Aging Theme Analysis

After Miss Meadows’s fiancé leaves her, she sees evidence of her advancing age everywhere. While she is surrounded by young girls who appear to enjoy the autumn, she connects the cold weather and dropping leaves with her loss of youth and the diminishment of her future possibilities. The fact that she was finally engaged had protected her from the full sense of growing older, but once Basil ends their engagement, Miss Meadows must face the fact that she is thirty years old and single—at that age, in that time, she would have had little prospect of ever being engaged again. Miss Meadows’s despair over her age, and her association of aging with autumn and death, suggests the tragic inevitability of life passing her by.

Miss Meadows already feels herself to be old at thirty, as she shows by the degree of her surprise that Basil wants to marry her at all—she calls this “a miracle, simply a miracle.” It is not only her own perception that she is too old to be loved by a handsome young man like Basil, since she recalls that the Science Mistress would not believe that they were engaged at first. When she thinks of her future if Basil does not marry her, she connects her despair to the song lyric “passes away,” which is a euphemism for death, and she describes the girls’ quiet voices while they sing this lyric as beginning “to die, to fade…to vanish.” While thirty does not seem old enough to worry about death immediately, Miss Meadows evidently feels that there will be nothing but fading and dying in her future if she does not marry.

Miss Meadows also associates her dread of aging with the autumn. As she mourns her lost engagement, she observes that the willow trees have lost half their leaves. This suggests that her sorrow at the break-up is connected to the feeling she has that her own romantic appeal is fading, just like the willow trees losing their leaves. When she hears the girls sing the words “Fast fade the Roses of Pleasure,” she can “scarcely help shuddering” as she recalls that Basil once wore a rose in his buttonhole to visit her. The image of a rose fading as time passes evidently connects to the loss of her relationship with Basil, and also to her own sense that the possibility of happiness and pleasure will diminish as she grows older. 

While Miss Meadows connects the fall to her advancing age and bleak future, the young students, who are not yet worried about life passing them by, are full of energy and joy, symbolized by the fall-blooming yellow chrysanthemum Mary Beazley offers Miss Meadows. At the start of the story, the students are “bubbling over with gleeful excitement” as they run to school in the cool air. As they absorb Miss Meadows’s mood, first from her unkind rejection of Mary’s chrysanthemum and then later from singing the sad words of the autumn song with the sad expression she asks them to use, they become increasingly subdued and even begin to cry. When she leaves the classroom to go to Miss Wyatt’s office, she asks them to talk quietly, showing that they would ordinarily have a more vivacious mood if they were left in a classroom without a teacher on an autumn day. Their energetic mood before class begins shows that it’s Miss Meadows’s attitude—and not the weather or the season—that has made them too sad to do anything but talk quietly when she walks out of the room.

Mansfield appears to be showing that Miss Meadows finds the fall to be a tragic time mainly because she fears growing older, since the more she ages, the less chance she has of living even a shadow of the life of which she once dreamed. Miss Meadows is old enough already not to naïvely dream of true love—she simply wants to be married to any man at all so that she can fit into her community—but even that seems to be beyond her reach after Basil breaks up with her and she’s left single at thirty. The loss of even a shallow, unkind connection with Basil makes Miss Meadows confront that her youth is gone and even her most meager hopes for the future are unlikely to be fulfilled.