Plot or Character Analysis Assignment: Miss Brill

Name Abdulhaq Alariki
Professor Howe
Class ENGWR 301
Date 3 February 2017
Miss. Brill
Miss Brill is a story about a woman who lives a superficially bi-faceted life. The author, Katherine Mansfield walks us through the life of the main character; Miss Brill, which is in the essence a window through which we are exposed to her behavioral traits. Through a second person perspective, we see the reality of Miss Brill’s existence as portrayed through the series of her thoughts. Mansfield has develops and shapes Miss Brill, her main character in a way that portrays her nature as a lonely, proud, delusional and emotional character. She goes ahead to empower her character through idealism and fantasy.
Miss Brill is revealed as a lonely woman as the story begins with her sitting in a French Public garden ‘Jardins Publiques’ alone. She holds a furry coat so dear to her, engaging it in a conversation. Initially, the reader is made to think that Miss Brill is crazy as she is directly addressing a fur coat: an inanimate object. She personifies it for the coat looks like a fox, with a tail and tiny eyes. As the story unfolds we discover that she is a bored and lonely figure. This is portrayed through the thoughts she shares over her fur coat. She had taken it from its box where she had kept it for years and shook out the moth-powder, brushed it then rubbed life into its little dim eyes. She only wore the coat during the cold but she had decided on it anyway, even though the sky was fine (pg1). The author describes the spectacle whereby the fur’s sad little eyes spoke back to Miss Brill asking what had been happening to it. This statement portends the loneliness that is going to be unraveled towards the end of the story. It conjectures the reality Brill lives in over the life from her imagination. Brill lives alone, in a tiny house and as an English woman working in a French environment, she finds it challenging to make new friends. From this fur coat, we discover Brill’s life exposed as somewhat lonely and boring. The box she takes her fur coat from is the projection of her lonely room, where she leaves to search for life by making ritualistic trips to the public garden during Sunday afternoons. The public garden rubs life into her, same way as getting the fur coat out of its box.
To add on her loneliness, Miss Brill is full of prejudice and self-endowment. This is because of the kind of power she thinks she harbors by the feeling of her ability to connect into everyone’s thoughts. She has even allocated herself a special seat in the park where she thinks she can monitor closely all the events that are going on in the park (pg1). As the feeling of her ‘specialness’ encapsulates her egocentric fantasy, Miss Brill imagines herself playing a key role in her imagined band in the park. Miss Brill mentions that she is in the primary group while the ‘other’ people in the stands are her accompaniment. Miss Brill actually has the feeling th...