Her First Ball
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Her First Ball
The Story
Leila, the young protagonist of “Her First Ball,” is thrilled though extremely self-conscious at the prospect of
attending her first formal ball. Every detail, from the shared cab that takes her there to the coach bolster,
which feels like the sleeve of an escort's dress suit, contributes to her pleasure. Not even the Sheridan girls,
amazed that she has never been to a ball before, can dampen her enthusiasm. She does feel less sophisticated
than her companions; after all, she has been reared in the country, fifteen miles from the nearest neighbor, and
her friends have had such evenings before.
She admires the easy gallantry of her cousin Laurie when he arranges, as usual, to have the third and ninth
dances with his sister Laura. Though sad almost to the point of tears that she herself does not have a brother to
make such casual agreements with her (“no brother had ever said ’Twig?’ to her”), the whole experience is
so overwhelming that Leila seems almost lifted past the big golden lantern, and the couples seem to float
through the air: Their “little satin shoes chased each other like birds.”
Leila acts with instinctive grace and is courteous even to the boorish fat man who presumptuously compares
his program with hers to schedule a dance. The fat man asks himself aloud whether he remembers Leila's
“bright little face,” whether he had known it “of yore,” but his condescension does not faze her. She dances
beautifully, even though she learned to dance in “a little corrugated iron mission hall” near her boarding
school. Indeed, Leila has a series of partners, and Jose's wink tells the reader, though apparently not Leila, that
her exuberance, grace, and beauty have quickly made Leila the “belle of the ball.” Her partners, aware of her
instinctive elegance and grace, try with varying degrees of success to appear nonchalant and to make the usual
small talk. Leila herself seems unaware of the splendid impression that she is making; she knows only that she
is enjoying herself immensely and that the evening is passing very quickly.
Then the fat man reappears for the dance he himself had scheduled, and the tone of the story changes
completely. To this point, the words have flown by in a series of vignettes, almost a catalog of Leila's quick,
vivid impressions of the scene. Instead of the expected awkward pleasantries about the quick and slippery
dance floor, the fat man tells Leila that she “can’t hope to last,” that “long before that you’ll be sitting up
there on the stage, looking on, in your nice black velvet,” that her “pretty arms will have turned to short fat
ones,” and that her fan will be “a black bony one.”
Leila laughs at the fat man's words, though they bother her inwardly because she realizes that they are
essentially true. One day she will grow old; then no one will dance with her, and she will become one of the
chaperons. The music, which had seemed gay, suddenly seems sad to her. For a moment, Leila feels like a
little girl wanting to throw her pinafore over her head and sob. Even so, she never loses her composure; she
tells the fat man that she does not take his words seriously.
Leila's gloomy mood does not last. When the couples parade for the next dance and a new partner, “a young
man with curly hair,” escorts her to the center of the dance floor, Leila's feet “glided, glided,” and she even
smiles radiantly and without recognition when her next partner accidently bumps her into the fat man.
Her First Ball
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Themes and Meanings
Leila's first ball is her first social triumph, even as it is her first disillusionment. She knows, even before she
dances with the fat man, that time will take her beauty, that she will not always be la belle du bal; even so,
these are things that she need not consider on the evening of her first formal. What bothers her is not so much
the fat man's words as his callousness in saying them. Indeed, what Leila discovers at the ball is human
cruelty, that it is usually aimed at the naïvely innocent for the perverse pleasure it gives to its wicked agent.
She also discovers how brief and fragile periods of absolute happiness are. Fortunately, however, youth is
buoyant, and the fat man's remarks, though noted and stored away, do not mar Leila's perfect evening.
Because she has been reared in an isolated place and as an only child, Leila's sensitivity is more acute than
that of others her age. This gives her greater capacity for joy, even as it makes her vulnerable to greater pain.
One moment, the lanterns, the azaleas, the gowns, the music make her float on air; the next, an aging cynic's
cruelty punctures all of her joy, and Leila wishes that she were at home listening to the baby owls in their nest
near the veranda. In short, Katherine Mansfield's story, for all its brevity, encapsulates the bittersweetness of
growing up.
Style and Technique
When scholars pored over Mansfield's autograph manuscripts and journals, they were struck by her poor
spelling and her eccentric grammar. Even so, Mansfield's style is geared to pictorial rather than verbal
vividness. For example, “Her First Ball,” though narrated in the third person, re-creates the ball as Leila sees
it: vivid colors, swift movements, ravishing music. It presents an important moment, perceived with the
intensity possible only for a sensitive and impressionable young person. Indeed, the story is told with the
manic mood swings of an adolescent. Like a musical composition, its tempos vary from allegro (the quickly
narrated sections of Leila's arrival and first dances) to maestoso (the melancholy sadness following the fat
man's words) to allegro vivace (when Leila dances with the curly haired young man). Often the words
reproduce a waltz rhythm: “in one minute, in one turn, her feet glided, glided. The lights, the azaleas, the
dresses, the pink faces, the velvet chairs, all became one beautiful flying wheel.”
Mansfield was born Kathleen Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand. When she became nineteen she
changed her name to Katherine Mansfield, joining an altered first name to her mother's maiden name. She was
not an only child, but she was lonely, and her early trip to Europe made her bloom as surely as Leila at her
first ball. Mansfield's pictorial intensity is the single most distinguishing element of her writing technique; it
brought her to the notice of the Bloomsbury writers and caused Virginia Woolf to say, “I was jealous of her
writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.”
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Themes and Meanings
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