What would be an interesting topic unifying "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" and "The Garden Party"?

These are two great stories by Katherine Mansfield and so
you will have lots to write about when you have decided the topic you are going to base
your assignment around. One idea that dominates the work of this excellent short story
writer is captivity and the way that this term is applied to women. You might want to
explore the way that both Laura and the two daughters, Josephine and Constantia are
entrapped in various ways and to what extent they are successful in fighting against
this captivity.

It is clear that we are presented with two
daughters who have been completely dominated in every form by their father. Their lives,
up until the death of their father, have been centred around avoiding the ire of their
father and avoiding him period. Their characters show the way that their father's house
has become a kind of cage for them, just as their own inability to act engages them too.
Note how they constantly worry about the consequences of certain actions and are ruled
so much by what they think others will say and do about them. Even when they try to sort
out their father's things, Constantia's "amazingly bold" action is only one of
passivity:

And
then she did one of those amazingly bold things that she'd done about twice before in
their lives: she marched over to the wardrobe, turned the key, and took it out of the
lock.

This "bold" action is
only one of postponement. By locking up the wardrobe, she is deferring real action. Even
though their father, the source of their domination, has died, the sisters show that
they are still just as entrapped by their habitual indecision, timidity and fear. Even
though there is evidence of their desire for freedom, they are so repressed and
entrapped that they cannot even confess their mutual desire for freedom to each
other.

In the same way, Laura shows herself to be just as
entrapped in "The Garden Party" by a sense of class consciousness. Even though she
starts off as a character by decrying the "absurd class distinctions" that separate her
from the men who have come to put up the marquee, as the story progresses and we see the
way she becomes distracted from cancelling the party because of the death of a working
class man by a beautiful hat, we can see she becomes ensnared by the very class
consciousness that she thinks she is unaffected by at the beginning of the
story:

Just
for a moment she had another glimpse of that poor woman and those little children and
the body being carried into the house. But it all seemed blurred, unreal, like a picture
in the neewspaper. I'll remember it again after the party's over, she
decided.

However, crucially,
unlike Josephine and Constantia, we do get some indications at the end of the story that
Laura Sheridan is able to break free from these restrictions. As she gazes upon the body
of Mr. Scott, she is struck by a kind of an epiphany that features on the peace and
tranquility that Mr. Scott has attained in death, compared with the frivolous nature of
her preoccupations with the garden party.