Catherine Mansfield Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Catherine Mansfield - Essay Example As the report declares looking deeper in the human behavior and trying to see the important details, her short stories had a didactic particularity. This happens with the short story: â€Å"Sixpence†. The story is a didactic one, but not as we might think at the beginning. The writer portraits two types of parents behavior. A little boy, Dicky, does not behave properly one day, just when his mother has a guest. This was a very strange fact, because he usually was â€Å"good as gold as a rule, sensitive, affectionate, obedient and marvelously sensible for his age†. This paper stresses that the child makes a mistake and the guest, Mrs. Spears, gives his mother an advice: the only punishment is the whipping. This contradicts his mother’s opinions, because when she said punishment she was not referring to beating. And here comes the two types of behavior, or we could extend the two types of parents. Mrs. Spears sons were very quiet, permitting their mother to give credit to her theory about punishment. Dicky’ s mother does not agree to the beating, but she let herself convinced by her friend’ words. The children themselves were very different and Dicky was the one that had a normal behavior for his age. He was gentle and sensitive, but sometimes he was acting foolishly, maybe because a child’s energy is too big and cannot be hold in. Mrs. Spears sons were not acting right for some children, they were too calm and quite.