Essay On Catherine MansfieldÒ'S "Miss Brill"

Essay on the main techniques of characterization in the short story: „Miss Brill" by Katherine Mansfield

The main character in the short story of Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill, is a person, who lives in a kind of „dream world". She has another impression of herself than other people have of her. Moreover, she is a lonely character, but does not realize that. She even judges other people for being funny, old or weird, but in fact it is she herself who has got a strange personality with funny and sometimes awkward habits. In the end she is torn out of her dream world and has to face reality. The techniques the author employs to characterize her main character are mostly implicit techniques. They do not rely on direct statements of character by either the narrator or by other characters. Instead Miss Brill is characterized through her own actions, thoughts and symbols. These techniques we will be discussing in the following work:

One technique of characterizing Miss Brill in the story is through her actions. Everything Miss Brill does, she keeps repeating it. Every Sunday she puts on her fur, goes to the park, listens to the band, watches the people, goes to the bakery and buys a piece of honey- cake. This habitual behavior already tells us a lot about the character of Miss Brill. The reason why she clings to these fixed structures might lie in the fact that these habits give her security and meaning for her life. She knows exactly what she is going to do and also what is going to happen in most cases when she is going to the park. Through these activities she can be confident in her actions and furthermore most of the things that happen around her are predictable on each Sunday. One significant moment in the story which can describe this situation is when Miss Brill arrives at the park and the band plays how she expects it to play:

" She was sure it would be repeated. It was; she lifted her head and smiled." (Page 1)

Another thing we learn about Miss Brill through her actions, besides the security, is that they give her meaning for her life. What would she do if she would not go to the park? Would she go out at all? This habit fills the whole Sunday and the act of going to the park, where she is amoung other people, makes her feel that she is not alone maybe that she is even part of their lives. "She had become quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didnÒ't listen, at sitting in other peopleÒ's lives just for a minute while they talked around her." (Page 2)

At the moment she breaks with the habit in the end, the reader knows that a radical change in her life took place and that nothing will be the same for her as it used to be. The technique of characterizing Miss Brill through her actions is done implictly.

Another implicit characterization technique is what Miss Brill thinks. Because of the fact that Miss Brill does not speak a lot in the story the focus lies more on her thoughts. These reveal Miss Brills attitude towards herself and others. One important aspect to mention here is that she seems to be totally unaware of her situation and herself. She thinks of others as funny, weird and old ( "there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old"(page 2) but does not realize that it is actually her life which is odd and that she is silent most of the time. This changes however when Miss Brill overhears what the young couple says about her. From one second to the other her constructed "dreamworld" bursts into pieces, she realizes that she is not at all suprior to the other people, what she thought she was and her final thoughts end with the words: "She thought she heard something crying." It is very obvious that it is not the fur she is talking about in this case but she is thinking about herself, crying, when she realizes what the reality of her life actually looks like.

Using symbols as a means of