A sense of Loss

A sense of loss is seen in the story ‘Miss Brill’. Miss Brill comes off as a very boring character to the reader, but she is far from boring in her own world and imagination. She believes she is an actor in a huge stage play which is her life, and it is connected with everyone elses. She then loses her identity as an ‘actor’ when she overhears a young couple bicker about her behind her back. An excerpt from the story where she “Thought she heard something cry” suggests the sadness she feels as she replaces her fur back into the box. Miss Brill lost what kept her content and she prefered her imagination rather than reality.

In the story ‘The life of Ma Parker’, Ma Parker’s grandson, Lennie, dies and the story is developed as a kind of psychological lapse of events. Ma Parker keeps on revisiting the past and memories of Lennie. He was all Ma Parker had left in her life and when he passed away, she felt nothing else but completely alone in the world. This would show a loss of relationship, since she is disconnected and away from her loved one because of his death. This would also show a loss of identity and ambition as she seems to be lost in her life and the past  constantly comes back to haunt her. The loss of a loved one caused her to lose all hope in everything else and to lose hope in her life.

The story ‘Daughters of the late Colonel’ revolves aroud two young girls, and because the influence of their strict and overprotective father, they have lost the cheery and quirky characters or identity they once had when they were little and have become somewhat clueless about the world. This shows that it is not just physical death or loss that Mansfield’s stories are concerned with, but loss here can mean the death of identity, ambition, and even the loss of character.

Katherine Mansfield portrays a sense of loss in her stories because she wants the reader to connect to her characters’ and understand the points in which they came from and how loss affects her characters’ and the stories.