Essay: Miss Brill's Pride

[emmyette]

Written for my English 1302: Composition and Rhetoric II class. The prompt that I chose to write on was simply to find a symbol and explain it citing sources from the text. The actual symbol part is a bit....not obvious, but I'd rather write a good essay that's a bit meandering when it comes to being on topic than a bad one that remains true to prompt. "Miss Brill" is a short story written by Katherine Mansfield and can be found in full text here.

Miss Brill's Pride

The short story “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield is a witty parable on the dangers of having too much pride. It tells the tale of a school teacher known only as Miss Brill who spends her Sundays in a public park, listening to a band perform while she watches the people around her go about their lives. On this particular Sunday, however; Miss Brill chooses to wear her fur, despite the fact that the weather is “so brilliantly fine,” before returning home prematurely and putting up her beloved fur—perhaps forever. Mansfield uses Miss Brill’s fur to correspond with the character’s superior and judgmental attitude towards the people around her throughout the tale. Miss Brill’s donning of her beloved fur in the beginning of the story, and her subsequent casting off of it at the end of the tale, represents her superior attitude and her punishment for possessing such a view of her fellow park-goers.

It has been argued by many psychologists over the years that a person’s attitude is altered according to what costume the person may be wearing at any given time, and this is quite apparent when Miss Brill assumes her fur. She describes it as a “[d]ear little thing,” as well as a “little rogue,” and it obviously means a great deal to her and is huge source of pride on her part. She takes much care in its appearance, storing it with “moth-powder” to keep it safe from mold and household pests. After removing it from its box, she takes the time to polish its eyes and repair its nose before slipping it on and leaving the house. Miss Brill thinks highly of the thing, feeling a great connection with it, and it is clearly counted amongst her highly prized possessions.

After putting on her fur, she proceeds to a park, “the Jardins Publiques,” where a band plays every Sunday, although today the “band sound[s] louder and gayer.” Families and couples mill about enjoying “the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots of light like white wine” and Miss Brill settles down for some much-anticipated people watching. As she sits, she takes notice of the dress of the conductor, dressed in “a new coat,” “a fine old man in a velvet coat,” and “a big old woman” wearing an “embroidered apron.” She reminisces about the previous Sunday, during which she observed a husband and wife—“he wearing a dreadful Panama hat and she button boots.” In fact, Miss Brill seems to be quite concerned in the garb of the people around her and takes special note of “little boys with big white silk bows under their chins,” “little girls…dressed up in velvet,” a pair of “soldiers in blue” who meet a pair of girls in red, “two peasant women with funny straw hats,” and a lady wearing “an ermine toque” upon her head and her “gentleman in grey.” She views each of these people from a distance, paying much attention to their outward appearances and judging them by what little tidbits of their private lives she can peep in on. She sees young children’s mothers as “young hen[s]” and the ermine toque as shabby. Miss Brill feels as if her fellow park-goers look “as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even—even cupboards!” She thinks to admire a woman who tosses away flowers that a young boy returns to her after she drops them. She does not bother to take into account that the people she is watching so intimately have lives outside of the Sunday park excursion and judges them immediately upon casting her eye on them.

She refers to one woman simply as “ermine toque,” because of the sort of hat she is wearing. Her age is judged as past her prime and having quite a washed-out appearance, as “she had bought [her hat] when her hair was yellow” and “her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same color as the shabby ermine.” Miss Brill watches the ermine toque’s interactions with the “tall, stiff, dignified” man she meets, and analyzes them as one would a tawdry romance novel. “Oh, she was so pleased to see him—delighted!” decides Miss Brill, and the ermine toque goes off on some sort of pointless diatribe in Miss Brill’s opinion. The gentleman does not even bother to take notice of the ermine toque’s words, and neither does Miss Brill. She views the ermine toque’s words to the gentleman as tedious—“[s]he described where she’d been—everywhere, here, there, along by the sea,” and shares the gentleman’s view of her as a bore. And after the gentleman blows smoke in the ermine toque’s face and walks off, abandoning her in the cheerful park and effectively breaking her poor heart, it is the band that seems “to know what she [is] feeling,” rather than Miss Brill, who feels no sympathy toward the discarded woman. Instead, Miss Brill wonders what the ermine toque shall do next. Then, as soon as the ermine toque “raise[s] her hand as though she’d seen some one else, much nicer, over there” and walks off, Miss Brill loses interest in a woman that had just moments ago captivated her, showing just how disconnected she is from the people around her.

Miss Brill even goes as far as to separate the entire park from real life by viewing it as “exactly like a play.” Suddenly the lives of everyone around her are dulled to being mere lines and parts being acted through, mere ghosts of what the actual words and actions mean to the people who are experiencing them—and Miss Brill is at the center of it all—“[n]o doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there; she was part of the performance after all.” The thought comes to her so simply, so matter-of-factly, so easily—that there is no doubt it has been there for quite a while. She even remarks that she has “been an actress for a long time” to an invalid to whom she reads the newspaper. In her mind, she plays an important role in the performance, and her fellow actors perform only small roles.

Miss Brill’s glamorous fantasy is interrupted by the entrance of a young couple, who promptly take up a spot on her bench that an elderly couple had previously occupied. She immediately takes notice of them, casting them as the leading man and woman in her little charade, and imagining them a thrilling back-story. However, her daydream is shattered by their remarks of her—they call her a “stupid old thing” who nobody wants, and mock her beloved fur. The girl claims it looks “exactly like a fried whiting” and the boy clearly shares her opinion.

Miss Brill returns home prematurely after hearing this exchange, skipping her usual “Sunday treat” of a “slice of honey-cake at the baker’s.” She sits “for a long time” on her “red eiderdown,” and then “unclasp[s] the necklet quickly; quickly without looking, [and lays] it inside.” She cannot even stand to look at the thing. Suddenly, when faced with the same level of disconnected judgment that she once heaped onto others, she discovers how cruel it is to be on the other side of the playing field. As she places the lid over the fur, putting it away as a form of self-punishment, she thinks “she hear[s] something crying.” Mansfield is deliberately vague here at the end, and it stands as a stark contrast to her overly descriptive writing in the earlier part of the text. Perhaps the fur is crying, mourning the fact that it shall never see the light of day again; perhaps it is Miss Brill, saddened at the loss of her little fantasy and distressed at the realization that she is separated from an outside world that she had once fancied herself at the center of.

Mansfield’s poignant tale of a lonely woman unconnected to her surroundings is a good reminder of the dangers of living inside a self-flattering fantasy. The author uses Miss Brill’s wearing of her beloved fur to represent the character’s wearing of her superior and judgmental fancy. Miss Brill’s casting off of it in the end and her subsequent tears after taking it off, serves as a punishment for her attitude and a reminder to the reader that he or she should form connections with others before judging them.


Sorry about the ending--it is a bit half-assed. I just kind of wanted to get it finished so the girl I'm swapping with will have a chance to "peer review" it.