How appropriate is the title of the short story the singing lesson?
Answers
Explanation:
Katherine Mansfield’s “The Singing Lesson” is a story of Miss Meadows, a spinster music teacher, who experiences harrowing gloom and unspoken mental anguish owing to a split in her relationship with her lover. This particular slice of life is chosen to capture our gripping attention. It mainly centres round a particular singing lesson class held at a girls’ school. And the protagonist’s activity in the class is used to show the changes in human behaviour brought by particular events in life.
The writer presents a profound psychological study of human psyche as is evident in the character of Miss Meadows who got a letter from her fiancé offhandedly informing her the break-up of their marriage. This is certainly a drastic and shocking incident in her life. It does have but a pervasive after-effect on her feminine sensibility. Life is a bundle of moments – sometimes a moment of pleasure or sometimes a moment of utter hopelessness and failure. The effect of the troubled relationship is abruptly noticeable in her behaviour even though she tries desperately not to disclose it to her colleagues at her school.
The high-strung emotional personality of a music teacher and her subsequent behaviour are studied as minutely as a studious observer would do. This is what is the bare essential of the plot of the story. The unwelcome appearance of emotional outburst, no doubt, unsettles the integrity of her character. The action of the story is confined to a particular class of singing lesson. The authorial statement strikes our attention to the overtly pessimistic attitude of Miss Meadows:
Answer:
In Katherine Mansfield's "The Singing Lesson," a music teacher named Miss Meadows goes through horrifying depression and untold emotional pain as a result of breaking up with her beloved.
Explanation:
The story's title, "The Singing Lesson," is appropriately justified. One singing lesson is all that the narrative requires.
Miss Meadows initially arrives at class in a gloomy and sorrowful mood, her thoughts remaining on the letter's contents. Because they were ignorant of the cause of her grief, her students suffered because of her.
But after hearing the good news, she felt happier. She is so ecstatic that the depressing tune turns upbeat. Her internal conflict is reflected in the singing lesson throughout the narrative.
The theme and music work together as an accelerator to determine the plot's mechanism and the main character's gradual reveal.