Miss Brill: A Tale of Loneliness, Alienation, and the Illusion of Connection
By Katherine Mansfield
Miss Brill is a middle-aged, unmarried English woman who lives alone in a small apartment in France. She teaches English to students and reads the newspaper to an elderly man several times a week. One of her prized possessions is a fur neck let that she wears on a Sunday visit to the town’s park.
Miss Brill is an astute observer of others; she compares the park to a stage. The realization fills her with joy. She has managed to connect with others only in her fantasy. Miss Brill retreats to her apartment without having succeeded in establishing the human contact she desperately wants and has sought. Miss Brill, however, suppresses her sorrow when she imagines that she hears her fur stole crying as she returns it to its box. She is unable to recognize the feeling as her own.
Alienation
Symbolically, the sense of alienation is heightened at the end of the story when Miss Brill returns her fur to its box quickly and without looking at it. This action is in contrast to her playful conversation with it earlier in the day, when she called it her “little rogue.” The final action of the story completes the characterization of Miss Brill as an alienated and lonely individual when she believes that she hears her beloved fur crying as she returns it to its box, just as she herself has returned to her “room like a cupboard.”
Loneliness
Though Miss Brill does not reveal it in her thoughts, her behavior indicates that she is a lonely woman. She thinks of no family members during her Sunday outing, instead focusing on her few students and the elderly man to whom she reads the newspaper several times a week. Her fantasy, in which she imagines the people in the park as characters in a play connected in some psychological and physical way to one another, reveals her loneliness in a creative way. Yet, her manufactured sense of connection to these strangers is shattered when she is insulted by the young couple. When her fantasy of playacting is crushed by the conversation of the romantic couple, she is shown to be alienated from her environment; estranged and apart from the others in the park, to whom she only imagined a connection.
Appearances and Reality
Through the stream-of-consciousness narrative in “Miss Brill,” Mansfield creates a story in which the contrast between appearances and reality are manifest through the thoughts of the main character. At the beginning of the story, Miss Brill is perturbed by the old couple sitting on the bench near her. Their silence makes eavesdropping on their lives difficult. Similarly, Miss Brill notices that the other people sitting on chairs in the park are “odd, silent, nearly all old” and “looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms. She also notices an old woman wearing a fur hat, which she calls a “shabby ermine,” bought when the woman’s hair was yellow. When the woman raises her hand to her lips, Miss Brill compares it to a “tiny yellowish paw.”
While making fun of this woman in her own mind, the comparisons between the “ermine toque” and her own appearance go unnoticed. Later, when Miss Brill’s imagination concocts the metaphor of the park visitors as actors in a play, she thinks of them as connected to her in a harmonious way. Yet, the attractive couple whom she imagines to be the hero and heroine of the play, are revealed through their conversation to be the antagonists. The play — a metaphor which produced a moment of epiphany for Miss Brill — has taken place only in her mind. Thus, this contrast between appearance and reality in “Miss Brill” further illustrates the story’s theme of alienation — the idea that Miss Brill is separated and estranged from her environment.
Gender Roles
With this text, Katherine Mansfield did not only want to express the rejection of the main character by others, but of women in general. She also wanted to reflect that society is an asymmetrical entity and people in it play not how they really are but how others think they are, and they reject others just to cause pain.
Mansfield wanted to reflect the loneliness that lots of women felt at that time, when they were not considered as important in the society. Furthermore, if they were old and they were not married, they were margined and that loneliness increased even more. It was not good for a woman to be single, because she would by criticize by everyone and also rejected by others.
Finally, she talks about creating an imaginary world where she can feel better and can avoid the real world, dominated by men and where she does not have nothing but duties.