REDUCTIVE IMAGERY IN "MISS BRILL:' by MIRIAM B. MANDEL

Katherine Mansfield's story "Miss Brill" has evoked a curious double response. Critics generally feel sympathy for the character/ but reject the story.2 The most positive statements about the story emphasize its careful structure and its compression.3 But even these admiring critics have failed to notice its most impressive technical achievement: a highly functional application offigurative language which enables the reader to understand and evaluate the character. "Miss Brill" has less action and more figurative language than any of the other stories in The Garden Party, figurative language which marks a departure both of kind and of purpose: "Miss Brill" relies on sense imagery, and not on the "trees, flowers, birds, insects, mice, rats, cats and dogs, the sun and moon, and the sea"4 with which Mansfield regularly expounds the familiar themes of helplessness and of preying. Most fully developed are the ima~es of sight and sound. But the senses of taste ("a faint chill,

1 Eudora Welty writes that "Miss Brill was from the fIrst defenseless;' ("Katherine MansfIeld's 'Miss Brill; " rpt. in Story and Critic, ed. Myron Matlaw and Leonard Lief [New York: Harper and Row, 1963], p. 19). Robert L. Hull fmds that "Miss MansfIeld gives in this story a significant look a look short and startling and at once full ofpity, at the world that the lonely woman inhabits She is left, as she began, in her pathetic solitude" ("Aleination in 'Miss Brill; " Studies in Short F'ictiDn, 5, No. 1 [1967], 74, 76). The most direct statement ofsympathy comes from Saralyn R. Daly, who claims that "Miss Brill ... engages the reader's affection" (Katherine Mansfield [New York: Twayne, 1965], p. 90). 2 Although widely anthologized, the story has not always fared well with the critics. Sylvia Berkman condemns both the character and the story: "Miss Brill, hyperconscious, semihysterical, through feverish examination herself emphasizes the meaning of each trivial happening in her afternoon, so that the very instrument ofimplication - the running stream offeeling- here gives rise to the obvious, or at least the mechanical"
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like a chill from a glass of iced water before you sip"1 and touch ("She felt a tingling in her hands and arms" [182D are also represented in the story. And this concrete sense imagery is, rather surprisingly, transmitted to us through the perception of a woman remarkably out oftouch with the world around her. 6 Miss Brill, an aging spinster, a foreigner (in xenophobic France) without friends or relatives, is almost a parody of the isolated expatriate. Her only relationships are with her students, in whom she naturally can't confide, and with an old invalid gentleman who is practically dead. No one else figures in her life. She maintains only the most tenuous of contacts with the outside world: once a week she observes and eavesdrops on strangers. It is a story, as David Madden points out, of a woman's forced retreat from the world. 7 What is the function, then, of the vivid sense imagery? Don't the very profusion and immediacy of the imagery contradict the theme of isolation? A careful look at Miss Brill's imagery reveals that all of it shares a singular characteristic: all of it is reductive. The images which bring the scene to life simultaneously reduce it: we see not only what Miss Brill sees, but we see how she sees what she sees, as it is reported in her own language (free indirect discourse). This is obvious, of course, in terms of characters and action: she transforms the real, human scene in the park into a set scene from a play ("It was exactly like a play.... They were all on the stage .... they were acting" [186-87D.8 But it is operative also in the imagery, by means of which she reduces the real world Oively, bright and joyful on a spring afternoon) to fit her own limited perspectives. Critics have noted that Miss Brill transforms the band imagery even as she reports it.9 But critics have not noticed that the means by which she transforms it are encoded in the sense imagery. What is important to an understanding of Miss Brill is not the fact of transformation but the manner oftransformation.1b give an example: music produced by a brass band playing outdoors is inevitably loud; on this Sunday, the first Sunday of the new season, it was even "louder and gayer" than usual. But filtered through Miss Brill's perception, the large brassy sounds become "a little 'flutey' bit-very pretty!-a little chain of bright drops" (183). For part of the story, Miss Brill doesn't even hear the loud band; and then "Tum-tum6 "Miss Brill;' in The Garden .Rzrty (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 182. All further citations are in the text. 6 In his Note "Alienation in 'Miss Brill' "(Studies in Short Fiction, 5, No.1 [1967], 74-76), Robert L. Hull uses the word the words "estrangement" and "solitude;' in addition to "alienation;' to identify the theme of the story. 7 "Katherine Mansfield's 'Miss Brill; "p. 89 8 Even the "little brown dog" is diminished: he is "like a little 'theatre' dog, a little dog that had been drugged" (p. 186). 9 David Madden accurately points out that she tries "to create her own private music out of her emotions" ("Katherine Mansfield's 'Miss Brill; " p. 90); Peter Thorpe remarks that "the band, the music and the ... conductor are merely raw materials for the dramatizations of Miss Brill's mind" ("Teaching 'Miss Brill; " p. 661).

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tum tiddle-uml tiddle-uml tum tiddley-um tum tal" (185)-she has reduces a brass band to a few humming, tapping sounds. The reductive and subjective quality of the sound imagery becomes even more obvious when Miss Brill projects onto the band her interpretation of another character's emotions: "the band seemed to know what she [the woman wearing the ermine toque] was feeling and played more softly, played tenderly .. ?' (186). The imagery presents not the real sounds the band makes, but Miss Brill's subjective transformation and ultimate reduction of these sounds. Miss Brill consistently reduces the world in which she lives. In Welty's terms, Miss Brill tries to make the world "cozy" and "safe" for herself. to 1b make them fit into her diminished world, Miss Brill attempts to reduce the people in the Jardins Publiques by imaging them as small animals: the band director "scraped his foot and flapped his arms like a rooster about to crow" (183); the mother is "like a young hen .. ?' (184). The older woman is reduced even further by metonymy-she is the "ermine toque" -and she dabs her lips with "a tiny yellowish paw" (185) and then "pattered away" (186). And the central image of the fox is also reduced in size: Miss Brill attaches the adjective "little" to it six times in the first paragraph: the fox is a "dear little thing" and (twice) a "Little rogue"; it has "dim little eyes:' "sad little eyes:' and needs "a little dab of black sealing-wax" (182) on its (presumably little) nose. We hear Miss Brills' voice and diction here. n As Miss Brill catalogues what she sees, she reduces and dehumanizes it: children are "little French dolls" (184); the people on the benches are "still as statues" (184). Faces are not described; Miss Brill prefers to see people in terms of single items of clothing: "a fine old man in a velvet coat ... a big old woman ... with a roll of knitting on her embroidered apron" (183); "An Englishman and his wife, he wearing a dreadful Panama hat and she button boots" (184). Sometimes several characters are reduced to the same single item of clothing- "little boys with big white silk bows ... little girls ... dressed up in velvet and lace" (184); "Two peasant women with funny straw hats" (185). Or they are seen in terms of a single color"a gentleman in grey:' "Two young girls in red ... with two young soldiers in blue"; describing the woman who is the ermine toque, Miss Brill sees, somewhat improbably, that "everything, her hair, her face, even her eyes, was the same colour as the shabby ermine ... " (185). Whatever Miss Brill sees, she reduces to the parameters of her own constricted world. The text does not provide an objective reason for the emptiness of her life. The usual Mansfield problems do not restrict Miss Brill. Money, "Katherine Mansfield's 'Miss Brill; "p. 18. Just as in "The Fly" we can clearly distinguish the opinions and diction of the boss, Mr. Woodifield, and even ofthe absent Mrs. Woodifield and her daughters, when these words are not encased in the conventional quotation marks (see F. W. Bateson and B. Shahevitch, "Katherine Mansfield's 'The Fly': A Critical Exercise;' Essays in Criticism, 12 [January 1962], 39-53), so here we are aware that "little" is Miss Brill's word. 10 U

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though not plentiful, doesn't seem to worry her. She is in good health; her senses are alert. No fights or angers poison her outlook; no cruel, overbearing men establish limits for her. And yet, her condition of isolation is so extreme that one thoughtless bit of cruelty is capable of wrecking everything. By giving us Miss Brill's own imagery (instead of the narrator's), and by investing it with the quality of reductivity, Katherine Mansfield has transposed the psychological aspects ofcause and effect. Instead, then, of presenting the story from the outside, and showing that a chance remark seems to make Miss Brill disproportionately unhappy, Mansfield shows us the character from the inside, in order to disclose why she could be made so unhappy by such a remark. That is to say, Miss Brill's misery is caused not by the cruelty of the unfeeling external world, represented by the young couple, but by the manipulative, restrictive, and finally destructive personality ofMiss Brill herself. Her reductive imagery suggests that Miss Brill has never permitted other human beings a full and independent reality. Like Emma Woodhouse, she has seen them only as raw material to be shaped and managed by herself. And as Emma is humiliated when those upon whom she attempted to impose her will turned out to have independent wills of their own, so Miss Brill is severely shocked when the romantic young couple- "the hero and heroine, of course, just arrived from his father's yacht" -turn out to be real individuals intent on their own needs and given to rather inelegant means of expression. The proper response to Miss Brill, then, involves not only pity for her current misery but also blame for having brought that misery on herself. Reading the imagery carefully reveals that the theme ofthe story is not destruction but self·destruction. Katherine Mansfield does not often require us to judge her characters so severely. But in this story she encodes a negative response into the text by attaching unflattering images to her main character. Although Saralyn Daly claims that "No distancing of emotion is allowed as the reader follows her train of thought and feeling:'12 several clear markers obviate emotional identification with the character. First, by choosing to present Miss Brill in the act of eavesdropping (instead of teaching her students or reading to the old gentleman), Mansfield emphasizes an unattractive aspect of her character. Mansfield also distances Miss Brill from us by giving her the name of a fish. 13 The fox fur, with which Miss Brill is identified both at the beginning and the end of the story,14 is not only dead but continues to decay even after death. And on the same narrative level, 12 Katherine Mansfield, p. 90. 13 James W. Gargano, "Katherine Mansfield's 'Miss Brill; " Explicator, 19, No.2 (1960), Item 10. David Madden mentions "the 'shine' and 'sparkle' meanings [in French] ofMiss Brill's name" (p. 92), as does Robert L. Hull, who fmds that the name works ironically, because Miss Brill is "a dull spinster without a shining personality or the warming glow of love" ("Alienation in 'Miss Brill; " p. 75). . 14 Peter Thorpe fmds that "symbol[the foxfur] and referent £Miss Brill]become one in this last sentence ofthe story" (p. 663).

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the girl at the end of the story reduces the value of the fox fur (and thus of Miss Brill) even further by comparing it to "a fried whiting" (189). Although we tend to respond sympathetically to Mansfield's troubled women, I think that in this story such a response is inappropriate. A more dispassionate examination of Miss Brill is demanded. IS Just as Miss Brill's imagery reveals her personality to us, so does the narrative discourse reveal the distance and attitude appropriate for the reader. Disassociation works on two levels: the character practices the technique on the world around her and thus reveals the causes for her isolation, and the author practices the technique on the reader and thus manipulates our response to the character. A careful reading, then, requires both a dispassionate attitude to the character and close attention to her imagery. That imagery reveals her method of dealing with the world: Miss Brill tries to control her environment by reducing it. But her final defeat or isolation or alienation (depending on which critic's language you use) is not the main issue of the story. The imagery draws our attention not to the defeat but to the process that has made it inevitable. The reductive imagery reveals that the defeat is caused not by the world, but by Miss Brill's attempt to work her will on it. The imagery is a powerful tool by means of which Mansfield encourages and enables us to discover how her character got to where she is: in no small measure, Miss Brill herself created the smallness of her life.

• .15 ~nce ~ assume the proper distance from Miss Brill, we become aware of further hmltatlOns. LIke Holden Caulfield, she has a limited vocabulary and repeats the sam rds o~e~ and ove~ again, the.favorite quite revealingly being "little?' And although she isef::d of SImIles, her Image-makIng capabilities are limited: she invokes only three animals (ermine rooster, hen), all of them small. '

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