Palpable Yet Inarticulable: The Gendered Narrative Regulation in Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party

This article utilizes Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Garden Party as the research object to explore the narrative generation conditions of ethical experience in the text. Through a close analysis of the novel’s narrative structure and key scenes, the article argues that ethical discomfort does not evolve into enduring moral judgments within the text; rather, it is continually managed and deferred through the interplay of aesthetic order, familial discourse, and the distribution of social roles. The novel eschews a linear trajectory of ethical awakening, instead crafting a narrative mechanism that keeps ethical experience palpable yet inarticulable. The female subject is given the role of sensing ethical incongruity, but lacks the narrative position from which to articulate it as judgment. Consequently, ethics remains confined to the level of personalization and unimplementability. Far from a narrative of moral growth or awakening, The Garden Party exposes why ethical judgment has become structurally unrealizable in modern narratives.

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