- Dr. Fuad Nabhan*
- Al-Quds Open University, Palestine
- DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20276340
This study uses at
least three different methods to analyze Katherine Mansfield’s famous short
story, “Miss Brill” (1922). It examines the themes of loneliness and
imagination, the language and narrative style, and a critically informed
psychological analysis of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, while acknowledging the
model’s Western and individualistic limitations. This study shows the
limitations of Mansfield’s literary craftsmanship and the representation of the
psychological condition of early 20th-century European spinsters.
The results show
that the protagonist’s imagination fills the void of loneliness. Stylistically,
the use of fuzzy lexical units (e.g., somehow, something, faint), exclamatory
structures, and, as a novel contribution to the field, the predominance of
mental process verbs over material process verbs (transitivity analysis)
creates a passive, fragmented consciousness for Miss Brill. Psychologically,
while Maslow’s framework articulates the absence of belonging, esteem, and
self-actualization, a metaphorical reading within the context of attachment
theory places her fur coat as a transitional object of attachment, the removal
of which represents an attachment rupture rather than a failed
self-actualization.
The results suggest that the short story goes beyond simply illustrating an elderly woman alone; in the larger picture, it offers a modernist account of urban alienation, a psycho-imaginative attempt to address social isolation, and the ultimate failure of imagination to stand in for social connectedness.
