"Miss Brill"

Critical & Opinion of the "Miss Brill,"  Story

In "Miss Brill," Katherine Mansfield introduces readers to an uncommunicative and apparently simple-minded woman who eavesdrops on strangers, who imagines herself to be an actress in an absurd musical, and whose dearest friend in life appears to be a shabby fur stole.

And yet we are encouraged neither to laugh at Miss Brill nor to dismiss her as a grotesque madwoman. Through Mansfield's skillful handling of point of view, characterization, and plot development, Miss Brill comes across as a convincing character who evokes our sympathy.

By telling the story from the third-person limited omniscient point of view, Mansfield allows us both to share Miss Brill's perceptions and to recognize that those perceptions are highly romanticized.

This dramatic irony is essential to our understanding of her character. Miss Brill's view of the world on this Sunday afternoon in early autumn is a delightful one, and we are invited to share in her pleasure: the day "so brilliantly fine," the children "swooping and laughing," the band sounding "louder and gayer" than on previous Sundays.

Miss Brill reveals herself to us through her perceptions of the other people in the park--the other players in the "company." Since she doesn't really know anyone, she characterizes these people by the clothes they wear (for example, "a fine old man in a velvet coat," an Englishman "wearing a dreadful Panama hat," "little boys with big white silk bows under their chins"), observing these costumes with the careful eye of a wardrobe mistress.

They are performing for her benefit, she thinks, even though to us it appears that they (like the band which "didn't care how it played if there weren't any strangers present")are oblivious to her existence

There is one character whom Miss Brill appears to identify with--the woman wearing "the ermine toque she'd bought when her hair was yellow." Ironically, it is with her own kind, the old people on the benches, that Miss Brill refuses to identify: 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!

But later in the story, as Miss Brill's enthusiasm builds, we're offered an important insight into her character:

And then she too, she too, and the others on the benches--they would come in with a kind of accompaniment something low, that scarcely rose or fell, something so beautiful--moving.

Almost despite herself, it seems, she does identify with these marginal figures these minor characters.