Commentary on Miss Brill
Miss Brill is a shortstory by Katherine Mansfield seen from a limited omniscient view. The main character and host character for the narrator is Miss Brill, an English teacher who lives in a country with a french speaking population. The observations on which I base these conclutions are the fact that Miss Brill thinks about her english students and visits the Jardins Publicues, french for public park. The first impression I got of miss Brill was that she was a wealty older lady who visit a weekly park concert. She has her own "special" seat, and enjoys to listen to other peoples conversations. She seems to suffer from "the person living in a foreign country, not liking to meet tourists from her home country". She's very dissapointed when an english couple one sunday sits next to her and she has to listen to their conversation. She also thinks that the Englishman wears a "dreadful" Panama hat. The readers picture of Miss Brill however changes during the shortstory. All the time there's small indications that Miss Brill isn't as happy as she's trying to act, and not as wealty as one first thinks. She's trying to conv
The theme of "Miss Brill"; a person wanting to be part of another social class and brutaly beeing trown out, seems to be used quite a lot in literature. This suggests that it's a subject authors find important. I don't know when "Miss Brill" was written, but there is critique against the social class system in the shortstory. This is most likely the motive the author had to write the shortstory. Miss Brill's subconsiousness however adds a twist to the story. It's not only the upper class that hurts Miss Brill, when she wont let out her own feelings she hurts herself. The interesting thing in the shortstory is Miss Brill, and specially her subconsiousness and the way she's trying to prevent it from making her sad by showing the truth about her life. She ignores the indications that something is wrong with her life which leads to the total destruction of her life. ince herself that she doesn't feel sad and that there's something odd about everyone else at the concert; "And when she breathed, something light and sad - no not sad..." (p. 340), "They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared th
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 757
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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