Death of an Illusion
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Death of An Illusion
“Miss Brill”, written in 1921 by Katherine Mansfield (rpt. in Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson, Perrines Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense, 9th ed. [Boston: Wadsworth, 2006] 175) is a story about a Sunday afternoon in the eyes of an old spinster called Miss Brill. Miss Brill has built a fantasy world to protect herself from her lonely life. She enjoys listening in on others conversations and imagining herself an “actress” in one big play. However, on this fateful Sunday, Miss Brills world comes crashing down around her, and she is forced to realize her self deception.
Miss Brill visits the “Jardins Publiques” (175) every Sunday as a special ritual to help ease her loneliness. She goes to enjoy the music, the weather and especially, the people. Miss Brill considers herself an expert at “listening as though she isnt listening” (176). She does this to feel as if she is included, and even refers to herself as part of a “family” that the band plays to during the off-season.
Miss Brill suppresses the truth of her lonely existence in many ways. The first example is her fur. She affectionately refers to the dead animal as a “little rogue” (175), and says that she could have “laid it in her lap and stroked it” (175). It is obvious that she sees this accessory as a companion. Another example of her altered reality in the fact that she watches the other old people
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who were “odd, silent, nearly all old, looked like they had come from dark little rooms like cupboards” (176), and does not see herself in them. The most important example of Miss Brills skewed reality is when she starts thinking of the park as a stage and herself an actress. She imagines telling the invalid man to whom she reads the paper to four times a week that she has “been an actress for a long time” (178). All of this fantasizing ends in a devastating crash back to reality.
As Miss Brill is sitting on her “special” seat on this eventful Sunday, a number of happenings occur to make her realize she is living in a fantasy. While she is people watching, she notices a lady in an “ermine toque” (177) and a “gentleman in gray” (177). The ladys ermine toque is very similar to Miss Brills shabby fur. The couple meets in front of her. The lady is “pleased to see him” (177) and starts chattering away about where she has been. The gentleman ignores her chattering and is even rude to her by “slowly breathing a great deep puff of cigarette smoke into