Miranda Rubio Rubio 1 Mrs. Lynsey Barry American & British Literature & Composition 11 September 2013 Mistress Hibbins Mistress Hibbins is a symbol of the hypocrisy in the puritan life-style. The Puritans believe in a simple way of life, yet they call Mistress Hibbins a witch for preferring to be in the forest. Though she is merely a “bitter-tempered (Hawthorne 113)” woman the townspeople are afraid of her. “The crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her garment (Hawthorne 236).” Mistress Hibbins should be considered an excellent example of a good puritan woman. She shuns the luxuries of her brother’s mansion, for the quiet comforts of Gods creation.
Miss Brill is a very lonely lady. Her loneliness has led to her being extremely observant of others and to creating a fantasy life to help meet her need for a closer connection with other people. The short story “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield gives great insight into how lonely people can begin to warp their perception of the world around them, causing them to unwittingly deny their loneliness, causing their twisted perception of the world to crumble. The main character, Miss Brill, sits in the park and eavesdrops on other conversations. She wears a fox pelt around her neck and strokes it as she listens in on other people’s conversations.
Mansfield spends a great deal of time discussing how Brill spends Sundays alone in the park. The character of Miss Brill is revealed through Miss Brill’s own point of view, along with the dialogue and actions of other characters. Brill’s loneliness becomes apparent when she starts to discuss her fur coat. The author gives the fur a voice and emotions when Brill “rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes.” This use of personification helps further convey Miss Brill as lonely, especially since she’s resorted to talking to inanimate objects as if they were a human being. Mansfield is essentially saying that Miss Brill has become so isolated from the rest of the world, that she’s resulted creating inanimate objects into companions.
When Lancelot is going to see the Lady of Shallot, she knows she is stepping into dangerous waters, but still goes along with it. Her image of herself turns so bad, that the basically kills herself and unhappy and lonely woman. After she is dead, Lancelot sees her and only says that “She has a lovely face,” demonstrating that he only cared about her looks and not really her inner beauty. The Lady of Shallot is a round character because she changes throughout the short story. At the beginning, she believes in herself and who she is as a person, but she is lonely.
The dark setting and the little contrast of the painting leads me to think that Wyeth thought of Christina as a sad older woman slowly dying from polio. Just from the lack of distinction from the foreground to background, it could be told that the artist was trying to convey a certain mood. It was the lack of color and the subtle transitions in the tone that makes me think he was trying to convey to us that she had a very dull life and not a lot to do in her daily routine. The kitten also leads the viewer to believe that Christina does not have much time, told by the way the kitten is being grasped as if it is the only valuable piece of life left. Looking deeper into the picture the viewer is only able to see one empty clothes line hanging in the background, as it crosses the cracking and peeling walls, making it seem as if nothing could be a bother to the
The author solemnly describes Miss Brill’s worn out fur as a “dear little thing” to display Brill’s loving disposition and isolation by using the fur as a symbol of comfort and companionship. In addition, Mansfield’s third person narrator subtly reveals that Miss Brill views other old people as coming “from dark little rooms or even-even cupboards” to demonstrate that Miss Brill is denying her own insignificance. By portraying Brill’s sad life Mansfield develops her theme that society throws away the old. Throughout the short story the narrator describes Miss Brill’s disillusionment when she sees the band playing loudly and the two soldiers meeting up with the two girls, through third person point of view in order to see the difference between her imagination and actual reality of her situation. The idea of Miss Brill trying to avoid loneliness is created by her vivid illusions and her visiting the park.
Anna Bailey Professor Williams ENC 1102 7 Feb 2012 Character Analysis SA 1,066 words Miss Brill's Fantasy Life is full of lonely people living mundane existences with little or no connection to other human beings. How these people cope is what separates them from tragedy. In Katherine Mansfield's short story "Miss Brill", we have an example of one such person. This is the story of a day in the life of Miss Brill, as she visits a nearby park on a cool Sunday afternoon. Miss Brill is portrayed as an elderly school teacher who lives alone and has no family or apparent friends.
The Imagination in Miss Brill In the short story “Miss Brill,” an old lady spends her Sunday witnessing human beings at the park. Although she is ignored by her surroundings, Miss Brill still seems to persuade herself that she is still important in that even though she is not noticed. She believes that if she was not at the park, the park attendees will still miss her. It’s obvious that she is a lonely person due to her dramatic thoughts and always trying to entertain herself through nonverbal communication between her and her own thoughts. In the beginning of the story, Miss Brill has a conflict between choosing which kind of fur she would like to wear to go to the park on an early Sunday morning.
“People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” is a quote commonly used for a person that will very quickly judge another but once they are being criticized that same person thinks it is unfair. This quote sums up Miss Brills character in her self titled short story by Katherine Mansfield. The setting is placed on a Sunday afternoon, on Miss Brills normal bench she sits on every Sunday. Miss Brill is an extremely lonely and narcissistic woman and the reader can see these traits in her the farther into the story they read. In the first paragraph of the story Miss Brill pulls out her fur.
By this you can already tell that she is someone who has a emptyness in their life. This is unappleaing to the immature reader/escape reader because on page four of Lauernce Perrnine's "Escape and Interpretation" it says "Escape Literature has as its only object pleasure." We can get a sense that Miss Brill does not have any pleasure by relating to the lonliness in her life. Her lonliness goes so deep that she starts to personify the fur. "Dim little eyes" (page 328 on Katherine Mansfield 'Miss Brill').