Despair and Cruelty Theme Analysis

After her fiancé Basil leaves a cruel note ending their engagement, Miss Meadows despairs. She feels wounded and hopeless about the future, but mostly she dreads the judgment of others—people who will scorn her for being thirty and single once more. In her despair, she is cruel with her music students, who then begin to despair themselves, weeping openly in class. In this way, “The Singing Lesson” shows cruelty and despair to be interlinked—despair leads to cruelty which leads to more despair. And even though the story ends with Miss Meadows’ engagement restored, Mansfield’s implication is that Miss Meadows’ happiness is built on a lie and is therefore unsustainable: despair and cruelty will return. By depicting despair as the story’s predominant emotion, and by showing how it spreads via cruelty, Mansfield paints life as a chain reaction of suffering in which despair is inevitable.

From the very first line—in which Miss Meadows has “cold, sharp despair” “buried deep in her heart like a wicked knife”—despair is the story’s defining emotion. The severity of Miss Meadows’s despair is noteworthy: she is described as “bleeding to death” because her heart has been “pierced” by Basil’s letter. While recalling snippets of this letter, she asks her students to rehearse a sad song about youth and happiness disappearing, which emphasizes the magnitude of her grief. The story’s setting also contributes to Miss Meadows’s sense of despair. The story is set in late autumn, when the weather is so cold that it “might be winter.” As the students “wail” while rehearsing their sad song, Mansfield describes the willow trees outside with their leaves mostly gone and the wind and rain blowing against the windows. Between Miss Meadows’ own expressions of grief, the mournful song her students sing, and the stormy autumnal setting, Mansfield depicts a world that is saturated in despair, in which despair seems to be the natural state of everyone and everything.

The story implies that the source of this pervasive despair is cruelty. This is clearest when Miss Meadows is cruel to her students and they quickly descend into a despair that matches Miss Meadows’s own. Mansfield initially describes the students as “rosy” and “bubbling over” with “gleeful excitement,” but then Miss Meadows is cruel: she ignores one student’s gesture of kindness (Mary Beazley handing her a yellow chrysanthemum), is brusque in her rehearsal instructions, and encourages them to put their saddest emotions into the song. This leaves many of the students in tears, which is a startling example of how cruelty makes others feel profound despair—even young students who were, moments ago, joyful.

But Miss Meadows is not arbitrarily cruel: her own despair is rooted in the cruelty of others, both her fellow teachers and Basil. While a broken engagement should be grounds for sympathy and compassion, Miss Meadows expects only judgment and scorn from her colleagues at school. This leads her to such despair that she feels she will have to abandon her job entirely rather than face her cruel colleagues. Her despair is also due to Basil’s cruelty, as the way he breaks their engagement is particularly cruel: he leaves her a note instead of speaking to her in person, and the note itself is inconsiderate, especially because he initially wrote that marrying her would fill him with disgust. While he crossed out “disgust” and replaced it with “regret,” he didn’t bother to cross it out well enough that she couldn’t read it. This hurts Miss Meadows profoundly and makes her know that Basil doesn’t love her.

Even Basil’s cruelty, however, seems rooted in despair. Mansfield implies several times that Basil is gay (most strongly through the portion of the letter where he essentially says that it would be impossible for him to love a woman), and this was a time in which a gay man would not, in general, have been accepted socially. While his letter to Miss Meadows is unacceptable, Basil is in a difficult position and it seems as though his waffling over their engagement reflects an internal conflict over whether to follow his heart or submit to a marriage that isn’t what he wants. It’s easy to imagine this causing despair, which leads him to be cruel to Miss Meadows, setting off a chain reaction of cruelty and despair that ends in her music students crying.

The ending of the story, at first glance, offers an interruption to the cycle of cruelty and despair: Basil restores their engagement, and Miss Meadows is joyful. However, Mansfield implies that this joy is baseless and that despair and cruelty will return. After all, Basil’s telegram reversing their breakup is brief and feeble. He does not explain himself or acknowledge the distress he has caused, which shows his lack of compassion and suggests that their marriage will not be a kind or happy one. Also, the casual way he changes his mind suggests that he might not be totally committed to getting back together—he could reverse himself again at any time, once again causing Miss Meadows to despair. The joyful fervor, then, with which Miss Meadows resumes her music class seems almost dangerously disconnected from reality, making the story’s ending ominous. Despair, it seems, would be a more natural emotion for the situation, and Mansfield implies that soon reality will come home to roost.

While Miss Meadows’s despair is rooted in real, serious issues—loneliness, disappointment, fear of judgment, heartbreak—it’s noteworthy that, throughout the story, Mansfield depicts both despair and joy in exaggerated ways that are almost comical. Miss Meadows’s despair (coupled with the sad song and the dreary setting) seems somewhat over-the-top for the situation: she has been dumped by someone who never loved her, which is certainly sad, but perhaps doesn’t merit her assertion that she feels like she is “bleeding to death” after being “pierced to the heart.” The melodrama of Miss Meadows’ despair, and the frightening intensity of her misplaced joy in the end, seems to mock both of these emotions. Perhaps if Miss Meadows were slightly less sensitive to what other people think and slightly more pragmatic or realistic about her circumstances, then she could avoid this ridiculous emotional rollercoaster altogether.