Katherine Mansfield is the author of the literary work, Miss Brill. Miss Brill is about an elderly woman who sits at a park on Sundays and watches others. During the week, she has English pupils and an old man to keep her company and make her feel needed in this secluded world. She wears a fur on these special occasions to the park that she often refers to. This is called stream-of-consciousness technique, a mental wondering in fragments and goes from one idea into another. This fur portrays how people view her because nobody notices the fur, just like they don"t notice her. Miss Brill sees everyone, including herself, as performing in a play. She sees herself as an actress symbolizing self-importance. A nearby young couple plays the role of hero and heroine as her perception in the play. This is ironic because they are the antagonists in this short story, which she will later discover. Everyone judges others internally making themselves feel more important and to boost their own self-esteem while often learn new things about themselves in this process.
We are uniformly judging people without neither knowing who they really are nor knowing how they may perceive us. This is better known as daydreaming. We are continually aware of our surroundings and trying to analyze them, and sometimes doing so unconsciously. Have you ever waited on someone at a park before? Perhaps a child laughing with her mother catches your eye. First, you would analyze the physical appearance and then how they appeared to you. In Paragraph 5, Miss Brill analyzed people by saying "they were odd, silent, nearly all old, and .
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from the way they stared they looked as though they"d just come from dark little rooms or even - even cupboards". She has no idea why some of the people are being quiet and what they might be feeling. They perceive her as being the same way.
Miss Brill uses the idea of her and her surroundings participating in a play because it made her feel important, a part of something, and a sense of belonging.