Marisa's Analysis of "When Nice Ain't So Nice"

Marisa Barth
Dr. Kerry Spencer
Honors Writing 150
22 October 2011
The Meaning of Nice

Early in life, children are told to be nice and love one another; however, perhaps love and niceness are not as complementary one thinks. Elouise Bell certainly had something to say about what it means to be nice. In her personal essay titled, “When Nice Ain’t So Nice,” Bell successfully uses the literary devices personification, antithesis, and irony to convince her audience that nice may have a whole other side that’s anything but pleasant.

In the very beginning of this essay, the word “nice” is immediately personified as it is capitalized like a proper noun. Nice is given characteristics that a criminal might have like “dangerous” and being a “culprit.” Later in the essay, Bell further vilifies Niceness as something that, “edits the truth, dilutes loyalty, makes a caricature of patriotism…. hobbles Justice, short-circuits Honor, and counterfeits Mercy, Compassion, and Love” (Jorgenson 171). She has applied personification to all sorts of adjectives and nouns and made them interact in a very un-nice way. Nice progressively receives a negative persona throughout the essay. The reader is shown that aggressive Utah drivers and the abnormally high anti-depression pill intake could be a result of repressed anger disguised by Niceness. The audience also reads that playing nice is how successful bomb killers, rapists, and abusive husbands easily fooled their peers and got away with their felonies.

The negative nice persona is consistently contrasted throughout the article with images of our “neighborhoods, campus, community, and the church” (171). Bell uses antithesis to convince the reader to change their views on what it means to be nice. She appeals particularly to the LDS readers by the use of pathos as their own state, school, and religion are factored in. The reader is convinced that the people of Utah who are nationally known to be genuine, happy, and, of course, nice are shown to have darker natures when the author employs antithesis. She describes neighbors who “smilingly put up with” each other but as soon as they are out of the neighborhood, the urge for “angry honking, cutting in, heading off, not-so-muted swearing, and flipping the bird” overcome them (171-72). This is likely to make the reader pause and reflect on the contrasts of their own situational behavior, and thus allows them to personally interact with Bell’s essay. Nice becomes a mask that disguises anger and Bell makes the point that perhaps if people did not hide anger beneath a kind façade, it is possible that they would not be so aggressive in other settings, such as the freeway.

Toward the end of the essay, Bell brings irony when she utilizes the original meaning of nice instead of the modern definition. Currently nice can be defined as pleasing, agreeable, or delightful. Bell explains that when traced back to Middle English, Old French, and Latin roots, nice meant strange, lazy, foolish, or ignorant. The reader, with two definitions of nice in mind, can be fully immersed in the irony of the article. Previously in the article Bell stated, “More deadly is the Nice Lady who never raises her voice, never utters the slightest profanity, but whose devastating words and emotional abuse leave permanent scars as disfiguring to the soul as any physical battering is to the body” (172). The audience originally reads this with the image of a pleasing, agreeable and delightful woman but with Bell’s new definition of nice, the reader now sees the flaw within a woman who never voices anger. It is the irony of the definition of nice that gives the second woman a negative connotation and allows the reader to be persuaded by Bell’s argument.

There is a new perspective on what nice is after the reading of Elouise Bell’s article, When Nice Ain’t So Nice. Nice, which was previously used to describe something or someone amiable has received a new meaning of something disagreeable or even dangerous. Bell has effectively, with the tools of personification, antithesis and irony, convinced her audience that nice may not be as complaisant as previously perceived.

Work Cited
Bell, Elouise. “When Nice Ain’t So Nice.” Reading For Intensive Writers. 5th ed. Comp. Susan Jorgensen. Provo: BYU Academic Publishing, 2007. Print.