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Unreliable Narrator
Explanation and Analysis—Miss Brill:
The story illustrates Miss Brill's unwillingness to confront her own loneliness by establishing her as an unreliable narrator.
Mansfield situates the reader close to Miss Brill's consciousness, telling the story entirely from her perspective and reproducing her thoughts through stream-of-consciousness monologues. But throughout her solitary expedition to the park, Miss Brill's explicit thoughts are determinedly positive. Because she's unwilling to acknowledge her own loneliness, even to herself, the reader has to deduce it from her observations and reactions. While watching the orchestra, Miss Brill reflects that:
"[...] what they played was warm, sunny, 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.”
From Miss Brill's insistence that the orchestra's music is not sad, the reader can infer that sadness is exactly what she's feeling right now. Through moments like this, Mansfield shows that Miss Brill is not an entirely trustworthy guide to her own emotions. And although Miss Brill only reports positive thoughts and feelings, Mansfield uses her unreliability to create a lonely and wistful atmosphere right from the story's beginning.
At the end of the story, when the young couple's insults make Miss Brill's friendlessness and loneliness even more apparent, the protagonist becomes even more unreliable in her attempt to avoid confronting her own feelings. This is an emotionally intense moment for Miss Brill, who has been demeaned by strangers after an afternoon of trying to convince herself she's part of a meaningful community. Here, Mansfield cuts off the reader's access to Miss Brill's interior life. Instead of voicing falsely positive thoughts, Miss Brill simply narrates her actions, stating that she "passed the baker’s by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room." Here, Miss Brill's refusal to share her emotions testifies to the extent of her despair.
Miss Brill's unreliability as a narrator is most evident in the story's final paragraph, when she is sitting in her dark room and taking off her fur collar:
She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.
Miss Brill may literally be crying here, or the sound might be a figurative manifestation of her distress. Either way, by distancing herself from the sound of crying, she's refusing to admit the true state of her emotions.
By establishing Miss Brill as an unreliable narrator and hinting at her true emotions through clues like these, Mansfield allows the reader to experience both Miss Brill's loneliness and her inability to name it. Ultimately, this technique creates an intimate and naturalistic portrayal of the character's consciousness.
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