An analysis of Miss Meadows inKatherine Mansfield's The Singing Lesson

Katherine Mansfield’s The Singing Lesson begins with the protagonist—Miss Meadows, a music teacher at a girls’ school—walking to her classroom on a fine autumn morning, clad in a cap and gown and carrying a little baton. She appears to be the very image of a stereotypical school teacher, if not for the ‘cold, sharp despair buried deep in her heart like a wicked knife. ’ The cause of this turbulent state is soon revealed to be a letter she got from her 25-year-old fiance Basil, breaking their engagement. Miss Meadows’ sensitive and impressionable nature lets this despair colour all aspects of her life. Trodding the ‘cold corridors’, she is wrapped in her own cocoon of melancholy, immune to the girls “bubbling over with gleeful excitement” and how they “hurried, skipped, and fluttered by”. Twisting into bitterness, this melancholy pervades her interactions as well—she is excessively rude to the Science Mistress, staring at her in hatred and making derisive mental remarks about her personality and appearance. Noticing a perceived ‘mocking’ light in her eyes, Miss Meadows anxiously wonders whether the Science Mistress had noticed anything, and takes her leave, countering her smile with a ‘quick grimace’. Miss Meadows seems to be a popular teacher, considering the “bobbing pink faces and hands” and “outspread music-books” of her students. The devotion she inspires in her favourite student, Mary Beazly, who brought her a yellow chrysanthemum each day, a ritual that was “as much part of the lesson as opening the piano”, speaks volumes about her affectionate and gentle character. Miss Meadows’ sensitivity, however, proves to be a bane for her students, as she uses the titular singing lesson as an outlet for her internal anguish. She is utterly apathetic towards Mary’s adoring demonstrations and the general cheerful spirit of the girls, instead addressing the class in a ‘voice of ice’. She feels thrown into the deep end by the sudden end of the engagement, and thus forces her students to partake in her sadness by making them sing a mournful lament. Even though every note her students sang was “a sigh, a sob, a groan of awful mournflness”, Miss Meadows paid them little mind, dwelling on the contents of the letter, with phrases such as “I feel more and more strongly that our marriage would be a mistake”, “I am not a marrying man”, and “the idea of settling down fills me with nothing but disgust” constantly haunting her. Her “strange, stony tone” and aloof demeanor leaves her students “positively frightened”, with Mary “wiggling her spine”. We also see that Miss Meadows is a conformer to the norms of the patriarchal society she lives in. As an unmarried thirty-year-old woman in a world that mocks spinsterhood, she is acutely aware that she must enter matrimony soon or risk becoming a laughing stock for her colleagues and students. Due to this perceived inferiority of herself as a single woman, she finds it hard to take pride in her career and financial independence. It is social acceptance, security, and integration that she strives for, and she even agrees to a loveless marriage for the same. Her insecurity about her position in society leads her to fearing “she would have to disappear somewhere” if the news ever got out. Thus, in Miss Meadows, Mansfield depicts the quintessential internal struggle of a woman trapped by the rigid norms of a patriarchal society, one wherein she fails to recognise her own worth as an individual because she is compelled to marry and blend into society. By showing us the crests and troughs of her emotional spectrum, the author cements herself as a master in her craft.