Miss Brill (new version)

Miss Brill

By Katherine Mansfield

This story shows love from an unusual perspective in which the protagonist is a passive onlooker. Miss Brill has the same plan every Sunday: she goes to the park, sits on the same bench and listens to other people’s conversations. Throughout the story she tells us about the bits of love stories she catches from some of these conversations, mainly between couples. That is how we come to know that love is all over the place, except by her side. Her sole company is a fur she loves so much, and it is not surprising that she chooses something “dead” as her so beloved object, since one can experience from her emotions that she seems to be dead , lonely and empty.

We can notice that Miss Brill has the most important role but at the same time rather passive because she is not the centre of attention in the setting. The fact that she sees life as a play, of which she is an actress and part of the audience as well, conveys the idea that people are told what to do by a director, or to follow a predetermined script, which leaves these “actors” with little willpower. Again, this is related to the concept the fur conveys:  something inanimate has no willpower. And doing a further reading, we can risk that this could also imply that she has the feeling that she is predetermined to be lonely, as if it were her destiny.

In spite of being the same park, something is different this Sunday afternoon: there are more people, the band sounds louder and gayer and the Season began, but she still follows the same routine, her life is still the same. The impression one gets of her life being static is a result of her loneliness.

To sum up, lack of love is shown throughout the story, giving us a sense of loneliness that is actually never expressed directly. But we, as readers can see that Miss Brill tries to fill this empty space that love has left by watching other couples and hearing their conversations.  This story makes us realize that love is one of the main factors in any person’s life because it makes the world go around. Sometimes we complain about what we lack and we do not appreciate what we do have.