Essay 1

COMMENT:
This piece is my best work because I think I had a good understanding of Miss Brill. Perhaps I shouldn't admit to this but I can identify with a lot her feelings of being a spector in the play of life. Since this piece was written at the beginning of the semester, before the other classes became overwhelming and my mother got sick, I feel as if I was able to submit a good piece.




Sunday Afternoon in the Park
Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” is a story of a middle-aged English teacher, living in France, who visits the Jardins Publiques to listen to the band play and watch the people every Sunday. She sits, hopefully, on a bench watching and listening to the people around her but never becomes a part of any of it. Miss Brill lives a life of loneliness and as a result she creates a fantasy world in which life “was like a play” (Mansfield 136) and “even she had a part and came every Sunday” (Mansfield 136).
The theme is Miss Brill’s alienation from the world. She is not a part of anything going on around her. She only listens “as though she didn’t listen” (Mansfield 135) as everyone else carries on with their lives. Miss Brill doesn’t actually interact with anyone although “there were a number of people about” (Mansfield 135). She is more interested in observing the interesting people around her and living vicariously through them. The very people she seems to have pity for; the people she thought “there was something funny about” (Mansfield 136) because “they were odd, silent, 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” (Mansfield 136), are the ones most like her. She doesn’t see herself in this way until the end of the story when she returns to her “little dark room –her room like a cupboard” (Mansfield 137).
She sees herself as being a part of the play going on around her where “no doubt somebody would have noticed if hadn’t been there; she was a part of the performance after all” (Mansfield 136). In fact, she isn’t even taking a part in the play going on in her imagination. She is simply a part of the audience. Those around her, who are, in fact, going on with their normal lives, are the only actors.
She becomes overly involved in the people she observes such as when she observes the couple discussing the woman’s need for spectacles. She becomes so focused on someone else’s conversation she “had wanted to shake her” (Mansfield 135). When the lady in the ermine toque stops the finely dressed gentleman, Miss Brill makes up an entire story about the fur hat as far as when the hat was purchased, stating “she’d bought (the hat) when her hair was yellow. Now everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same colour as the shabby ermine” (Mansfield 136). Ironically, she is mocking the woman for dressing in the same way she was dressed.
When she takes it from the box and readies her fox fur for wearing, she seems to humanize the dead animal. She refers to it as a “dear little thing” (Mansfield 135) and a “little rogue” (Mansfield 135) as if this was a naughty child who had been put into a time-out and was finally being allowed freedom to go out into the world again. She even goes as far as to refer to its cold glass eyes as “dim little eyes” (Mansfield 135) as if it had just waked from a nap. The fur is a connection to her youth and to years gone by.
On some level Miss Brill realizes she is living in a fantasy world and has lost her youth and any chance she has for love, so she uses her visits to the park to fulfill her curiosity. By dressing herself in the fox fur from her past, she tries to recapture the lost youth. She also needs to be an important part of the socializing on Sundays in the park, so when she reads to “the old invalid gentleman” (Mansfield 136), she tells him with joy that she “(has) been an actress for a long time” (Mansfield 136) and “two points of light quivered in the old eyes” (Mansfield 136) in happiness for her.
Just as Miss Brill begins to feel like she has found her place in the world around her and an explanation as to “why she made such a point to starting from home at just the same time each week” (Mansfield 136), the two young lovers occupy the spot at the end of the bench where the old couple had sat. The man’s brutal words toward her shatter the fantasy world she had created, making her feel as if she was a “stupid old thing” (Mansfield 137) who should “keep her silly old mug at home” (Mansfield 137). Miss Brill leaves the park, bypassing the baker’s which was her Sunday treat, and retreats to her lonely, sad existence, once again alienated from the world around her.

Work Cited

Mansfield, Katherine. “Miss Brill”. Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2007. 134-37.