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Katherine Mansfield's Miss Brill

Decent Essays

In Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Miss Brill”, an elderly woman is portrayed as content with her life due to her unique ways of dissolving reality into her own. However, when she finally sees reality for how it truly is, she is brought to the realization of her loneliness. This paper will analyze the hidden qualities of loneliness through Mansfield’s illusions, symbolism, and Miss Brill’s personal revelation.
From the start, Miss Brill was crafting her own reality by personifying her fox scarf, by having it say “What has been happening to me?” (65). Although Miss Brill expresses this question towards the fox, it’s underlying target is herself as a non-living object is incapable of asking questions. She then continues by stating that she “felt a tingling in her hands breathed, something light and sad – no, not sad, exactly – something gentle seemed to move in her bosom” (65). The “something gentle” that she refers to is once again the dead fox, incapable of moving. …show more content…

The most important symbol was the Public Gardens, which represented a stage where she sat and pictured nonexistent events as she fought back her loneliness. After Miss Brill took her usual “special seat” (65) at the Public Gardens, she began “sitting in other people’s lives . . . while they talked around her” (65). She began with the elderly couple adjacent to her by eavesdropping on how the wife refused to wear spectacles claiming that she “wanted to shake her” (66). These events directly illustrated how she created her own

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