The Fragile of Miss Brill’s Fantasy -- A Formalistic Approach to Katherine Mansfield's Miss Brill
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DOI: 10.25236/assah.2019.031
Corresponding Author
Li Na
Abstract
Katherine Mansfield's short story, Miss Brill, is published in her 1922 collection of stories entitled The Garden Party. It is one of Mansfield's most popular stories and Miss Brill has become one of the impressive female characters in English literature. The story's enduring popularity is due partly to its narrative strategies. This paper is intended to view the main character, Miss Brill and present the shattering of her fragile fantasy from the perspective of narrative strategies. Mansfield’s skillful handling of narrative strategies displays the conflicts of Miss Brill’s subjective world and the objective reality and predicts the shattering of her fragile fantasy in front of reality.
Keywords
Fragile fantasy; The conflicts of subjective world and the objective reality; Point of view; Speech representation; Narration of impersonal object