for love, never to allow gradually the traffic to smother with noise and fog the flowering of the spirit near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields see how these names are fated by the waving grass and by the streamers of white cloud and whispers of wind in the listening sky. The names of those who in their lives fought for light, who wore at their hearts the fire's center born of the sun. They traveled a short while toward the sun and left the vivid air signed with their honor.