“She is a nightmare! ” said my friend after we read ‘Aunt Pegg’ passage. To us, Aunt Pegg is an awful, hideous, evil woman, and we feel sorry for the children who wrote the passage. How can we feel that way? That’s the writer’s style, to describe Aunt Pegg so we can sketch her as a ‘Vile Aunt Pegg’. The writer used diction, sentence structure, and tone to make a specific style. Let’s take a look at that. The description about Aunt Pegg started with an extreme hatred.
Vile’, a really strong word, gives us the first impression about Aunt Pegg as an evil ‘baby-sitter’; it makes readers turn against Aunt Pegg in the very first sentence. The next phrase ‘Leering, sneering, peering, Aunt Pegg,’ rhymes, gets readers attention and emphasizes that Aunt Pegg
...is an ugly woman, kind of like a witch in some ways. Once you imagine a witch, you can’t forget about ‘cat-related’ images. She would ‘pounce on us like a cat’, which showed us the infliction of violence of Aunt Pegg to the kids, but we can possibly realize that there was a bit of exaggeration mixed in to that phrase.
This also connected to ‘snarl’, the action that an angry cat would do, makes us imagine Aunt Pegg has a harsh and mean voice. In the third paragraph, there was an unfamiliar exaggeration there, ‘Aunt Pegg had eyes on sticks’, but when meaning is deeper than I thought at first. It said in the passage that Aunt Pegg is a ‘tiny woman’, it’s much easier for her to search in every corner and place in the house, she apparently can see everything!
This made the children scared of her because they were never free from her watching and peering.
At the end of the third passage, it mentioned that her mouth looked like ‘an upside-down new moon without a hint of smile’, describes Aunt Pegg has a fierce face, she never smiles, the happy face turns down to ‘a scary as in a horror movie’ face. If you think a little deeper, you will see a pretty cool connection between ‘cat, moon, and Aunt Pegg’. The writer purposely put in his/her opinion about Aunt Pegg to the witch-related things like cat, moon, and an ugly face without a smile. Interesting, right? Let’s look at some more! In the fifth paragraph, the children were completely different from the introduction in the first paragraph.
They were described as ‘little zombies’, spiritless, like the living dead. The reader can easily feel the atmosphere in the house, ‘uncommunicative’, they don’t talk to each other anymore, neither insults each other. They were controlled by Aunt Pegg, and they feel that they’re her prisoners as in ‘the barred doors of our prison’. The image made the sentence more effective since they were in their own house. They were ‘mournful children’, which is describes how desperate they were; because ‘mournful’ makes readers think as someone has died.
As they were mournful and desperate, they felt ‘nostalgia’. Nostalgia really means that misses someone that gone for a long time, and these children have been separated from their parents for two days. All these imageries, dictions, and tone make us turn against Aunt Pegg. The writers successfully delivered his/her massage to us, how horrible Aunt Pegg is, and we
can obviously feel. There are some exaggeration makes readers think critically about the hatred of the children to Aunt Pegg. All thanks to writing styles.
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