She had taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken out the moth-powder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again. Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. ![]() This means that we are drawn into Miss Brill’s thoughts (and what we might call her stream of consciousness) even though she is never speaking directly to us: Writing the story from the third-person narrative viewpoint also allows Mansfield to make the most of a common modernist technique: free indirect speech, whereby a third-person narrator adopts the ‘voice’ (including the voice of their thoughts) of one of the story’s characters. The fact that there is a generosity about her perception of others – that she is not some solipsistic attention-grabber who believes she, and only she is on the stage, but that everyone is performing, just as she is – only makes the crumbling of her weekly Sunday afternoon ritual, and the meaning she has invested in it, all the more piquant. Part of the quiet tragedy of the story is that Miss Brill doesn’t fully realise, or confront, her own loneliness, the extent to which she was wounded by the young couple’s remarks not just because she is no longer young (as they are) or because she is not in love (as they are), but because her ideas about how she is perceived by others have just been exposed as false. This is another key part of the story’s effects: if Miss Brill had been narrating her own experiences, it would have been more difficult for Mansfield to reveal to us the gulf between Miss Brill’s understanding of the people around her and the reality. ‘Miss Brill’ is told in the third-person narrative mode, rather than the first-person. After all, what does it mean to say ‘they understand what I mean’ if you then acknowledge that you don’t know what it is they understand? How can this be ‘understanding’ in the usual sense of the word? ![]() In other words, the words are subtly ironic in that they show that Miss Brill does realise the truth of the matter, but doesn’t realise that she realises it: that is to say, she inadvertently acknowledges that she doesn’t understand the people around her (as the exchange between the young couple demonstrates), while deluding herself that she does. This last sentence is revealing because it hints at something which we, as readers, may pick up on but which the story’s protagonist appears to be oblivious to: namely that if the other people in the gardens ‘understand’, but what they understand Miss Brill doesn’t know, then she clearly doesn’t understand them, nor they her. Yes, we understand, we understand, she thought though what they understood she didn’t know. And another moment, related to Miss Brill’s realisation that everyone is playing a part, comes shortly after this when she imagines everyone in the garden singing along as the band play:Īnd Miss Brill’s eyes filled with tears and she looked smiling at all the other members of the company. In Mansfield’s stories there actually tend to be several epiphanies, or miniature moments which suggest some kind of new awareness in the mind of the story’s protagonist. ![]() ![]() How strange she’d never thought of it like that before!’ But the dismissive exchange between the two young lovers on the bench suggests that, if anyone did notice she wasn’t there, they wouldn’t be bothered: indeed, they’d be relieved she wasn’t there. And there are several hints that Miss Brill’s epiphany is flawed or even misguided.įor instance, we are told, ‘No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there she was part of the performance after all. She has realised something about the way this public space functions and that everyone is putting on an act: everyone is both part of the audience (watching everyone else) and performer (aware that everyone else is watching them).īut epiphanies in modernist fiction are often ambiguously poised between capturing genuine enlightenment (the protagonist has a life-changing realisation) and temporary change of mood (the protagonist thinks they have undergone a life-changing experience, but they are deluded about this). So in ‘Miss Brill’, we might say that the title character’s realisation that everyone seems to be in a play, and that the weekly ritual of walking and sitting in the public gardens is like a performance in which everyone plays their part, is an epiphany.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |