My Little Bit of Country

The essay My little bit of country by Susan Cheever is about Susans childhood in the
city, her observations concerning the differences between life in the country and life in
the city, and her arguments to why she at all times would prefer the latter.
The essay in its definition is very personal, and shows a lot about the authors
individual experiences and viewpoints. The narrator is, consequently, the same as the
author, and in this case Susan Cheever narrates about her childhood experiences
growing up in the city of New York, about suddenly being forced to move with her
family to the country, and at last about moving back to her beloved New York to start
her own life and raise her own kids in this fusion of civilization and nature one can only
find in the city.
Though Cheevers main point with the essay isnt to persuade people to move from
the country to the city, but rather to communicate her love of the city and her fond
memories of said place, she manages to come off as reasonable and convinving
because of her way of argumenting indirectly. This she does mainly by setting up
contrasts between the different lifestyles in the two environments.
The use of contrasts is a recurring stylistic effect throughout the essay. The most
prominent examples occur when she is comparing the city to the suburbs: "Why would
I want to swim in someone's muddy pond crawling with leeches when I could perch
myself on a marble basin and cool myself with splashing clear water, topping it off
with a lemonade from the cart on Fifth Avenue?" (page 8, line 110-115) She practically
couldnt have made her point more obvious than she does using these contrasts
between the muddy pool and the marble basin with splashing clear water. She
obviously prefers anything the city has to offer as opposed to the uncivilized nature
and poshness of the country and suburbs. In this quote she conveys her message by
eloquently focusing on the most unquestionable perks she can think of concerning the
city such as splashing clear water, and the unquestionable disadvantages concerning
the country such as muddy pools and leeches. This basically leaves the reader
incapable of disagreeing with her, and one might even begin to adopt her views on
which is to prefer of the two opposites.
Though this kind of more or less objectively valued contrasts work effectively,
contrasts can also be found in the not quite so unquestionable variety . An example
can be found on page 9, line 172-175: Country children may have had ponies, but my
kids had the delicious Carousel with its honky-tonk music and bright stallions. Here
she uses the otherwise negatively charged phrase honky-tonk music as something
desireable, and she counts riding the metallic imitation of a horse to be more valuable
than riding a real-life pony. Though it might look like she is counteracting her own case
by writing something like this, she makes up for it by prettifying her memories with
positive adjectives such as delicious Carousel and bright stallions. It ends up
coming across as a somewhat quirky thing of hers, and makes it more personal, which
is in her interest since the essay is a personal genre.

However, contrasts is not the only stylistic effect she uses when trying to get her point
across. Her choice of words and indirect references in specific cases can also work in
her favor. Examples of this can be found on page 9, line 159-163: "Years later, I raised
my own children in Central Park, where the wonderful urban public spaces are more
fabulous than even the most luxurious rural private spaces." Presumably she has
chosen the words fabulous and luxurious purposefully, since they reflect the two
settings well. The word fabulous is often associated with fashion and with the modern
concept of metrosexuality, which can really only be found in larger cities. Luxurious,
however, is a word associated with the upper-class, or, as people in England would call
them, the posh people. It implies abundance and wealth, which generally is what you
could expect of a typical suburban neighbourhood. Perhaps I am biased when coming
to this conclusion, but I think she by using these words creates an image of the city as
a place of diversity and beauty, whereas the country gets portrayed as a place of
uniformity and redundancy.
The last kind of argumentation I want to focus on in her essay is how she makes the
countryside seem utterly uninteresting by depicting it in extreme details, like in this
quote: "I could wander all I wanted in the suburban woods and try to be interested in
the skunk cabbage that bloomed in the spring and the interesting patterns made by
rotting logs next to a brook and the jelly blobs of frog's eggs in the pond, but none of it
held a candle to the magnificent variety of the Conservatory Garden or even the
rolling land around Cleopatra's Needle." (page 9, line 145-154). Here she makes use of
hyper realism, which is normally something that would intrigue and peak the readers
interest, but in this case communicates that she couldnt care less about those
random details, along with wild nature in general.
Overall, the writing techinques she uses works to get her point across in particular
the use of contrasts work successfully, and at the same time it shows that she has
no doubts about what she prefers. It gives a very personal portrait of what its like to
live and grow up in a city, although no compromises or disadvantages are even hinted
at.