Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was a writer of short fiction from New Zealand. She went to Great Britain at some point in her life and met writers D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. She is best known  for tow of her more famous writings, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" and " The Fly". I read her short story Miss Brill. This story could not help but to ring a thought of mental illness to me.

The short story Miss Brill also seemed to based in what today we would call mental illness. I consider myself an observer of people. I could relate to that characteristic in Miss Brill. However for her she became a movie, a script role. Somehow she lost herself and became what she was observing. The more you observe people the more you learn about personalities and gain a more genuine understanding of people. In her case she became the people she watched because she was not having any experiences of her own. Miss Brill also appeared to be a lonely woman like the woman in A Rose for Emily. She appeared to long for a relationship from the people she observed but would never initiate any conversations to try and start any form of communication with them. It appeared she was in a constant acting role in a movie. Her life was the movie and she was the star. There was a scene near the end of the story where Miss Brill hears crying coming from her fur. I wondered if she was having a self-realization that she was not living her own life she was playing a role in unscripted film in her head. She felt she was invisible but the teen boy that yelled out rude remarks about her as if she was preventing his plan to score with his girlfriend is a good example of that. She ignored his comments and did not even respond or acknowledge they were about her. As if she does not see the fact some people may be offended by her paying constant attention to what they are doing.

- Cassa Arnold