"Miss Brill" conveys several themes, but the most important one is that human beings feel a deep-seated need to belong, and this need is so powerful that it can prompt us to create elaborate fictions in order to keep ourselves from feeling isolated.
The mood of this story is established early on, and we should feel somewhat uneasy by the details that we learn. First, though the air is still, "when you opened your mouth there was just a faint chill, like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip." A chill is almost never a good thing: we often feel chilled when we are scared, we keep our homes warm to drive away the chill, someone who is described as "chilly" seems insensitive or emotionless. But Miss Brill (whose first name we never get, as her behavior seems to invite only chilly formality) is happy for the chance to wear her fox fur. Although she seems to believe that it is somewhat fancy and quite fetching -- she refers to it as a "little rogue" -- we get a number of clues that the reality doesn't match her perception of it. It just came out of moth-powder, with dim eyes, and has a nose that has almost become detached. It sounds as though it has clearly seen better days. Though Miss Brill seems somewhat playful as she considers her fur, as "she breathed, something light and sad - no, not sad, exactly - something gentle seemed to move in her bosom." By now, we can tell that all is not as it seems to Miss Brill. She is excited to leave her home, but there is an uncomfortable chill in the air; she feels fetching in her fur, but it is clear that it is quite old and decrepit; and she feels some kind of discontent within herself despite all of her attempts to keep it at bay.
When she arrives at the park, an older couple sits next to her, but
They did not speak. This was disappointing, for Miss Brill always looked forward to the conversation. She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her.
Miss Brill has no one to talk to. Apparently this has been the case for so long that she has had to become "expert" at eavesdropping on others in order to be a part, so to speak, of any conversation. But rather than recognize her loneliness for what it is, she instead turns it into a compliment to herself, that she has become adept at something most other people can't do.
She watches everything going on around her, noting the people, the colors, the music, the animals, everything as though it were happening just for her.
How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play [....]. But it wasn't till a little brown dog trotted on solemn and then slowly trotted off, like a little "theatre" dog, a little dog that had been drugged, that Miss Brill discovered what it was that made it so exciting. They were all on the stage. They weren't only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting. Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn't been there; she was part of the performance after all.
In order to avoid the recognition that she is utterly isolated and alone, Miss Brill invents a fantasy in which she has become an actress; of course this means that she plays an integral role in the "production." For that reason, she convinces herself that she would be missed if she didn't come, and this allows her to feel a sense of belonging.
She maintains this fantasy until the young lovers come to sit by her. She imagines them to be the hero and heroine of this play, but as she eavesdrops, she hears them refer to her as "that stupid old thing at the end there," and the girl says that her fur looks like "a fried whiting." Although Mansfield doesn't show us Miss Brill's immediate reaction to this conversation, we do find that Miss Brill breaks with her tradition today. Typically she stops on the way home for a slice of cake, but today she does not. Instead, she hurries home, and when she gets there,
The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.
It is, of course, Miss Brill who is crying, but something seems to prevent her from realizing it. She was so anxious to think of herself as a person who was noticed and wanted that she actually convinced herself that she was a vital, interesting, vivid part of the world. In the end, she is like her fox, which we can now read as a symbol of her and her illusions. Just as she thought of her fox as fetching, she thought of herself as "dashing." She couldn't see that it was musty and old and sort of repugnant, and she couldn't see that she belonged to that colorful and interesting world no more than her fox did.
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