The Singing Lesson Summary & Analysis

The story initially describes Miss Meadows’s despair but not the cause of it—possibly because her despair has complex causes. The story only shows that she feels that she has a knife buried in her heart, which is quite a dramatic description of suffering. Mansfield shows the contrast between Miss Meadows and the girls, who are “rosy” and blooming. Miss Meadows, by contrast, feels that she is already becoming cold and aged, like the autumn weather.

When the Science Mistress appears to be asking kindly if Miss Meadows is cold, Miss Meadows thinks something else is happening—that perhaps the Science Mistress has noticed Miss Meadows’ despair and is cruelly commenting on it. Miss Meadows hides the truth about her feelings from the Science Mistress, showing that she expects hostility from the school community. While it isn’t the main cause of her despair, this hostile community appears to be one reason she is so sad.

Miss Meadows is expecting unsympathetic judgment from her students, but she is also cold to them—in particular, toward Mary Beazley who is trying to please her by preparing her seat at the piano. Her feeling that she must defend herself and her despair from the unkindness she expects makes her behave unkindly herself. She is one of the people making the school community unkind. 

This reveals the cause of Miss Meadows’s despair—Basil has ended their engagement. While her description of “bleeding to death” suggests the loss of a great love, the letter from Basil hints heavily that he is gay (since he says that he cannot love a woman much, and feels disgust at the idea of presumably having a sexual relationship with her). He also seems careless about her feelings while he is rejecting her—he does not bother to cover the word “disgust,” even after he changes his mind about using it. It seems that this was not a great love affair, and that he is rather cruel and careless to Miss Meadows.

The thought of Basil’s cruel breakup letter prompts Miss Meadows to be cruel to Mary Beazley in turn. She is not only lost in thought, she is outright unkind to Mary by refusing to speak to her or accept the gift that Marry offers her every morning. This shows how Basil’s cruelty becomes Miss Meadows’s despair, and her despair becomes cruelty, which spreads the despair to Mary.

Miss Meadows’s feelings about the autumn and her own dwindling prospects in life are closely connected with this song—from the name “A lament” to the invocation of autumn and winter, the song evokes sadness and aging. She feels that the words themselves, even sung without emotion, sound like crying—and the crying is directly connected to Basil’s letter.

Even in Miss Meadows’s memory of the happy times in their courtship, Basil does not seem like a very passionate lover. The things she recalls about his interest in his own appearance and his focus on furniture align with that era’s stereotypes about the vanity of gay men. Further, she doesn’t recall anything about his personality that she likes beyond being glad that he is good-looking and wants to furnish a home for her. She does not seem to be in love with him either.

Basil seems invested in his career and he expects to stay at the school where he teaches, whereas Miss Meadows would likely give up her job when she marries. He doesn’t appear to like the people at his school any more than Miss Meadows does, but this illustrates a reason that they each might want to marry—Basil might want a wife to help him look good (and not gay) within his school community, and Miss Meadows wants to marry rather than endure the shame of being an old maid in her own school. However, both of them are marrying without love, to impress people they dislike. This moment also affirms Basil’s devotion to keeping up appearances, as he chooses to go to annoying dinners for reasons of social propriety and advancement, rather than living in alignment with his true desires. This obviously connects to the suggestion that he is getting married merely to appear straight.

Miss Meadows has transmitted her despair to the children through her cruelty to Mary earlier in the story, and now she is transmitting her emotion again through the tone of her voice. Despair and sadness travel easily, and it seems that the joy the girls felt at the beginning of the story is completely gone. Miss Meadows appears to be very sensitive to the emotion in the song and in the weather, and Mary also appears to share this trait.

This is finally the heart of Miss Meadows’s despair, which was hinted at in the beginning of the story. She is despairing because she is thirty and she believes she is now too old to find a desirable marriage again. In fact, the engagement with Basil was based on self-delusion, which is symbolized by him touching the ostrich feather boa. First of all, touching the boa rather than touching her is quite impersonal, and second, ostriches are known for burying their heads in the sand to avoid reality. That the boa is ostrich associates both Basil and Miss Meadows with this tendency to avoid painful reality and live instead in convenient delusion. With that delusion taken from her by the break-up letter, she must face her true hopelessness about her age and prospects in life as a woman of thirty.

When Miss Meadows thinks it doesn’t matter to her how little Basil loves her, she is showing that their marriage would be one of convenience for her just as much as it would be for him. She’d rather be unloved than humiliated in her community. Her level of dread about being known to be single again seems to show that this fear of being single at thirty and having everyone know it is her true motive for marrying. However, even a marriage of mutual friendship seems unlikely from Basil, who doesn’t even care about her feelings enough to hide the word “disgust” in his letter, which underscores his cruelty.

Miss Meadows’s despair has had such an extreme effect on her students that they are crying, which underscores how exaggerated Mansfield’s portrait of despair is (and suggests that maybe she is a little satirical about the magnitude of emotion felt, considering the relative unimportance of losing a lackluster engagement).

Miss Wyatt seems to be quite a bit older than Miss Meadows, as she untangles her glasses from her clothing, and has likely had promotions from teaching roles like Miss Meadows’s to become Headmistress. She is also unmarried (since she is called “Miss”)—this indicates that Miss Meadows might have a future at the school even if she does not marry Basil, or anyone else. In a way, Miss Wyatt can be seen as a possible future for Miss Meadows. Miss Meadows’s expectation that Basil may have committed suicide and Miss Wyatt’s evident expectation of bad news show that they both appear to expect the worst when the news is not yet known.

This telegram from Basil saying he doesn’t want to break up with her after all is extremely short and contains no reference to Miss Meadows at all, only himself. He reverses his opinion from the letter only by saying he “must have been mad”—or crazy. He never apologizes or acknowledges the distress he has caused, and then he says he bought a hat-stand, which is quite frivolous and underscores how inadequate this note is. It’s uncertain at first how Miss Meadows will respond to this insulting and unkind telegram.

Miss Wyatt’s kindness drops away as soon as it’s clear that Miss Meadows has not had bad news. Mansfield suggests that Miss Wyatt enjoys bad news and feels sour toward Miss Meadows when she is happy. Where the adults of the school seem to relish sadness, there is no equivalent transmission of joy. Miss Meadows herself also emphasizes the word “fiancé” reminding Miss Wyatt that she will marry, where Miss Wyatt did not. In a way, this substantiates Miss Meadows’ fear that the school community will judge her for not marrying—after all, she herself is being cruel to single Miss Wyatt by emphasizing the word “fiancé.” 

It seems amazing that Miss Meadows could take Basil back so easily and with so little suspicion when he has been so cruel to her, but Miss Meadows’s joy is as extreme as her despair was. Just as her despair seemed disproportionate to her situation, her joy here is clearly precarious and based on a lie—her engagement is tepidly back on, but Basil has been shown to be cruel and unreliable, a person who is unlikely to make her happy. When Miss Meadows felt sad, she assigned an autumnal song (which was associated with her fear of aging), but now that she is happy, she assigns a summer song. The weather, though, is still clearly late fall—it’s cold and stormy—so the out-of-step summer song embodies Miss Meadows’ own delusional joy about her engagement, which is clearly not good.