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The story begins with a simile, comparing the sunlight to “white wine splashed” over the park, and the chill of the day is compared to ice water. This immediate use of figurative language shows Mansfield’s talent for creating vivid images in just a few words, but more than that, it also suggests that Miss Brill takes a positive, almost artistic view of the world.
Miss Brill personifies her fur, which she calls a “dear little thing.” Her attitude toward her fur gives readers an early hint at her loneliness. While she makes her fur seem almost human, she sees people as inhuman. The band conductor behaves “like a rooster about to crow.” A mother rushes “like a young hen” to rescue her child who has stumbled. The old couple sits on the bench “as still as statues.” Mansfield also uses synecdoche, which is when a part of something represents the whole. She refers to one woman as “the ermine toque.” The clothes, in this case, really do make the woman. The boy also uses synecdoche when he asks why Miss Brill doesn’t “keep her silly old mug at home.”
Perhaps the most important use of figurative language is the extended metaphor in which Miss Brill compares the park to a stage and the people to both audience and actors. Everyone plays their part in the human drama, and Miss Brill would be missed if she did not play hers. She delights in the idea of herself as an actress, imagining the newspaper she reads to the invalid as though it were a script.
The story ends with Miss Brill returning to her “little dark room,” which is “like a cupboard,” just like the “odd, silent, nearly all old” people she critiques at the park. The repeated simile suggests the sad state of her life.
