Literary Criticism of Miss Brill

Miss Brill is another full portrait of a “marginal woman”, told from a subjective point of view of an aging insignificant character. However, whereas Miss Ida Moss (from the story Pictures) is an embattled survivor, the genteel Miss Brill is an observer of life, one who sits on the sidelines and watches the game in all its striving, contending, cruelty, and passion. She is as frozen in time as in a sepia photograph, wearing a ratty fox fur as if she were in the theater instead of seated on her usual park bench, observing the scenes played out by one after another. She even fancies that she, the receptive audience, might be missed by the players if she were to fail to show up for one of the performances. Her illusion is cruelly shattered when she accidentally overhears two young lovers making fun of her as she avidly eavesdrops on their love making.

In the unconscious irony of Miss Brill’s final behavior, the onlooker aspect of her life is reinforced. As she puts away her Sunday fur, she imagines she hears something crying in the box. So inauthentic is her life, made up of second hand experience as well as second hand furs, that she is incapable of recognizing the origin of her tears, which of course, is her grief and humiliation. It is more natural for her to imagine that her weeping comes from the glass eyes of the fox’s head on the boa.(Page 91)

Katherine Mansfield

by Rhoda Nathan

The Continum Publishing Company

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