"The Garden Party" opens with frantic preparations being made. The cloudless summer day is perfect for the garden party at the home of Sheridan family. Before breakfast ends, four workmen arrive to set up the marquee. Because Meg has just washed her hair and Jose is still in her petticoat, Mrs. Sheridan assigns the task of supervising the men to Laura. Taking a piece of buttered bread with her, Laura goes outside to begin her task.
The protagonist, Laura, is an idealistic and sensitive young girl. She is surrounded by her more conventional family: her sister, Jose, who, as the narrator tells us, "loved giving orders to servants"; her mother, Mrs. Sheridan, a shallow old woman whose world consists of having enough canna lilies; her father, a businessman; and her brother, Laurie, to whom she feels most similar in feeling and ideals.
When she suggests that the men–all smiling and quite friendly–set up the marquee on the lily lawn, a fat man asks her. "You want to put it somewhere where it'll give you a bang slap in the eye." Laura wonders whether it is respectful of a laborer to speak to a girl of her upbringing in the simple language of the common people.
Another man suggests placing the marquee against the karaka trees. Laura dislikes the idea of hiding the broad leaves and yellow fruit of the karakas, but the workmen are already heading toward them with the staves and rolls of canvas. She is impressed that one workman stops to smell purple. She considers that she would get along well with these simple workmen and wouldn’t let class distinctions get in the way.
After sometimes later a voice from the house calls Laura to the phone, so she goes back across the lawn, up the steps, across the veranda, and into the hallway. There she found her father and brother Laurie who are about to leave for work. Laurie asks her to press a coat for him before the party. On the phone is her friend Kitty Maitland. They chat and agree to have lunch together. After hanging up, Laura delights in the busy sounds of the house.
A man then informs everyone that a young cart driver was killed that morning when his horse reared on Hawke Street. His last name was Scott, and he had lived in a cottage just down the road from the Sheridans in a settlement of commoners. He left a wife and five children.
Hearing this Laura feels pity to the man and she thinks the atmosphere is negotiated. Struck by the inappropriateness of throwing a garden party when a neighbor has been killed, Laura immediately suggests that they cancel the party. The rest of the story is structured around Laura's understanding of her concern for the dead laborer and her family's reactions to his demise. Laura attempts to convince Jose of the necessity of canceling the party. Jose's response is indicative of the family's overall view of the impoverished laborers. She chastises Laura for her desire to cancel the party, saying, ‘‘you won't bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental.’’
But her mother and all of the members of her family disagree with her. She says, “It’s not very sympathetic to spoil everybody’s enjoyment as you’re doing now,” So, Laura goes to her room. But when she glimpses “this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long black velvet ribbon,” she wonders whether her mother is right. Yes, she decides, her mother is right.
...After lunch the band members arrive, all wearing green coats. When Laurie arrives and heads toward his room to dress, Laura thinks again about the accident and calls to him when he is halfway upstairs to tell him about it. He turns and looks at his sister. .A short while later; the guests begin arriving, the band starts playing, and people shake hands and kiss cheeks. Everyone who greets Laura tells her how striking she looks and how becoming her hat is.
The hired waiters serve tea and passion-fruit ices, the band plays on, and “the perfect afternoon slowly ripened, slowly faded, slowly its petals closed.” The party had gone perfectly. Everyone gathers in the marquee. While eating a sandwich, Mr. Sheridan talks about the “beastly accident,” saying that the victim “leaves a wife and half a dozen kiddies.” Seeing all the leftover food–sandwiches, cream puffs, cakes–Mrs. Sheridan suggests Laura to send it down to the family.
.......Laura walks down the road. As she enters the run-down neighborhood, children play in doorways, men lean on fences, and women in shawls hurry hither and thither. She wishes she hadn’t come. At one house, “a dark knot of people” were standing outside. Laura, nervous, asks a woman whether it is Mrs. Scott’s house. Then a woman invites her into the house. Laura just wants to leave the basket, but the woman leads her into a small kitchen. Laura observes that there lay a young man, fast asleep - sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. He was far from all the things. She leaves immediately. On the way, home Laurie comes toward her and says their mother was beginning to worry. But Laura, though crying, says everything went well and begins asking a question that she can’t finish: “Isn’t life– isn’t life?” Her brother understands, saying, “Isn’t it, darling?”
Laura
This is Laura’s story. Although there are some general, impersonal passages and several scenes without her, we see the world through Laura’s eyes. We observe others how she sees them, especially their response to her own behaviour.
Laura is still a child. She doesn’t fully understand what is happening; her reaction to the workman’s death is a mixture of instinct, upbringing and egotism. She sees the workman’s death in an emotional way, torn between her own instinctive feelings and the powerful dominance of her mother and older sisters. She finally reaches her own personal understanding of life, which is left ambiguous in the final sentence. She does not reject the social life of the upper-class but comes to her own serious kind of maturity.
Being still a child, and not fully aware of the power of class distinctions and her own place within the social structure, Laura acts as a bridge between the upper and lower classes. She decides ‘it’s all the fault… of these absurd class distinctions’. Unlike Mrs Sheridan, she sees the workmen as individual people, indeed, as attractive ones.
When the carter dies, again, Laura sees him as another human, with the frivolity of their party exposed.
Jose Sheridan
Jose is Laura's class-conscious older sister. She takes a dim view of Laura's wish to cancel the garden party when she tells Laura that she "won't bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental."
Laura Sheridan
Laura Sheridan is an idealistic and impressionable young person who struggles with her own and her family's perceptions of class difference. Learning that a working-class neighbor was accidentally killed, Laura wants to cancel the garden party planned for that afternoon. The narrative centers on Laura's vacillation between feelings of empathy for the dead laborer and her vanity and class elitism. She unsuccessfully tries to convince her mother to cancel the party...
Narrator
If you remember one thing about this narrator and one thing only, let it be this: he carries a torch. Big time. We're talking Joey-for-Dawson (in the early days, at least), Ross-for-Rachel, Jim-for-Pam. This crush is serious business. He's not into his friend's older sister because she's nice and pretty. He notices all the details, like her hair is a "soft rope […] tossed from side to side" (Araby.3).
When it comes to Mangan's sister, this is no laughing matter. He develops daily rituals to follow her to school, and tells us that he cries because of her. Maybe it's just not fair to call this a crush. After all, the kid "pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: 'O love! O love!" many times" (Araby.6). He's so plumb head over heels for this girl that everything around him becomes a backdrop—Dublin, the dead priest's room, it's all a blur.
When he finally talks to Mangan's sister, it's actually kind of a bummer. They don't say anything particularly interesting to each other, and he doesn't exactly sweep her off her feet. His true feelings come out in his promise to get her something from the bazaar—something he hopes will win her over.
Love Hurts
But here's the problem. For all his swooning and wooing and, um, stalking, his love isn't really anything special. Mangan's sister doesn't even seem aware of it. And when he finally gets to Araby, it's not like the clouds part to cast a ray of sunshine on the perfect gift. Nope. Instead, he encounters surly salesmen, to whom he's just another late customer, preventing them from closing up shop for the day.
Along with the narrator, we're starting to feel upset that the aunt and uncle and shopkeepers are so insensitive. But are they? Probably not. The real problem is that the world isn't conforming to the narrator's grand expectations. He wants sweeping romance, and he winds up in a half-empty bazaar.
Love Stinks
Cue major revelation:
Gazing up at the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. (Araby.36)
Um, that's not exactly the response we were expecting, right? You want to impress someone you like by buying them a gift, but your uncle, and the mall (let's say) are conspiring against you. Who gets the brunt of your anger? Your uncle and the mall, right? Well, not in this case. The narrator turns back almost all of that feeling on himself. But why?
The narrator is really aware that he's in love with Mangan's sister, but it's something he holds inside himself: he doesn't tell a single person. So it's not like anyone else has his back with this. And even worse, it's not like his uncle kept him from going to the bazaar. At least not entirely. He had a chance to get a gift. A small chance, sure, but a chance. And he totally blew it. When it comes to love, he already knows, no one else can take the blame but you.
Or you could look at it another way. The bazaar hasn't lived up to his expectations. Maybe Mangan's sister won't either. After all, isn't his crush a kind of "vanity"? Hasn't he blown up its significance to crazy proportions? And the fact that it might all blow up because he couldn't get to market on time shows that it's all on shaky ground to begin with. He's no knight in shining armor, and Mangan's sister's no princess. They're kids in a city with forgetful uncles and surly shopkeepers and a whole bunch of other stuff just ready and waiting to burst their bubble.
Minor Characters
Mangan's sister
The narrator's would-be girlfriend doesn't even have a name of her own. She's just his friend's big sister, and she lives in the house directly across from his. In some ways, the story is all about her, but we only get a couple of descriptions of her in the story, and only one chance to hear her talk. As a presence in the narrator's mind, she's the most major figure there could be; but in "Araby," she a minor character.
One pattern emerges whenever Mangan's sister appears in "Araby." Like a religious icon or a painting of Money, there's always some reference to light. When the narrator sees her on the railing outside her house calling her brother to dinner, "her figure [was] defined by the light from the half-opened door" (Araby.3). Later, in a similar situation, when she finally speaks to him, light makes the whole scene possible: "The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing […] just visible as she stood at ease" (Araby.9).
Check out the contrast between the light that shines on Mangan's sister and the "darkness" that encloses the bazaar once it's closed. That darkness—when they turn out the lights—means there's no hope for him anymore. He can't buy the gift, and can't win her, and basically can't possibly be happy (yes, he's being dramatic).
On the other hand, the light that allows him to see and appreciate Mangan's sister provides some hope that this narrator will, miraculously, escape his cage. Remember North Richmond Street, where he lives, is "blind:" for the narrator, Mangan's sister allows him light enough to see a way out.
Aunt and Uncle
The narrator lives with his aunt and uncle (just like in "The Sisters"), and he portrays them as distant but not all that bad. It's not like they're the Dursleys or anything. They're not terrible as parents, but they definitely don't understand why it's so important for the narrator to get to Araby. And come on, aunt and uncle, it seems kind of obvious. Can't they just be cool for a second?
The title holds the key to the meaning of Joyce's story. Araby is a romantic term for the Middle East, but there is no such country. The word was popular throughout the nineteenth century -- used to express the romantic view of the east that had been popular since Napoleon's triumph over Egypt. And, of course, the story is about Romantic Irony, for the unnamed boy has a romantic view of the world.
Joyce finished "Araby" in October of 1905: the eleventh in composition of the stories that would become Dubliners.
The story is about Orientation: notice how we derive that word from the Orient, from the East, originally meaning that, to orient yourself means to know in which direction the sun rises. The boy in "Araby" is disoriented, but will know the true compass of the world at the end of his journey -- a traditional form in literature (the German term Bildungsroman is so commonly used that it often appears in English dictionaries).
Mangan's sister :Joyce could count on readers making the connection with the popular, but sentimental and romantic 19th century Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849). Mangan was himself fond of writing about "Araby," and even though he knew no Arabic he claimed that some of his poems were translations from Arabic. Joyce's use of "Mangan" is one of the strongest supports for the theme of romanticism in the story, while at the same time it serves to strengthen previous instances of hypocrisy and false sentiment. Mrs Mercer:
Joyce selects this name to continue the imagery and theme of the mercantile and the mercenary, in the story. This effect is further supported by making her the widow of a pawnbroker, as well as the fact that she collects used stamps to sell for money to be given to the church. Again, money is being associated with religion, as it was in the paragraph in which the boy's shopping trip with his aunt is presented as a religious quest. The ultimate irony at the conclusion of the story is that what the boy thought of as a holy quest, to get a gift for the girl, was actually a sordid mercantile affair based on the sexual rather than the spiritual.
