Tuesday, December 24, 2013

What are the differences and similarities between "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "Miss Brill"?

One similarity between these two short stories is that both deal with an elderly, isolated person. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" the old man believes the narrator to be his friend, and the narrator tells the reader that he loves the old man. Yet one thing about the man drives him into a state of homicidal madness—his eye.
In Katherine Mansfield's story Miss Brill has bonded, in her own mind, with the people in a park she frequents, where they listen to a military band. She's otherwise an isolated person like the victim in Poe's tale—and in some sense like Poe's narrator as well. She even begins to imagine herself and the others in the park as a kind of acting company, each member playing his or her role, until a young couple are heard making nasty comments about her and the fur she wears. The fur could possibly be seen as Miss Brill's "defect" as the old man's "eye" is in Poe. The old man is killed by the crazed narrator because of the eye, and Miss Brill's illusions about fellowship with the others frequenting the park are destroyed, at least partly because of the fur.
Other than this one parallel that can be drawn, these two stories have little in common. Poe's is a narrative of the bizarre and the macabre. As he and his early nineteenth-century contemporaries typically do, he explores the irrational in human nature, depicts psychosis, and portrays events where the reader cannot be sure how much is "real" and how much is feigned or hallucinated by the narrator. Mansfield's story, by comparison, is realistic, gentle, and poignant. Yet it, as well, deals with a person who, like Poe's narrator, seems to be locked in a dream world of his or her own making.

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