Kevin Zhang

English 12

Miss Brill
Katherine Mansfields short story Miss Brill plays with the gradual exposure of a characters
personality as the reader watches her through a few hours in one day of her life. Miss Brill is
shown to be enthusiastic and generally likable in the first section of the story, but as her attitude
and impressions of the strangers surrounding her is unveiled, her true nature is revealed as that
of a pitiful, pretentious and lonely person.
Through Miss Brills habits of eavesdropping on strangers, it can be seen that she is usually
secluded from the outer world and desperately seeks some form of human interaction. She takes
pleasure in judging people by their outward appearances and conversations while pretending to
be close acquaintances with them. Tragically, her self-esteem comes only from her
objectification of others: she regards others only as actors in a play, following a predicated script
and role. However, she even sees herself as a valued and intrinsic part of the park scene, and
when a boy exclaims Why does she come here at all who wants her? she is devastated by her
sudden severance from the society that she tries so hard to be a part of.
The fantastic world that Miss Brill lives in emerges as a result of her stubbornness in
acknowledging the reality of the world that she resides in. She superimposes layer upon layer of
fabrications to disguise the harsh truths regarding her own character. Her fur, for one, is an
object that has lost its glamour over time, which Miss Brill only subconsciously admits by
identifying herself in the other other people that sat on the benches. From the readers
perspective, odd, silent, and nearly all old is a perfect description of Miss Brills disposition,
yet she herself is too lost in her fantasy to actively realize this. The power that this illusion has on
her is shown when Miss Brill admits to not even caring if the old invalid gentleman had passed
away; her belief that she was cared for and noticed even extended to the unresponsive dead.
Although this shallow fantasy had a great effect on her, it was just as fragile as influential, and
was instantly destroyed by the shattering who wants her?
Miss Brill is an exceptionally strange character, yet she represents, in a way, a fundamental
sympathetic person who lacks a person close to them her fur, an inanimate object, seems to
be her closest friend. Her pretense of an idealistic world puts herself at the center of the world
when she subconsciously accepts that she is an insignificant speck. Throughout the story, her
waking consciousness is in conflict with her wiser subconscious, and gives the story its
uniqueness and absurdity.