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The Singing Lesson Themes 1. Marriage and Gender Biased Society The protagonist of the story is a thirty-year-old woman, who is engaged to a twenty fiveyear-old man. This man, Basil, calls of their engagement without giving any concrete reason other than the fact that he found himself to not be a marrying man . This puts Miss Meadows in a state of despair. Throughout the story, it s clear that Miss Meadows feelings for Basil are lukewarm; her real concern about their broken engagement is that others will judge her for being single. Her shame at being single again is such that Miss Meadows thinks, after the breakup, she could never face the Science Mistress or the girls once it got known. She would have to disappear somewhere, which suggests that losing Basil is less significant to her than losing the appearance of his love within the school community. This shows the importance of marriage in the life of a woman approaching thirty. So much of a woman s worth came from marriage, that she would consider giving up a steady job just to avoid people seeing her as a failure. This story shows how marriage became tied to a woman s validation and sense of self, so much so that they would even take a flaky man in place of having no man at all. Through the melodramatic depiction of Miss Meadows emotions: her over-the-top despair when her lackluster engagement ends, and her feverish joy when her engagement is feebly renewed Mansfield seems to be poking fun at people who assume that following social norms is so high-stakes. 2. Despair and Cruelty From the very first line in which Miss Meadows has cold, sharp despair buried deep in her heart like a wicked knife despair is the story s defining emotion. The severity of Miss Meadows s despair is noteworthy: she is described as bleeding to death because her heart has been pierced by Basil s letter. While recalling snippets of this letter, she asks her students to rehearse a sad song about youth and happiness disappearing, which emphasizes the magnitude of her grief. The story s setting also contributes to Miss Meadows s sense of despair. The story is set in late autumn, when the weather is so cold that it might be winter. As the students wail while rehearsing their sad song, Mansfield describes the willow trees outside with their leaves mostly gone and the wind and rain blowing against the windows. Between Miss Meadows own expressions of grief, the mournful song her students sing, and the stormy autumnal setting, Mansfield depicts a world that is saturated in despair, in which despair seems to be the natural state of everyone and everything. The story implies that the source of this pervasive despair is cruelty. Miss Meadow s despair is rooted in the cruelty of others, both her fellow teachers and Basil. The way he breaks their engagement is particularly cruel: he leaves her a note instead of speaking to her in person, and the note itself is inconsiderate, especially because he initially wrote that marrying her would fill him with disgust. While he crossed out disgust and replaced it with regret, he didn t bother to cross it out well enough that she couldn t read it. This hurts Miss Meadows profoundly and makes her know that Basil doesn t love her. While a broken engagement should be grounds for sympathy and compassion,
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