A Cup of Tea, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY, by Aurora Ledesma

The story was written in January 1922 in the space of just 4–5 hours, and was published in a popular magazine, the “Story-Teller”, in May of the same year.

Rosemary was a wealthy woman, who had been married for two years to a very rich man, Philip Fell, who adored his family. Though she was not very pretty, she made up for it as she lived in extreme style and fashion. She always enjoyed organizing parties for important people and artists. She liked shopping in a perfect florist’s in Regent Street and also loved collecting antiques.

One rainy winter afternoon, after leaving an antique shop, Rosemary felt a bit upset, because she had not been able to buy an exquisite little box.  Suddenly a poor young girl came up to her and asked for the price of a cup of tea. Rosemary thought of doing something generous, like in the novels of Dostoevsky, and invited her to her house. Rosemary wanted to show that those nice things that happened in novels and fairy tales, about generous rich people, happened in real life also. At the beginning, the girl didn’t believe Rosemary, even suspected that the lady might hand her over to the police, but at last Rosemary took her home.

When they arrived at Rosemary’s house, she took the girl up to her bedroom and made her sit near the fire on a comfortable chair. Rosemary even had to help her take off her coat and hat, because she was very weak, but threw them on the floor. The poor girl cried and complained that life was too hard and that she was so tired of living. Then Rosemary consoled her and asked her servant to bring some food and tea.

When she was going to begin asking the girl about her life, her husband Philip came in. He was astonished to see the girl in his wife’s room, and he asked her to go to the library, where he tried to tell her that she couldn’t have a stranger in the house. Facing a refusal, he used the old jealousy trick and he praised the girl’s beauty. So Rosemary went out of the library, took three pounds, gave them to the girl and sent her away.

Afterwards, Rosemary dressed up, put on some makeup and tried to attract the attention of her husband. At the end, Rosemary didn’t know if she was pretty enough for him, and she wasn’t sure if Philip loved her either.

 

Some Reflections

In this story we can find some topical themes that the writer repeats in many other stories: The prominence of women, the social classes, the oppression of the poor by the rich, the materialism of the main characters etc. But in “A Cup of Tea” we also find the appearance in contrast to reality. Rosemary on the surface seems kind by taking care of the girl. However, her intentions are something else. She wants to receive the admiration of her “friends”. The reality of her intentions is full of hypocrisy. She helps the girl for her own interest.
Rosemary is also a prototype of jealousy and insecurity. When Philips praises the girl’s beauty, she forgets her good intentions and sends the girl away.

QUESTIONS

-How can you explain the differences between beautiful and pretty? Can you give some examples?
-The protagonist says “I hate lilac”. And the attendant “put the lilac out of sight”. So strong of the power of money? Can you give some more curious examples?
-Remember the seller in the “antique shop”: can you give some tips as to how to be a very good shopkeeper?
-Why would / wouldn’t you buy second hand things?
-What do you think of philanthropy? Do you think it’s a way to help poor people, or you think it’s useless for the poor and hypocrisy for the donor?
-Are all the women sisters (in their fight for their rights)?
-Are rich people more natural than poor people? Do you think very rich people belong to another species? Is it easy to recognize them?
-“If people wanted helping, they must respond a little”. How true is this sentence? Must you always accept charity?
-Is being very formal a feature of rich people, like when Philip says “Oh, what’s happened? Previous engagement?”
 

VOCABULARY

duck, beamed, cherub, plied, vile, pick-up, bowled over

STORY WITH MARGIN NOTES

VIDEO ANALYSIS

SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

The Stranger, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY

Mrs Hammond has been ten months away from home visiting her eldest daughter in Europe. Now the ship in which she has been travelling has stopped outside Auckland harbour for no apparent reason. A doctor has been sent for to go on board, and this situation lasts for a couple of hours.

Meanwhile, Mr Hammond, who has come from Napier where he lives, has been waiting with a number of people for the ship docking. Mr Hammond has been very nervous and agitated: he has paced up and down the wharf, he has lifted and girl on a barrel and then forgotten her, he has felt his heart beating… He has wondered if his wife had been ill on board...

Finally, the ship has berthed and is moored. Mr Hammond runs to greet his wife Janey; he goes on board to help her with the luggage. He is very excited because he wants to be alone with her and have some intimacy. He has even left their children at home and has booked a room in a hotel to spend at least a night together before going back to Napier with the family.

But before going away from the boat, Mrs Hammond wants to thank the captain and to say goodbye to her traveller mates, and Mr Hammond realizes her wife is very popular and he feels proud of her and likes her the more. But then, when she wants to say goodbye to the doctor, Mr Hammond is afraid again thinking that perhaps his wife has been ill during the passage, and what is more, he suspects that something singular (he doesn’t know what) has happened.

He longs to get some hours alone with his wife, but her responses to his desires are distant or cold. When they arrive to the hotel, he’s so in a hurry that he didn’t even greet his mates there: he wants to be immediately in their room. Alone with his wife, he doesn’t want to go down to the restaurant to have dinner. But he is a bit confused because of this lack of tenderness in his wife: she’s been ten months away!

In the end, she tells him why she’s in a so melancholic mood: a young passenger has died in her arms. He had felt sick and, according to the doctor, he has had a heart attack. Mr Hammond is more unsettled when he knows she was alone with the young man before and in the moment of his death. And he feels jealous, he feels he won’t be alone with his wife ever more. A dead man has beaten him to the punch, and he’ll never be able to get a rematch.

Jealousy, or envy, is in this case a contradictory feeling, because the object which spurs it doesn’t exist any more; so it’s like striking in the air, it’s a ghost and you’ll never be able to defeat it.

But is he really jealous, or he’s only disappointed because he couldn’t get satisfaction for his intimacy?

 

QUESTIONS

-At the beginning of the story it seems that the ship waiting near the harbour is in quarantine. What do you remember about the quarantine in the beginning of 2020? Where does the word “quarantine” come from (because sometimes means 15 days and in our case lasted 3 months)?

-What resources use the author to give us the impression that Mr Hammond is very anxious to meet his wife?

-When does he start to being jealous? Is jealousy a feature of a character, or it’s something you can feel all of a sudden? Is really a bad thing (morally) being jealous? Is it something you learn, or does it belong to the human nature?

-What can be the difference between “well-meaning envy” and “green envy”? Give examples.

-At the end of the story, we can see that a dead man has “replaced” or “overcame” the husband. James Joyce did something similar in his story The Dead. Why in the story is the bond with the dead man so strong? What do you think of the famous sentence in The Little Prince, by Saint Exupéry, “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed [or saved]”?

 

VOCABULARY

crinkled, galley, stern, snugly, glasses, roped, liner, dent, thrum, wheezed, raked, rot, bee-line, pikestaff, took it all, put off, butting in, chucked, thirsted, hover

SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

SUMMARY

AUDIOBOOK

The Dead, by James Joyce

The Daughters of the Late Colonel, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY

The story deals with the memories, feelings and perspectives of a couple of spinsters a week after their father’s death. The action takes place in a brief lapse of time inside the house, and there’s a lot of dialogue, so it’s almost a play for the theatre. The sisters talk about the things they have to do following their father’s funeral. They speak about giving or not their father’s top hat to the porter, about the convenience or not of dying black her dressing gowns, about not paying the nurse for having been invited to stay with them a week after the decease, about sending their father’s watch to his son Benny, who lives in Ceylon, or to give it to his grandson Cyril who lives in London, about having or not the holy communion, about arranging and disposing of their father’s things, about dismissing or not the maid now they don’t need a cook to prepare colonel’s meals any more…

They discuss all these questions, and they have a lot of doubts as to take a decision for the most of them, for all their lives they had been under the authority of a tyrannical father, and now they are at a loss about how to deal with the things to do. We have to suppose their father was a soldier serving in India (not an easy post), who treated his children with military discipline to the point of annulling their wills. And this strict education was aggravated because their mother died when they were very young.

Now, Josephine, or Jug, and Constantia, or Con, cannot get rid of the feeling that, even now, they are under their father’s authority, and even, when they know he’s dead and buried, feel his presence: they imagine he’s watching them, that he’ll raise from the tomb and scold them for having buried him, they imagine that if now they shut him in a cupboard, he’ll fight to get out, dead as he is. For they remember the exact moment when he died, when he opened only one threatening eye to look at them angrily, just before passing away.

So these two girls had spent their lives taking care of their father, bore his angers, his quarrels with the family friends, and bore to be isolated from the society, and thus having the possibility of finding a husband who would carry them away from their home-barrack hindered. No suitor would approach them with a so unpleasant father, a father more bent to chase them away than to allure them. Jug and Con couldn’t even ask their brother Benny for help, because we can imagine that he followed his father’s calling, career and character, as he lives in a remote part of Ceylon.

But the two sisters were (and are still) not only afraid of their father, but of the maid, a woman who has adopted the colonel’s character and treats the sisters with a contempt and rudeness improper of a servant.

Their sense of abandonment, fear and indecision reaches its highpoint at the end of the story, when they wanted to say something to each other, and they cannot (or perhaps don’t want to) remember what was it.

The story is a sad and a hopeless: we can imagine how secluded, monotonous and even poor their life has been until now, and how it’ll be for them in the future: they cannot even cook! But this topic isn’t new in the literature of the 19^th and 20^th centuries; the novelty is the way Mansfield tells it. We find funny or surprising moments in her narrative, as when they laugh imagining their father’s hat on the porter, when they imagine dying their dressing gowns, when Con worries about the poor mice, when Jug is afraid her father will be angry when he discovers that they had buried him, when Jug wanted Con to be the first to go into their father’s dormitory because she is taller, when they feel his presence inside the chest of drawers and then locked the wardrobe, when they imagine so vividly Benny’s life that we believe we’re seeing him, although it’s only a sisters’ fantasy; we also get confused with Cyril’s visit, because at the beginning we don’t know if it takes place before his grandfather’s death or after; we don’t know either what to think when they don’t want the holy communion because of minor details like the difficulty of finding a place for the altar, when they remember they gave money to the barrel organ to stop the music, not as a tip for it, etc.

And then, as usually, Mansfield offers us some mysterious details that have to be symbols open to infinite interpretations: the top hat, the dressing gowns, the watch and the box they wanted to send it with, the shortened names, the boa, the snake, the barrel organ, the meringue, Con lying on the floor with her arms outstretched, the tunnel…
And finally one cannot help praising Mansfield’s ear for the dialogues; one cannot help thinking what a master of the spoken words she was: the characters talk so fluently, so naturally, that one can imagine really hearing their voices.

QUESTIONS

-What do you know about etiquette at funerals?
-What has to be your attitude in a funeral? You cannot laugh there, but how can you avoid a laughing fit?
-According to your experience, is mourning for public appearances or for a personal feeling?
-Beside the black clothes, what else you do to show you’re in mourning?

-Obituary and epitaph: do you have your own ones composed? What do you know about the Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters?

-What last words or last gestures of famous people (or not famous) do you know? E.g.: Please, believe me if I tell you that I would like my last sentence was: “I have no choice but to die; I apologize for any inconvenience.”

-In your view, what are the meaning of these symbols:

the top hat, the dressing gowns, the watch and the box they wanted to send it with, the shortened names, the boa, the snake, the barrel organ, the meringue, Con lying on the floor with her arms outstretched, the tunnel…

-What do you think is going to happen to the sisters in the future?

 

VOCABULARY

heaved, dyed, shrieked, scurry, crumbs, tabbies, marmalade, appallingly, gimcrack, bold, callous, told on, runners, rocker, blow-out, breezily, brooded, give Kate notice, bypath, made a face, mantelpiece, thieved

SUMMARY

MORE ANALYSIS

SUMMARY AND MORE

FILM (from minute 25:44)

AUDIOBOOK

Mr Reginald Peacock's Day, by Katherine Mansfield

 

SUMMARY, by Cristina Fernández

The tale is the story of one day in the life of an egocentric musician that has success in his career, but unable to manage with bills, creditors and everyday details.

He would like to be one of the aristocrat group of people for whom he works, and behaves like one of them, meanwhile his wife has to manage to please his extravagances with a low budget and be her maid.

The marriage doesn’t work, as he adores everything in other women and loathes everything about his wife. Also, he tries to teach his son to behave like an aristocrat, with the result that the child finds it absurd.

To summarize the day, he gives singing lessons at home to grateful women and at night he sings in a private house, and that night he went to dinner too with one of his students.

Today, all has been a success in his life, but not his marital relationship, as he treats his wife as a maid, and he would like she would be like one of his pupils.

 

QUESTIONS TO REFLECT

Why do we want to be the centre of everything?

Why is always the other the responsible for a failure?

QUESTIONS TO DEBATE

-What can you tell us about the hero’s name?
-What is the best way to wake up? Do you think that having to get up at a determined time is a kind of being a slave?
-Do you think marriage / living together changes the relationship between a couple?

-Our society has to do exercise or go to the gym because most of the jobs don’t imply movement. Is this good or bad for our health in particular, or for the mankind in general?

-According to your opinion, what kind of formalisms are necessary in our daily routines? (saying “thank you”, e.g.) Aren’t these formulas worn out?

-What are your politics about keeping a servant?

-“Vanity, that bright bird”: what is the meaning of this expression? When vanity can be positive?

-How can governments promote culture for everybody, not only for rich people?

-“Nobody is a hero for their servant / husband /wife”. Why is that?

-“Ah, is we only were friends, how much I could tell her now!” Do you tell different things to a friend than to your spouse?

 

VOCABULARY

overall, stick and stone, shell, clip his wings, wedded, loofah, thrill, make it up, looked up, pansy, chords, waft, dairy

ANALYSIS

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