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Be sure to the read the story before you read this essay.

The Sad Dance of Life: A Reading of Katherine Mansfield's "Her First Ball"

Writers (and football coaches) use many different metaphors for life -- life as a journey, life as a road, life as a battle, and even life as a football game. In Mansfield's "Her First Ball" we see yet another metaphor for life -- life as a dance. In other words, the careful reader is able to see that Leila's encounter with the strange old man at the ball, the older women grimly and unhappily chaperoning the ball, and the slippery dance floor can all be interpreted as figures of speech or symbols that tell us something important about the sad and somber way that Katherine Mansfield viewed life.

Why was she sad and somber? When Mansfield wrote "Her First Ball" in 1922, her own death by tuberculosis was only a year away. She was an intelligent and beautiful woman, had until recently been an incredibly desirable woman with a "past," was still only 34 years old, had enjoyed much praise as an up-and-coming literary artist, had been living the exciting life of the Roaring Twenties with important literary figures like James Joyce and Middleton Murray, but now knew she was dying of what was rather a horrible disease in the days before TB vaccinations were available, and knew exactly how painful her death would be. Death was about to rob her of a wonderful and exciting life, as exciting as the ball Leila was about to attend:

It would be cruel and insensitive to describe all the details of the death she faced, but just a few details will make the point -- in the last year of her life she would cough up blood almost non-stop, she would shrivel down to looking like a skeleton. . .get the point?

So, in her story about Leila's first fancy dress ball where a strange old man reminds her that her youth and beauty and happiness will all very soon be gone, poor Katherine Mansfield presents the metaphor of her life as a dance toward Death:

Then quite an old man [appeared to ask her for a dance] -- fat, with a big bald patch on his head -- took her program and murmured "Let me see, let me see!
He has a shabby and raggedy look that suggests he has been dancing among the young people at these balls for a very long time:
And, as they move around the dance floor, the old man mentions that he has been dancing at these balls since twelve years before Leila was born and then he goes on to tell her truths about what life has in store for her, truths that are as cruel as Death:

The harsh truth of what the old man has said kills any joy or happiness Leila is feeling at the ball. Even the slippery dance floor that made the dancing so exciting for young people has been turned into a place too slippery to prevent one from falling out of happiness. Indeed, so far as Leila's happiness goes, the old man might as well be the Grim Reaper himself:

This story would be almost unbearably melacholy if it were not for the ending. It is true that the old man has killed Leila's joy and the young girl wants to leave the dance, which is a metaphorical way of saying joy is dead and there is nothing but aging and death to look forward to. The young, however, can escape the gloom for a while by letting romance and pleasure carry them away. Leila is just about to abandon the ball when something else happens:
It will not be long before Leila (and Katherine) have to face the gloomy truth about the dance toward death, but -- for just a few moments more -- she can ignore what the fat man told her. She can dance one last dance happily before the ball is over.