Loneliness, Imagination, and Linguistic Artistry: A Multi-Faceted Analysis of Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill"

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.