CULTURAL CAPITAL AND SOCIAL MOBILITY IN KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S 'THE GARDEN PARTY': A BOURDIEUSIAN ANALYSIS

Abstract

This paper examines Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party (1922) through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological concepts of cultural capital, habitus, and social mobility, analyzing the integration and critique of social class in literature. The social class implications of the cultural refinement and aesthetic sensibility appropriation to the Sheridans' garden party unmarked bourgeois enjoyment establishes the party as both objectified and embodied cultural capital. The Sheridans’ social and cultural alchemy explains the Sheridans social power overflowing social closure and reinforcing structural mobility inequality. Laura's brief encounter with death, ‘the class unconditioned,’ seems to condition her unclassed response, opening the slightest possibility of cross-class sympathy; and yet her response to the dead carter is an aestheticized response, working-class pain made politically mute to a deeply personal, existential experience, unvoiced. Mansfield’s unflinching focus on the social and cultural structures of inequality leaves little to critique. Using the Bourdieusian dimensions of this reading, we can assert how the totality of social inequality, and the structures that regulate it, frustrates emotion, morality, and even flashes of keen cross-class sympathy. The critique of cross-class empathy’s absence demonstrates Mansfield’s modernist lens is, and remains, relevant. Her woven threads, ridged with class and social mobility, offer a precursor to the cultural capital with which we now frame social position issues and continua, alongside class issues. Thus, the critique of Mansfield as foundational modernist literature remains relevant, illustrating the class issues that frame the argument today.