Katherine Mansfield's Miss Brill

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Katherine Mansfield is known for modernizing short stories in the early 1900's. One of the qualities that Mansfield has is the ability to exploit human's psychological state in her stories. By showing how people are internally coping with society. Miss Brill is a short story about a lonely, elderly woman who goes to her local park every Sunday to try to reconnect with society. The theme in the story is about loneliness and how someone copes with society in their elder years. The theme shows that people need intimate contact with other people in their lives, if not, one will create alternate ways to make up for the lost connection. In the short story Miss Brill the character Miss Brill recreates the lost connection by, personifying her scarf, eavesdropping and living in a self-made illusion. Although, she is confronted with the…show more content…
The author shows how the character, Miss Brill, hides the realization of being alone by having conversations with her fur scarf. The fur scarf is a skinned fox. Miss Brill gets the fox out of the box, and says, "Dear little thing!" She imagined the fox replying, "what has been happening to me?" with his "sad little eyes." She continued the conversation by looking at how the nose was a bit scuffed off. This turned the tone of the passage to a reality instead of an illusion. But Miss Brill went back into her delusional state by continuing to converse with the scarf. By saying that the scarf was her, "Little rogue!" and implying that it was so nice that she could have "taken it off and laid it on her lap and stroked it." Showing how she admired it so much that it could have been her pet. But in reality it is not alive. With her having conversations and admiring her scarf as if it was real, shows how she created an alternate way of coping with being alone. This also shows the reader how isolated Miss Brill is from daily

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