Katherine Mansfield and Ernest Hemmingway are both published writers. One was born in New Zealand and the other in the United States during the late 19th century. This paper will compare and contrast the setting, plot, imagery, climax, and theme between Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” and Hemmingway’s “Cat in the Rain.”
The setting in “Miss Brill” takes place in a public garden in France. The story states the band plays in the Jardins Publiques (Public Gardens) in France (15). Miss Brill, the protagonist, is proceeding on a Sunday afternoon to the gardens where she will listen to a band. Mansfield tells us there were a number of other people out that afternoon, more than any other Sunday. The time of year appears to be autumn. Mansfield
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She is a lady vicariously living through those around her. She makes observations of the patient Englishman and his nagging wife (15). Furthermore, she observes two young girls laughing and meeting up with two soldiers (15). Nearby resides a stiff man with a woman. The man indifference to the woman makes Miss Brill angry. She whispered over and over “The Brute! The Brute!” (16). She was also unimpressed by a beautiful woman that passed by. She dropped some violets, which a young boy picked up and gave back to her. However Miss Brill see’s the woman throw the flowers away. She exclaims, “Dear me!” (16). Miss Brill views the events as a play as if she is an actress. Each individual have their parts. Even the fur she wears around her head has a part in the play. Mansfield advises, “It was exactly like a play. Who could believe the sky at the back wasn’t painted?” (17).
In contrast, the characters in the plot of “Cat in the Rain” are limited to the American couple, a cat, the padrone, and a maid. The American wife sees a cat from her window. Hemingway states, “A cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables” (62). She desires to retrieve the cat against the indifference of her husband. The American wife states, “I’m going down and get that kitty” (62). George, her husband, half-heartedly offers to retrieve it for her. He was indifferent to the episode. Hemingway advises us that he went on reading and
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By the age of fourteen, I wanted to become a hairdresser. Although I always wanted to become a hairdresser, I knew that I wanted to help make a difference within others life, by giving them a voice and having a person to talk to. Due to my upbringing, I never had a voice and was silence in more than one ways. I have found myself feeling alone and unable to express how I felt. Realizing how much my childhood had impacted me I made sure to always find ways to help others and with this it provided me the opportunity to go after my dream of becoming a therapist.
She pays attention to the smallest details. "Wasn’t the conductor [of the band in the park] wearing a new coat, too? She was sure it was new. He scraped with his foot and flapped his arms like a rooster about to crow… Now came a little ‘flutey’ bit—very pretty!—a little chain of bright drops. She was sure it would be repeated. It was; she lifted her head and smiled" (98). Even if she’s only an observer, Miss Brill is an involved observer. She draws enjoyment from simply being in the park atmosphere. However, her enjoyment is more than a passing mood. It’s actually an indication of a deeper emotion—a kind of happiness. This becomes clear after Miss Brill has paid close attention to several small exchanges between people at the park. "Oh how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all!" (99). That Miss Brill does not actually participate in anything is clear to the reader, but not to her. Vicarious involvement in other people’s lives seems to be fulfilling for her, even though there is no actual interplay with others. The most telling evidence that Miss Brill is happy (and that her happiness is based on a false impression) is when she comes to the conclusion that she’s somehow needed at the park. "No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there; she was part of the performance after all… Miss Brill nearly laughed out loud" (100). This realization eventually moves Miss Brill to
Through this violent speech, Lady Macbeth takes on a violent and masculine role. At first, the babe is depicted as “smiling” and has “boneless gums.” It is innocent of the vice in the world and its forthcoming fate, and vulnerable to any external harm. It “symbolizes pity, and the necessity for pity.” (Muir 235) It depends totally on its mother. Lady
Throughout the 20th century, the United States has slowly constructed a global system of control. Its superior military, weaponry and intelligence apparatus have been crucial in this system, but an equally important factor has been its control of the global economy, and its primary weapon, the U.S. Dollar. The dollar’s world reserve status alone does not make it unique, but its deeply rooted role in American and global geo-politics certainly does. As Vassili Fouskas and Bülent Gökay point out in their book The New American Imperialism, “Dollar hegemony has always been strategic to the future of American global dominance, in many respects more important than America’s overwhelming military power. While military power is more visible and useful as a display, it is the dollar’s role as reserve currency that secures the domination of the U.S. in the global economic market place”. [1] This system is built on serious fault lines and its future is the most important issue for international relations today.
Middleton and Dekker collaborate to write The Roaring Girl, which concentrates on a real-life London woman named Moll Cutpurse. Moll was reputed to be a prostitute, bawd, and thief, but the playwrights present her as a lady of great spirit and virtue whose reputation is misrepresented by a small, convention-bound civilization. In the play, as in reality, Moll dresses in men’s attire, smokes a pipe and bears a sword representing a colorful and in the underworld life of Moll Cutpurse. She stood London on its head with her cross-dressing and gender-bending behavior, and illegal pursuits. Her defiance of women in this play is exceptional. Also, she is perhaps one of the only players to be scrupulously true to herself; some of the other characters display very hypocritical aspects. Such unorthodox and unconventional role, Middleton and Dekker implies, leads to her spotted standing. She is a roaring girl; An audacious and bold woman-about-town. But beneath this absence of femininity, is a courageous, high-principled woman. Moll interposes in the central plots and is associated in skirmishes with many of the characters, consistently showcasing her ability to stand up for the downtrodden and wronged. Therefore, Moll creates a 'third space ' that identifies her as importantly freed in her navigation of space and social relations.
Hemingway’s Americans’ continual desire for more alienates them from the rest of society, proving their lack of understanding for the world. In “Cat in the Rain,” an American couple is vacationing in Italy. Instead of admiring the beauty of their surroundings, the Americans instead focus on irrelevant trivial pursuits, illustrating their greed. After going down to retrieve the cat, the wife is immediately attracted to the hotel owner, proving Americans ever-evolving want for new things: “She liked the way he wanted to serve her. [...] She liked his old, heavy face and big hands” (Hemingway 130). Instead of staying loyal to her husband, the American wife forgets he exists and moves on to the next best person she finds, showing the apathy Americans possess for what they already have. Additionally, the hotel owner is simply doing his job, and the American wife’s failure to realize this results from her greed, which severely clouds her judgement. The greed Americans possess is further proven with the American wife’s childish behavior throughout the story. When the wife cannot find the cat, she complains, “I wanted it so much [...] I don’t know why I wanted it so much” (130). Back in the hotel room, the wife demands to her husband that she “want[s] to pull [her] hair back,” and to “have a kitty to sit on [her] lap and purr when [she] stroke[s] her” (131). The
The other view that Glaspell shows in this play is a sympathy that the reader grows for the women. How they are forced to follow the men. Like when they are asked to get close to the fire, they do it even though Mrs. Peters
In this essay I will be comparing Oscar Wilde's play 'A Woman of No Importance' to John Fowles' novel 'The French Lieutenant's Woman'. I will be exploring their differing views of woman in Victorian society. Generally, woman were viewed as inferior to men, yet Wilde shows compassion for them in his writing, this can be seen through his kindness to Mrs Arbuthnot towards the end of the play. However, John Fowles, although much darker in his presentation of woman, portrays Sarah Woodruff as
She is an elderly woman, but she is not a “normal” old woman. "The old people sat on the bench, still as statues. Never mind, there was always the crowd to watch.” This quote shows what Miss Brill thinks about elderly people. By doing this, she is acting like a teenager, sort of immature. She likes to be different from the other elderly people or people who act like old people. In the same way, when she saw old people who were sitting on benches, she said that they were "nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they'd just come from dark little rooms or even - even cupboards!” In this way, she is putting herself away from that “old people”. She describes them in a negative tone and showing that she is much more than one typical frail old
The narrator in the story “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield, is telling us this story in the third person singular perspective. Our narrator is a non-participant and we learn no details about this person, from a physical sense. Nothing to tell us whether it is a friend of Miss Brill, a relative, or just someone watching. Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill comes alive from the descriptions we get from this anonymous person. The narrator uses limited omniscience while telling us about this beautiful Sunday afternoon. By this I mean the narrator has a great insight into Miss Brill’s perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and into her world as a whole, but no real insight into any of the other characters in this story. By using this point of view,
In the society of the 1920s when the play was written, the confinement of women was at an all-time high, however the breakout of women’s rights was just starting. The tone of this play helps show just this view, by promoting a character such as Mrs. Peters, who is stuck on whose side be on in the mystery of the murder. As they uncover the motive of Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Peters character begins to understand her, although the deceased husband was murdered in such a gruesome way, and know there should be a punishment for the crime for the crime because of her background with her husband as sheriff, who said she is “married to the law”, she comprehends the “stillness” that Mrs. Wright must have felt, with the house being as gloomy as it was on a bright character such as she before she was married. Such as
Shenli Song College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Gongshang University Office of Foreign Language College at Zhejiang Gongshang University Xia Sha City-University-Town, Hangzhou 310018, Zhejiang, China E-mail: windyforever@gmail.com Abstract Katherine Mansfield, remembered as one of the finest writers of English short stories, enjoys enduring fame and a somewhat awesome literary status with her short stories, Miss Brill as one of her representative pieces. The interest of our Chinese critics, in general, locates more in the modernist techniques and devices she employs to present the inner world of the characters in her stories,
In the short story the "The Cat in the Rain" by Ernest Hemingway, the cat is a symbol around which the story revolves. As a central symbol, the cat reveals the psychological state and emotional desires of the American wife.
“Cat in the rain” begins by defining the setting, using strong imagery of the postwar period of Italy the 1920’s. Hemingway puts emphasis on a war