Zichuan Mei

Zichuan Mei

Volume 21, Issue 4, 2025

Miss Brill, Imagined communities, Marginalization, Internal focus narrative perspective, Epiphany.

Katherine Mansfield, revered as the progenitor of New Zealand literature, distinguishes herself with a distinctive linguistic flair and narrative technique that resonate through her works. Taking her short story Miss Brill as the research object and Bakhtin’s thought of Marginalization in the system of philosophical anthropology as the theoretical basis, this paper reveals Miss Brill’s inner world as a marginal person through a detailed analysis of her marginal position in three dimensions of body, clothing and language, as well as an in-depth interpretation of her “Epiphany” moment. At the same time, the novel adopts an internal focus narrative perspective, interprets Miss Brill’s helpless struggle to integrate into the “Imagined Communities” but finally hopes to become disillusioned, and reveals the tendency of society to ignore and exclude marginalized groups. 

© 2025, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license