Displacement in 'The Country Mouse' by Elizabeth Bishop

The Country Mouse by Elizabeth Bishop interwaves personal inventory and public history, and it is a biographical text where we can find the child's voice being represented, some existential problems, religion beliefs, irony and displacement in the childhood of this girl. There is also a conflict between cultures, more specifically, the American and Canadian ones where she brings social and political perspectives to her story. The character used to live in Nova Scotia when she had to move along with her grandma to the USA. Once there, she experienced the first lesson of displacement when she ponders: 'Oh Dear. I had dolls back home in Nova Scotia; I was even quite fond of one or two of them. But grandma had found them in no condition to go travelling in Pullmans', and here, we can understand that she had left a part of her behind and remembers them wistfully; at the moment she is in the USA, she feels she does not fit in the 'States'.

Another episode of displacement in her personal life in the passages: 'Now grandma and I were immediately driven to Stern's to buy me some decent clothes', which shares the idea that what she had before had no value, and in: 'To my slight resentment (after all, hadn't I been singing "O maple leaf, our emblem dear" for years?', so her songs had no value; what was true in her world had no value; what was her culture had to be left behind too. In the passage: '(...)only this house was on a much larger scale, twice as large, with two windows for each of the New Scotia ones and a higher roof.', she was comparing the places of her origin with this new large place where she did not fit, nevertheless, she would be the struggling to adapt to her own conflicts and changes all by herself. The whole idea of her struggles with all those changes in culture and life would also appear when the narrator says: '(...)a new life was about to begin (...) a whole unknown past I was made to feel I should have known about, and a strange, unpredictable future.' The only feeling left for the little girl was the feeling of displacement in the big house and in a unwanted new life. As if suddenly her identity had the urge to be other, she had to change it somehow. If it is possible to imagine the struggle for a child having to exchange the old familiar Canadian songs for new American ones, and the complexity of this switch, as when she declares: 'Now I felt like a traitor.', regarding the singing of new songs. She, as a child, did not comprehend political forces, but the mark of displacement can be perceived when she affirms she felt like a traitor, a traitor since she was change the songs of her heart, the songs of her culture, to adapt to a new society and be placed again with difficulty. In times of war, social discrepancies were risen and nothing better than analyze the life of a child in the middle of those turbulent times to understand the surroundings, the context in which people were inserted, and all the adaptations and frustration they had to endure.