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Miss Brill

On a Sunday Afternoon

Katherine Mansfield's Miss Brill is a story about an old English woman that lacks companionship and self-awareness. Miss Brill lives by herself and goes through life in a repetitive manner. Each Sunday, Miss Brill ventures down to the park to watch and listen to the band play. She finds herself listening not only to the band, but also to strangers who walk together and converse before her. Her interest in the lives of those around her shows the reader that Miss Brill lacks companionship. In addition, the story uses indirect presentation to allow the reader to create his or her own opinion of Miss Brill. Mansfield describes her as a woman who lives in a small house, somewhat the size of a cupboard and that she is living in a state of false consciousness. Miss Brill struggles with her loneliness and lack of reality while living vicariously through others.
Loneliness plays an extremely large part of Miss Brill's life and can be proven by things in the story. For instance, " Miss Brill was glad she had decided on her fur…Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken out the moth powder, given it a good brush, and rubbed life back into the dim little eyes." This shows that Miss Brill had developed a friendship with the fur and after it had been put up for a while she is concerned on how it is. She referred to it as "dear" and in her perspective the fur has "sad little eyes" instead of glass ones. In addition, in Miss Brill's imagination the fur asks her " What has been happening to me?" In a sense Miss Brill feels guilty because she has kept the fur in storage for so long and has been slightly damaged. Another example of Miss Brill's lack of companionship is when she visits the park on Sunday's. Not only did she look forward to listening to the band but she also looks forward to seeing what is going on with the lives of the others....