Angie C. Litchfield, Prose

Poetry Critique Miss Brill

11/23/1998

A Grand Struggle

" Miss Brill" by Katherine Mansfield is a short story featuring an elderly woman, Miss Brill, who portrays the struggle of the elderly to find meaning in their lives without a close family or friends. Miss Brill looks forward to her Sunday afternoons spent at the park, but this Sunday she realizes that her life really isn’t important. The process of development begins with a somewhat happy woman, and takes her through a realization that she really isn’t important, which in the end leaves her lonely and depressed.

Using Reader-Response to interpret this story, I find many parallels between my repertoire and the text’s repertoire. I have three widowed grandmothers who struggle to find meaning in their lives when they spend their days in simple tasks and household chores. Like Miss Brill, my grandmothers think the tasks they do are incredibly important, but to many in the outside world, their tasks are meaningless. However, unlike Miss Brill, my grandmothers each have an entire family whom they can share their lives with. Their families are where they find meaning in life.

Using Freud’s psychoanalytic method of interpretation, I find that Miss Brill represents the current state of an elderly person and how her life is. This current state, or ego, is filled with Sundays in the park and the company of her fur. "She was glad that she had decided on her fur." (p. 219) Though Miss Brill is surrounded with passersby, she still focuses her love and friendship on the fur. She is happy to be out of the house, but is still somewhat lonely and desperate for companionship.

The Park and the people represent society, or the superego. Society wants to ignore the elderly and lock them away in their "closets". Society says that Miss Brill and her other elderly counterparts are insignificant and unnecessary in other people’s lives. A young person in the park even states of Miss Brill, "Why does she even come here at all–who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?" (p.221) Society sees Miss Brill as unimportant, and she should just stay at home, locked away, so the rest of the world won’t have to bother with her.

The point in the story when Miss Brill imagines herself as if she is the lead in a play represents the id. Miss Brill sees herself as playing an important role and that "No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there." (p.220) Miss Brill uses this to feel important. She is playing a necessary role, and she must be there in the park every Sunday, or else the play would not be able to go on. This part of her, her id, allows her to feel some sense of importance in an otherwise meaningless life.

Miss Brill continues through a process of development in this story. She begins being happy about her trip to the park, realizes that she isn’t really that important, and it is not as necessary as she would have hoped for her to be at the park. She then ends the story realizing that she is alone, locked in her cupboard, and she doesn’t have meaning in her life at all.