Youth and Age Theme Analysis

Miss Brill’s strange behavior of talking to her fur coat can be seen as her nostalgia for a lost youth, when her coat was new and she was at the hopeful age of marriageability (in Mansfield’s time women were married at quite a young age, and not getting married was so looked down upon that spinsters were pitied and shut out of a great deal of social life). As Miss Brill sits in the stands she notices that everyone sitting around her looks just about the same: “odd, silent, nearly all old.” These are people who have been relegated to the sidelines, marginalized and ignored by society, and the story connects that marginalization with being old.

Though Miss Brill’s description of these people could just as well be applied to herself, through much of the story she does not recognize this. The story can be seen as Miss Brill’s awakening toward her understanding of her irrelevance and marginalization in society – her oldness. The silent old woman and old man next to her leave and, in their stead, come a young girl and boy who dismiss Miss Brill, call her a “fried whiting” – a cooked fish. This brushoff represents the way generations succeed each other, and how the young often disdain the old. At the end of the story, when she places her fur coat back in the box, the action suggests a kind of retirement for the coat, which Miss Brill finally sees as old and worn—just like her.