Love And Negative Connotations In Katherine Mansfield's Miss Brill

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The general definition of love is to have affection for someone or something. Love is commonly used in relationships between two or more people (couples, family, and friends) and for animals as well; a specific example would be pets. It could describe one’s passion for work, hobbies, and beliefs. But love can also be used to describe feelings for subjects that have negative connotations. This does not exclude the topics stated above because each and every situation could vary depending the circumstances. And these circumstances could affect the course of one’s life. These negative connotations could include greed, lust, and abuse. Greed is the never ending desire to want something and in most cases that desire could grow to become addiction. …show more content…

It becomes a part of who and what they are. In “Miss Brill,” Brill is a single woman working as an English tutor in Paris. Every week she goes to a concert and sits where she can listen in to the lives of others. Miss Brill’s hobby is eavesdropping on people’s conversation. She takes pride in her ability to eavesdrop on others to go as much to say it is a special skill of hers. Katherine Mansfield says. “She [Miss Brill] had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn’t listen, at sitting in other people’s lives just for a minute while they talked round her” …show more content…

This story deals with different types of love, but the more common ones deal with Paul and Hester. In the beginning of the story it clearly states that Hester does not love her kids. Lawrence says, “She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them” (295). But it then states, “Whenever her children were present, she felt the center of her heart go hard. This troubled her, and in her manner she was all the more gentle and concerned for her children, as if she loved them very much” (295). Because of this, Hester was praised by the neighbors as a loving and caring mother, but like the story, “ Only she herself, and her children themselves, knew it was not so” (252). The children knew that the mother’s love was just a facade just like the thought of them being

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