Mount Pleasant Mary-Louise Buxton Analysis

A child can have the wildest vivid imagination, where it has the ability to turn the world into a playground filled with ghosts, witches and other supernatural beings. This world knows no boundaries: dolls transform into goblins and old portraits come to life.

Children include their spirited imaginations in their games by turning everything into an exciting, challenging, humorous and sometimes even dreadful world. An insight into the vivid imaginary world in a creative child’s life is precisely what the author Mary-Louise Buxton gives us in her short story Mount Pleasant written in 2005.

The short story “Mount Pleasant” takes place in a local environment, but mainly in the family 's new house called Mount Pleasant. It is an old, dusty and ruined house that the family has bought, the rooms have no heat and even the light switches do not work. It is very apparent to us that our narrator Elizabeth and her family belong to the lower middle class, and that they have moved into a neighborhood that they do not belong to with other social standards. In the short story, we hear the father´s language, he states: “Out from us feet” (p.1, l.2) here we can establish that he is rather uneducated, in the grammatical sense, as one would normally

Elizabeth’s language is very childish and it suggests the statement of the unreliable narrator; for example, she mentions her parents with terms like "mammy" and "daddy", and says “babby” instead of baby in line 28. Another example is when she plays with the language and recites a children 's rhyme “eenie meenie miny mo” (p.3, l. 35), or when she devises her own names for different concepts, for example “Granny ‘Omi’s Duckering Ball” (p.3, l. 49). Besides that the language contains imagery words which are mainly related to the child 's imagination. For instance when Elizabeth feels uncomfortable in her clothes and compares herself with a frog, ”I’m all blowed up like an old frog.” (p.2, l. 12). The ingenious language also shows a girl with a vivid imagination, who shapes and plays with the world around her. Elizabeth is a fanciful and a rebellious young girl approximately seven years old; this can be seen explicit, when she says the mysterious boy is “maybe nine or ten, not much older than I am.” (p.3, l. 59). Her young age and rebellious nature are established in the very first line of the story: “Mammy’ll take to me with a wooden spoon if she finds me up in the attic.” (p. 2, l.1). Eventually we can establish that Elizabeth is indeed rebellious against the traditional gender roles, when she says “If I was a boy like my big cousin Wilf or my babby brother George William, I could get filthy dirty.” (p.1, l. 28-29). Additionally, she enjoys “playing for hours at house or working at some theatrics” (p. 4, l. 152), and modifies the environment in her mind, just as when she invents the dust sheets as curtains and shrouds. This childish imagination is the main theme in the story. The major mischievous violation is when Elizabeth puts a lot of sweets on her mother’s tab, and afterwards leaves her with a big bill. Well, we can demonstrate that Elizabeth often looks for amusement. This information