英语短篇小说鉴赏PPT

About the author

Story presentation

"Miss Brill," Katherine Mansfield's short story about a woman's Sunday outing to a park, was published in her 1922 collection of stories entitled The Garden Party. The story's enduring popularity is due in part to its use of a stream-of-consciousness narrative in which Miss Brill's character is revealed through her thoughts about others as she watches a crowd from a park bench. Mansfield's talent as a writer is illustrated by the fact that she at no point tells what Miss Brill is thinking about her own life, yet the story draws one of the most succinct, complete character portraits in twentieth-century short fiction. "Miss Brill" has become one of Mansfield's most popular stories, and has been reprinted in numerous anthologies and collections. The story is typical of Mansfield's style; she often employed stream-of-consciousness narration in order to show the psychological complexity of everyday experience in her characters' lives.

About stream-of-consciousness

Plot summary

The story is about Miss Brill, a middle-aged English teacher in an unnamed French vacation town. It follows her on a regular Sunday afternoon in the park, which she spends walking and sitting in the park, wearing an old but beloved fur. She sees the world as if it was a stage, and enjoys watching the people around her, often judging them condescendingly（谦逊的）. However, she then overhears a young couple's cruel remark about herself, and the story ends with her realizing that she is not really needed in the busy world, and she thinks that she heard the fur crying. Mansfield's personification（化身） throughout the passage reveals a sense of loneliness belonging to Miss Brill for she not only fabricates（构成） a connection with the other park passers-by, but also personifies（使人格化） her inanimate （死气沉沉的） piece of clothing by conversing（谈话） with it as well as feeling for it.

Characters

Miss Brill, an English professor

Many other passers-by, including

Y oung couple

Major motifs

?loneliness

?illusion versus（对（指诉讼、比赛等中），与…相对）reality

?rejection

?isolation（隔绝，孤立，隔离，绝缘，离析）

Theme

What this story is trying to illustrate is that sometimes people can be happy through living in an illusion. However, this kind of happiness is fragile and can be easily destroyed. Unfortunately, modern society does not provide a place for everyone. Inevitably, there are those people, often elderly, who become marginalized; they live alone, friendless and mostly ignored. Miss Brill is one of these people, which becomes clear in her lack of communication with the people around her in the park. “They did not speak

.

Literary significance

The text is written in the modernist mode, third-person limited point of view, without a set structure

My understandings

The author is very perceptive（有理解的）. She describes the protagonist’s inner mind in detail. Miss Brill is an old, lonely woman (for she always goes to a place where there are a lot of old men and women). She is single all through her years. She has no child, no husband, and no relatives. So she has nobody to talk to when she feels lonely. She is left alone. However, she serves in a community, whose aim is to help the poor people in need. Sometimes she teaches pupils English, sometimes reads the newspaper to the old invalid gentleman. After finishing her work in the community, she goes back home alone. No one shares her joys and sorrows of life. So she always talks to her “little thing”, fur.