UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO

FACULDADE DE FILOSOFIA, LETRAS E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS

PEDRO HENRIQUE DE DEUS

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE “STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS”

TECHNIQUE IN KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S “MISS BRILL”

São Paulo

2018
 PEDRO HENRIQUE DE DEUS

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE “STREAM OF

CONSCIOUSNESS” TECHNIQUE IN KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S
“MISS BRILL”

Dissertação apresentada à Faculdade de Filosofia,

Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São
Paulo, com o objetivo de aprovação na disciplina
Introdução ao Conto.

Prof: Dr. Daniel Puglia

São Paulo

2018
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“​Miss Brill” is a short story written by the New Zealand author Katherine
Mansfield. In short, it’s a story about a old woman enjoying her Sunday outing to a
park in her own way and having her day (and maybe her life) ruined by a thoughtless
young couple. It’s one of the most recognized Katherine Mansfield’s short stories,
most because of the technique used in the writing, the stream-of-consciousness,
popularized by authors like James Joyce, and a technique that Mansfield uses to
show the psychological complexity of her characters.

This short story can be analyzed through many aspects. Although “Miss Brill”
may seem to be simple, it’s loaded with themes and symbolism from the beginning
(we can say that that’s a characteristic of the genre). In this paper, we will approach
things like loneliness, alienation, the confusion between the real world and the
imagination, the difficulties of being a woman in that society, how Kate Mansfield’s
personal life may be reflected in the short story, among other things. We’ll also talk
about the technique of Kate Mansfield, how she uses her technique of
stream-of-consciousness in order to built the character of the protagonist in a very
particular way. Things like the language used by Miss Brill, and even the name Miss
Brill himself are essential to understand the short story in a more profound way.

In a very interesting paper about “Miss Brill”, Miriam B. Mandel, lecturer and
specialist in English and American studies of the University of Tel Aviv, talks about
the language used by Miss Brill. If we pay attention, it’s a very reductive language:
the word “little” is used a lot, the people are reduced to pieces of clothing, the several
sounds and the complexity of the band are reduced to little sounds, everything is too
small, to simple. In other words, Miss Brill’s vision of life is, in fact, very reduced. Like
Mandel says: “she reduces the real world to fit her own limited perspectives” (1989).

Kate Mansfield’s protagonist reduces all kinds of things around her in order
to create a safer environment for her. She dehumanizes the things around her,
creating a world where she can, at least for a moment, control things that she can’t,
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in fact, control. We won’t be fair with Miss Brill if we just think that she’s a superficial
person, a materialistic person, that’s not the case. We can’t deny that she see things
in a superficial way, but that doesn’t define her character. Seeing from this point of
view, it seems more like a self-protection device that she developed with the
intention of escaping from a harsh reality.

We don’t know why she lives in that state of isolation. She doesn’t seem to
have problems with money, health, marriage, the problems that usually affect
Mansfield’s characters have no place in “Miss Brill”. We don’t have any kind of
information regarding her life in the text, just her thoughts. We can recognize that
she is a lonely person, but we don’t know why. The fact is that she lives in a
imaginary world that has a very fragile structure, and if one single thing goes wrong,
the whole structure can fall apart.

She’s brought back to reality when a young couple shows that their reality
isn’t influenced by Miss Brill. Yes, they were insensible in what they said, but they’re
not the villains of the short story. They just brought up to Miss Brill that she was
incarcerated in a lie. It just happened to be the young couple, but it could be any
other thing showing remote signs of independent life and her reaction would be the
same. The villain here is the manipulative, restrictive and destructive personality of
Miss Brill.

Besides that, Miriam B. Mandel also points out the fact that Katherine
Mansfield probably don’t want the reader to like Miss Brill. Mansfield wants us to
judge Miss Brill. Even though the protagonist is a teacher and she reads for a old
man, Kate chooses to present Miss Brill hearing the conversation of other people,
emphasizing a negative aspect of her character. Kate also chooses to distance the
protagonist of the reader giving the first the name of a fish. The fox fur, the piece of
clothing that defines Miss Brill, is a dead animal who continues to decay even after
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death. In the context of the short story, that’s a strong statement about the
protagonist.

The imagery of the short story shows that the story goes way beyond a old,
superficial woman in a park listening to people around her, and listening to
something that she didn’t wanted to hear. This short story is about a person who
created the smallness on herself, and isolated herself from the real world, living in a
imaginary world manipulated by her that was destroyed. It’s not like she judges
people and lives moved by appearances, in fact, she doesn’t recognize people as
people, she sees people like things that she can control inside her world, which is
the only world possible - until the couple’s appearance.

Even Miss Brill’s name says something about her personality. A brill is a kind
of flatfish who lives in Europe. The flatfish development is very odd: they’re born with
two normal eyes, but with the passage of time, one eye moves closer to the other
until one eye becomes sightless. After this change, the fish goes to the bottom of the
sea, and assume a new position: the eyeless side becomes the underside and both
eyes appear close together on the top side. In addition to giving the flatfish a strange
appearance, this change results in peculiarities of vision. We don’t know exactly
how’s the vision of the flatfish, but they are commonly thought like fish who have an
extremely limited vision. So they’re much like Miss Brill.

Like a flatfish, she also has an extremely limited vision, as we saw earlier on
this paper. And that particular detail (to know, the name) shows how Katherine
Mansfield really thought of everything when she wrote the history. And that
information about the brill supports the thesis that Miss Brill’s not a superficial
woman who judges how people dress, she is, in fact, a person who has a extremely
limited and distorted point of view.
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There’s another thing that is very interesting in Miss Brill. Although we don’t
know anything about her life, it’s possible to find moments where we have some
evidence of previous trauma. In two passages of the short story, she seems
incapable of recognizing happiness as an sentiment: “She felt a tingling in her hands
and arms, but that came from walking, she supposed. And when she breathed,
something light and sad - ​no, not sad, exactly - something gentle seemed to
move in her bosom​” and “yet there was just a faint chill - a something, what was
it? - ​not sadness - no, not sadness - a something that made you want to sing​”.
These are signs of alienation, it’s almost like she sees love or happiness like things
that she can’t get, things that are inaccessible to her. It’s also curious that she can
tell us exactly what sadness is (or better, what sadness isn’t), why that’s the only
feeling that she can recognize? She recognizes sadness another time in the short
story: “”The ermine toque was alone; she smiled more brightly than ever. But even
the band seemed to know what she was feeling and played more softly, played
tenderly”. She knows what sadness is because she went through it, or she’s in the
middle of it, that’s the only explanation. Her vision of the world can be a result of her
sadness.

But why Miss Brill’s sad? We insist on that question. The things that we
know about her are: she’s a old woman living in a foreign country, she’s single, she
teaches English to a few students, she likes to go to the park, sit there and hear
other people’s conversations and she reads stories for an old man. In other words,
she’s a lonely (for lonely you can read “single”) woman in a big city, and for some
reason that can be a problem in the vision of the society. And that was way worse at
the time when the short story was written. The sexist and misogynist society (which
is still practically the same) sees old single women like women who failed in life.
They’re set aside, they’re isolated from the society (just for the fact that they “can’t
find” a husband, just for that). So maybe that’s the reason of all that alienation and
sadness. Given Katherine Mansfield’s short stories character, Miss Brill is not sad
because she didn’t found “true love”, she’s sad because she is a victim of an unfair
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situation. We should remember that at the time that Miss Brill was written, Kate was
in France, “alone”, and she could be facing the same kinds of difficulties.

This short story has some of Kate Mansfield’s personal life. As it’s known,
Katherine suffered from tuberculosis, and as a form of treatment was normal to
isolate people in that condition, and because of that isolation, they could manage to
amplify the auditory sensitivity. In the short story, that appears as “she had become
(that is, she developed a skill) really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though
she didn’t listen”. Besides that, people who suffered from some kind of disease
(Mansfield suffered from a lot of diseases) were victims of prejudice, so they could
be concerned about what people could say about them, and so they got into the
habit of listening other people’s conversations. And of course, the fact that she was
living in France when she wrote Miss Brill, so it’s all in there.

We are talking about a very interesting and deep short story. With that
analysis, if we can’t see everything behind the intentions of the author, we managed
to notice some important aspects: the reductive imagery, the situation of women in
that society, the deepness of the alienation of “Miss Brill”, the relation between the
name of the protagonist of the short story and a species of fish (and it was showed
that “Brill” isn’t a random name that Kate picked for no reason), the ability that Miss
Brill has to recognize sadness, the disability of the same to recognize positive
feelings and the trace elements of Mansfield’s personal life reflected on the short
story.

When an author of a short story gives you so few details, is your mission to
see what he’s hiding under your nose. Since Kate uses the “stream of
consciousness” technique in the entire story, we just know what is inside of Miss
Brill’s mind, and few marks of a third-person narrator describing the scenario. The
story is given by an inside-outside structure. But at this point of the paper, I think it’s
fair to say that the stream of consciousness gives us everything that we need to
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understand what Kate Mansfield wants to say. We have a lot of information, but that
information comes in a very euphemistic way, and of course, we are free to make
our own interpretations (as long as the text supports us).

When it is well used, like in “Miss Brill”, the stream of consciousness

technique can tell you a story in a way that any other types of narration couldn’t do.
It’s not a reductive form of tell you things, but a form of share the subjectivity of the
character and tell you a story with efficiency. The stream of consciousness is very
important in “Miss Brill”, and without that technique, most of the conclusions made in
this paper wouldn’t be possible, they would be unreachable. So the stream of
consciousness is the basis of the short story and without that technique, the story
wouldn’t be as complex, as deep, as meaningful.
 BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

MANDEL, Miriam B., ‘Reductive Imagery in “Miss Brill”’, ​Studies in Short

Fiction,​ 26.4, 473-77, 1989

MANSFIELD, Katherine. “Miss Brill”, ​The Garden Party and Other Stories​,
1922

WHITEMAN, Kate. ​The world encyclopedia of Fish and Shellfishes​. Hermes

House. p. 256, 2000

CHAPLEAU, Francois; AMAOKA, Kunio. Paxton, J.R.; Eschmeyer, W.N.,

eds. ​Encyclopedia of Fishes.​ San Diego: Academic Press, 1998.

COOPER, Lucille. ​Is there a woman in the text? : a feminist exploration of

Katherine Mansfield's search for authentic selves in a selection of short stories.​
University of South Africa, Pretoria, <​http://hdl.handle.net/10500/2410​> Access: May
11, 2018