Miss Brill, By Katherine Mansfield

Two characters, Elisa Allen and Mary Teller, struggle with the idea of being accepted into the society of the 1930s. Women’s rights were not fully accepted in the 1930s, and these two characters were set in the common day view of men and women. In the 1930s, “[Society has] assigned to white women such roles as housewife, secretary, PTA chairman, and schoolteacher. Black women can now be schoolteachers, too, but they are most prominently assigned to such domestic roles as maid, cook, waitress, and babysitter” (Chisholm 123). These assigned roles have impacted women around the world, including the two characters in these short stories - “The Chrysanthemums” and “The White Quail”. Not being activists in women’s rights, these women conformed to society and lived their lives as any typical housewife in the 1930s. Their passions and choices during this time affected their way of living and relationships. The two stories reflect similarities of the women’s love for gardening and lonely marriages, but also reflect their different viewpoints on the world they live in.

Kate the Great by Meg Cabot, teaches you to know that only true friends will always be by your side no matter what.

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines gutsy as “marked by courage, pluck, or determination; having a strong or appealing flavor ("Dictionary and Thesaurus | Merriam-Webster"). It may be common to associate this adjective with a skydiver or daredevil, but what about an eighteenth century columnist named Fanny Fern? Fanny Fern, or as her birth certificate would state, Sarah Willis Parton, lived in the mid to late 1800s and wrote famously about controversial issues that are still prevalent in the twenty first century. Fern wrote with whimsy and liveliness, making issues like gender inequality in marriage and women’s reform seem funny and lighthearted, although looking closer, we can see that (through the use of several tropes) she was anything but. With cuts such as a woman’s cult of domesticity disguised as a relatable entry about silly husbands, we can look back at Fern’s work today and admire her courage to write without compromising her beliefs, as well as her ‘guts’ and determination. Fanny Fern famously used a witty mix of sarcasm, pun, and metaphor in her eighteenth century writing to critique and challenge her highly oppressive patriarchal society.

In the short story “Miss Brill” the protagonist, Miss Brill, is a lonely and isolated woman who likes to spend her Sunday afternoon’s in the park observing everyone around her and listening to their conversations without them knowing. We can infer that Miss Brill has created her own fantasy world to escape the harsh reality of her own life. At the end of the story the audience can come to the conclusion that Miss Brill experienced an epiphany that will change her life.

Bliss and Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield and Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

The phases of life are described uniquely in the novel “Shirley.” At first glance, you don’t necessarily think that Charlotte Bronte is trying to describe life, but when you analyze it, it is a beautiful way of describing life and the changes that happen throughout it. Bronte uses personification, hyperboles, and a well written syntax and diction to describe these different phases.

The main idea of the book revolves around the issue of discrimination and inequality in the 1940’s against the Black community in Mississippi. The book is written by Anne Moody, who throws light on the difficulties she faced as a black women living in Mississippi. The book talks about Moody’s early years and her family’s instability and struggle living in a racial environment of Mississippi. Moody was chafed by the indifference and insensitivity that the Black people faced at the mediocre social and economic positions allotted to them.

We live in a country where television and advertisement is designed to entice people into always wanting more than what they already have. This enticement is achieved by feeding into the human desire for happiness. Advertisers create persuasive campaigns that inundate the public with images of societies narrow interpretation of success and beauty. These images are then presented as a precondition to the happiness that human beings are searching for. When a person’s reality does not match this narrow image, the message sent through television and advertisements is that in order to be content people need to find a way to acquire it. As a result we live in a society where people are continuously longing for a happiness that

In “Miss Brill,” Katherine Mansfield utilizes Miss Brill’s thoughts and actions and the surroundings to characterize Miss Brill as a lonely character. Mansfield immediately introduces Miss Brill with a very odd scene that shows her conversation with the fur coat. This quickly and effectively establishes the type of person Miss Brill is. As a result, Mansfield suggests that Miss Brill is a lonely and an “abnormal” person to illustrate to the audience how society treats those who are not considered “normal” through the later actions of a young couple.

Miss Brill often finds herself personifying this fox fur, giving it gendered pronouns as opposed to objective pronouns. This indicates how the fur seems to be the only companion or friend that she has, and that she projects her loneliness onto this fox fur. The style of Mansfield’s writing shows that Miss Brill deeply cares about this fur, showing some of Miss Brill’s internal monologue as she takes the fox fur out of its box that afternoon. In the park, Miss Brill finds herself listening in to people’s conversations, as she feels like she can be a part of their lives this way even if it was just for a moment. The deep isolation and loneliness that Miss Brill experiences causes her to long for human connection -- though she never figures out how to achieve it. Also, it is interesting to see how Miss Brill describes the other elderly people in the park around her. She observes that they looked as though they had “just come out from dark little rooms or even — even cupboards!” This is significant because she compares them to her fox fur, which is something that she keeps in a cupboard until she is ready to leave her house again. She makes this comparison between the other elderly people at the park, however she does not make this connection to herself. This could show how Miss Brill separates herself from the other elderly people, because she longs for

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,

Miss Brill is a single woman, probably in her mid to late fifties. She lives alone in a very small space without even a cat or bird. She has a collection of vintage clothing. Her physical appearance is only alluded to in the 18-paragraph short story by Mansfield, but in reading about a day in her life, one has the impression of an intelligent, sensitive

“The Story of an Hour” describes the journey of Mrs. Mallard against the Cult of True Womanhood as she slowly becomes aware of her own desires and thus of a feminine self that has long been suppressed.  While this journey begins with the news of her husband’s death, Mr. Mallard’s unexpected return at the very end of the tale tragically cuts short the journey towards feminine selfhood.  Yet the tale is tragic from beginning to end, for the very attempt to create an identity against the gender constraints of patriarchal society is riddled with a sense that such an attempt can only end in defeat.  “The Story of an Hour” demonstrates that the patriarchal society that defines gender roles which control and delimit women’s experiences deny them a self founded on true feminine desires.  Ultimately, Mrs. Mallard’s journey towards selfhood only serves to reveal the erasure of identity, indeed of being, that women experienced in the nineteenth century.

Mansfield created the story with the intention of allowing it to be open for various interpretations; though she includes specific detail concerning the characters Mansfield does not elucidate them in a manner that clearly defines their personalities. The story, like the budding rose, is one that never peaks to maturity, but rather remains in the developing stage because of its ambiguities which cause it to be discussed and interpreted in many varying ways.

Katherine Mansfield’s short story, Miss Brill, is a well-written story of an elderly, unmarried woman in Europe. In Miss Brill, Katherine Mansfield uses stream-of-consciousness point of view to show alienation and loneliness, appearances and reality, and Miss Brill’s perceptions as she attempts to make herself fit in with the park goers. Miss Brill is an older lady who makes a living teaching English to school children and reading newspapers to an “old invalid gentleman” (Wilson 2: 139). Her joy in life comes in her visits to the park on Sunday where she is notorious for “sitting in on other people’s lives” (Wilson 2: 140). It is there that her ritualistic, monotonous journey that Miss Brill refers to as a “play” takes place.