Similarities and differences between the two stories, 'Ma Parker' and 'Miss Brill', By Katherine Mansfield.

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Similarities and differences between the two stories, ‘Ma Parker’ and ‘Miss Brill’, By Katherine Mansfield.

  The two stories, ‘Ma Parker’ and ‘Miss Brill’ have some very distinct similarities. Both stories create the image of two misfits living a very lonely and unfulfilled life.

  Miss Brill was never married, even her name creates a picture of loneliness, and gives the reader the impression that she doesn’t even think of herself as a real person since she doesn’t use her first name. Her not being married means that she has no one to care for her and even because she is a teacher we would think of her as having friends but she has none. She is so lonely that she spends her Sunday’s talking to her fur ermine and visiting the public gardens where again, she has no friends and no one to talk to.

  Ma Parker is a widow and has no children or husband left to care for her. Her husband died of consumption and some of her children died at a very young age, and ‘ then young Maudie went wrong and took her sister Alice with her; the two boys emigrated, and young Jim went to India with the army, and Ethel married a good for-nothing little waiter who died of ulcers’. Yet Again she was left with no one in her life that would care for her.

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  Both characters keep their emotions locked up inside them and are in denial. Miss Brill denies that she doesn’t have any friends and goes to the public gardens every Sunday to try and prove to herself that she was part of a performance along with everyone else at the gardens so she left ‘home at just the same time each week- so as not to be late for the performance’. She pretends that doing this makes a difference to the people there and that they would miss her if she wasn’t a part of it. ‘On her way home ...

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