Katherine Mansfield's Miss Brill

Miss Brill
1.Characterize Miss Brill. Which details in the text suggest what her life is like? Why are her Sunday trips to the park important to her?
+ Miss Brill, the short story by Mansfield, is filled with significant detals that allow the reader to have some insight into her true character and lifestyle. One of the most glaring is when she goes to the park and starts to imagine that she is somehow interconnected and involved in the people's lives that she sees around her. In this way we can see that she is trying to construct a reality where she matters to someone instead of being a lonely, overlooked, forgotten old woman.
QUOTE: "They were all on the stage. They weren't only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting. Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn't been there; she was part of the performance, after all."
Miss brill’ life is one of shabby gentility and pretense,this impression commences in the opening paragraph as she lovingly takes an old fashioned fox fur out of its box for her usual Sunday outing to the gardens
+Because she lives on the fringes of life in her small French town, Miss Brill regards her solitary Sundays in the park as the highlight of her week.
Here, watching the people whocome and go and eavesdropping on their conversations, she feels a connection with her fellow human beings. Miss Brill is a woman who craves significance and meaning, and wants desperately to believe that she is valued and important. The fiction she creates about the park being a play that she has a role in allows her to believe, however fleetingly, that she is important and that her absence would be
noticed
2.Comment on the significance of the setting. Would the story be as effective if it were set in another place or at another time of the year?
The story takes place in a park, the "Jardins Publiques," suggesting the setting is in a small French town. The sea is visible from the park, so the town must be seaside. It is a place where people stroll, where some people sit on public benches, and where some listen to the band playing its Sunday afternoon concert. The band, playing on Sunday, is typical of a highlight for a small rural town. The time is fall because leaves are turning yellow and there is a chill in the air. The atmosphere is rather stark and bleak, while the mood is lonesome and austere.
3.What revelation does Miss Brill get in the park about herself and the world? In what way is it accurate? Is Miss Brill really an “actress”?
The full passage is as follows:
She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her.
This statement shows how Miss Brill has come to believe that she stands apart from her social context and has complete control and mastery of all that is occuring around her. She lives alone, and this feeling is the way she has turned her solitary life into something valuable and special. She has even developed the illusion that she is a sort of director or conductor and that everything she sees is an elaborate play or show that is being put on for her benefit. She comes to feel herself one of them, an actor in life’s drama. So caught up does she become in the sudden revelation that all the world’s a stage and that she, like everyone else, has a part to play, that she has a mystical experience. This is why the criticism of the young couple is so shattering -- it reveals brutally to her that they consider her a tiresome and despicable nuisance, someone who spoils the "play" by her presence, rather than a detached master or conductor.
4. Are the following details perhaps symbolic: the fur---- the almond in the honey cake----the cupboard the fur
Miss Brill refers to it as a male which reflects that she not only longs for excitement (via the term rogue), but that she also doesn’t have a significant other in her life. The fur is a substitute companion that accompanies her to the park. It lives a life similar Miss Brill’s as it is put into the closet to lament in the same way Miss Brill returns to her dark room to cry. She puts it in the closet so that it wouldn’t see her cry.
The fur also shares the rejection that Miss Brill sees when a boy calls her a “stupid old thing” and a girl insults her fur. She values the fur’s companionship and treats it as if it were an actual person, saving it the dignity of crying in front of her when actually she didn’t want her companion to see her cry.
Cake
Normally Miss Brill gets a cake every Sunday to enjoy, but this particular Sunday when she and the fur are insulted is different. She simply returns home to sulk. The cake represents a bit of enjoyment in an otherwise uneventful and pitiful existence. By not getting the cake, Miss Brill denies herself that enjoyment.
The cupboard
In the conclusion, MB return to her “little dark room- her room like the cupboard”. esily one of her most treasured items in her wardrobe, the fox symbolizes both Miss Brill's physical and mental states. The fox is said to be old, dusty, and badly in need of a "good brush". It is as if like the old people in the park (and as we later learn Miss Brill herself), it had been kept away in a cupboard