Miss Brill - An image of today's society?

Miss Brill – An image of today’s society?

The world moves up and people get connected with each other more and more via internet and television. Nevertheless, within this closer-getting world everybody knows the feeling of being lonely and deserted among the crowd. In her short story “Miss Brill” Katherine Mansfield depicts a lonely woman’s way of ignoring her status of solitude and at last her failure in it.

Every Sunday Miss Brill breaks her solitude by going out into the park, not only for observing but also eavesdropping other people there, slipping into their lives for a moment. As a result she thinks to escape isolation – an idea which is destroyed very brutally in the end.

For Miss Brill runs through absolutely contrary emotions during the story, Katherine Mansfield uses a third-person singular perspective with limited omniscience to give the reader a deep insight into the lady’s thoughts and feelings. Her choice of perspective makes the story gripping in a very special way. On the one hand, by concentrating only on Miss Brill’s point of view, we can feel her pleasure, her pain and despair as well as she does. On the other hand, the use of a third-person narrator perspective preserves the possibility to describe the lady’s emotional status in words sounding more objective than it would have been with an I-narrator.

Nonetheless, the author uses a very interesting possibility of reporting the conversations Miss Brill is listening to, Mrs Mansfield jumps between direct speech, as when the wife of the Englishman bothers “They’ll always be sliding down my nose! [spectacles]” (310), and indirect speech, for example when it is said about the same woman that “she knew she needed them; but that it was no good getting any” (310). This change of direct and indirect speech is often used in private conversations, and therefore Katherine Mansfield creates a personal atmosphere between Miss Brill and the reader.