Depressive is defined as causing feelings of hopelessness, despondency, dejection; feeling sad. Both the main characters in Katherine Anne Porter’s The Jilting Granny Weatherall and Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill experience depressive behavior. In Katherine Anne Porter’s The Jilting Granny Weatherall, Grandma Weatherall is an eighty-year-old woman on her final days of life, withering away in a hospital bed. She reminisces of how she grew old, raising her children on her own, and getting ready for death. Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill is about an older woman who enjoys eavesdropping on strangers during her weekly Sunday outings. While shadowing Miss Brill, you realize how lonely and desolate her life really is. Both character’s depressive formations are vital in how each
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The one thing that Miss Brill wants most is to be accepted and included in the afternoon activities of the town. Miss Brill has resorted to fantasy to include herself in the community. She characterizes people not by name, but by what they are wearing and has certain distastes in the attitudes and tendencies of the people around her. Miss Brill believes that she is part of an elaborate play going on in the park; people were not only the audience but also part of the play. While wanting to be part of this intricate fantasy that she had created, Miss Brill sadly realizes how hopeless her fantasy is and how real the reality of her life was. A boy and girl sit next to Miss Brill and the boys says, “ But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there? Why does she come here at all – who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?”(pg.89). The boy’s observation of Miss Brill gives the readers an insight if what the other people view Miss Brill as, an older, uninteresting woman. This statement that Miss Brill hears gives her a feeling of hopelessness, that her fantasy cannot become
The one thing that Miss Brill wants most is to be accepted and included in the afternoon activities of the town. Miss Brill has resorted to fantasy to include herself in the community. She characterizes people not by name, but by what they are wearing and has certain distastes in the attitudes and tendencies of the people around her. Miss Brill believes that she is part of an elaborate play going on in the park; people were not only the audience but also part of the play. While wanting to be part of this intricate fantasy that she had created, Miss Brill sadly realizes how hopeless her fantasy is and how real the reality of her life was. A boy and girl sit next to Miss Brill and the boys says, “ But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there? Why does she come here at all – who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?”(pg.89). The boy’s observation of Miss Brill gives the readers an insight if what the other people view Miss Brill as, an older, uninteresting woman. This statement that Miss Brill hears gives her a feeling of hopelessness, that her fantasy cannot become