SOURCE: Darrohn, Christine. “‘Blown to Bits!’: Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Garden Party’ and the Great War.” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 3 (fall 1998): 513-39.

In the following essay, Darrohn maintains that Katherine Mansfield's well-known story “The Garden Party” provides insight into how society struggled to recover from the brutality of World War I, a “war that jeopardizes the integrity of physical bodies as well as the stability of social categories.”

“Blown to bits!”

That is how Katherine Mansfield, still in shock just a few days after learning of her brother's death in the war, described him to a friend. Twenty-one-year-old Leslie “Chummie” Beauchamp had been stationed in France for less than a month when on 7 October 1915, as he was giving a hand grenade demonstration, a defective grenade blew up in his hand with a force so strong it killed both himself and his sergeant (Alpers 183). Mansfield's succinct description of her brother's...