What Makes Miss Brill

“All the world’s a stage and all the men and women are merely players” - William Shakespeare. In “Miss Brill,” a short story by Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill lives a seemingly simple and routine life. She always sits on her bench at the park and picks up her Sunday treat at 4 o’clock sharp. However, she believes she is playing a role and the world is her stage. Miss Brill never realizes how peculiar she may seem to other people, until she receives a rude awakening from a young couple during one of her “performances.” This awakening shatters her inflated notion of self and brings her to realize who she truly is. Miss Brill loves to observe people. She believes every person in the park she watches fits some sort of stereotype, all living some kind of drama. She thinks herself to be the opposite of this, a figurehead. In reality, Miss Brill just has a warped sense of self that is incapable of perceiving her appearance to the rest of the world. This warped mental perception is what causes Miss Brill to believe she is, in a sense, better than everyone else at the park. She believes her presence on her bench is essential and that everyone notice if she was missing, which is far from the truth.
She lives by herself, runs errands by herself, and spends most of her time by herself. Her only routine human interactions are with her students, the man she reads the paper to, and the owner of the bakery. This lack of human interaction is what inflates Miss Brill’s sense of self. Her only human interaction at the park that Sunday was the young couple whom ridiculed her. The best way to gauge your appearance to others is through other humans. Miss Brill does not communicate with others and lives in a world of self-deception. This state of oblivion is the reason that the young couple’s harsh but true words stung Miss Brill so