Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story "A White Heron” is a beautiful realistic narration set in Maine, at the end of the nineteenth century. A young girl, Sylvia, is the heroine in a quest journey. As in traditional stories in literature, she follows what Dan Bronzite reports as "The Twelve Stages of the Hero's Journey". She will leave what had become her usual world to enter an extraordinary one full of wonders but also scary, to wind up again in her ordinary world but as a changed person. Sylvia’s voyage is one of great importance as it will change her character forever. Sylvia starts her journey in a normal place, “the woods (…) one June evening”; she is “a little girl” with “her cow”, at home in “a beautiful place” and happy in that rural …show more content…
“What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb?” Sylvia, nymph of the woods as her name etymologically suggests, hears the “murmur of the pine’s green branches”, “remembers how (she and the white heron) watched the sea and the morning together”; she cannot “give its life away.” She decides between her own individual purpose and the one of “a Higher Cause” when she chooses to remain untainted from the sin of being the accomplice of the white bird’s murder. Sylvia is the guardian of the forest and its beauty that can “bring (its) gifts and graces” to her. This is her “return with the elixir”: she has matured, the hunter leaves without his prize and the white heron is saved. From the start, Sylvia had been under the charm of the man who speaks “gallantly” and “alarmed” her. Even then, she felt he could be her downfall as “she hung her head as if the stem of it was broken”, just like her former neighbor’s geranium; he represents the city and its dangers, people, the foe for someone like her “afraid of folks”. He tries to win her over by giving her a knife, and Sylvia can sense her “woman’s heart (…) vaguely thrilled by a dream of love.” She has a “premonition of that great power” and the pain she will endure when “the guest went away disappointed” whilst she “could have served and followed him and loved him as a dog
In the Time of the Butterflies is a historical fiction novel by Julia Alvarez based on events that occurred during the rule of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. This book shows the hardships the Mirabal Sisters had to go through while being part of an underground effort to overthrow the dictatorship of Trujillo. It also shows that ultimately, it was their courage that brought upon their own death. Alvarez wants us to understand anyone and everyone has the potential to be courageous.
This essay will be looking at and examining the theme of characters having or going through a Journey, and how they are conveyed by author, Gwen Harwood, in her poems, ‘Suburban Sonnet: Boxing Day’ and ‘In the Park’. With the journeys in these two poems seemingly being written as reflections, where the characters are going through and struggling with the journeys they’re undertaking, I’ll be looking at what the journeys in these poems are representing and what they are showing readers about the characters who have had them.
Of Nightingales That Weep Chapter 1 This chapter is about Takiko and her first family home. It tells a lot about her family. They talk about the war in this chapter also. Takiko’s mother decides that she will remarry after her father dies.
The tile of the poem “Bird” is simple and leads the reader smoothly into the body of the poem, which is contained in a single stanza of twenty lines. Laux immediately begins to describe a red-breasted bird trying to break into her home. She writes, “She tests a low branch, violet blossoms/swaying beside her” and it is interesting to note that Laux refers to the bird as being female (Laux 212). This is the first clue that the bird is a symbol for someone, or a group of people (women). The use of a bird in poetry often signifies freedom, and Laux’s use of the female bird implies female freedom and independence. She follows with an interesting image of the bird’s “beak and breast/held back, claws raking at the pan” and this conjures a mental picture of a bird who is flying not head first into a window, but almost holding herself back even as she flies forward (Laux 212). This makes the bird seem stubborn, and follows with the theme of the independent female.
Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron" is a brilliant story of an inquisitive young girl named Sylvia. Jewett's narrative describes Sylvia's experiences within the mystical and inviting woods of New England. I think a central theme in "A White Heron" is the dramatization of the clash between two competing sets of values in late nineteenth-century America: industrial and rural. Sylvia is the main character of the story. We can follow her through the story to help us see many industrial and rural differences. Inevitably, I believe that we are encouraged to favor Sylvia's rural environment and values over the industrial ones.
Sylvia doesn't understand the difficulty so to show what she went through the author compared it to a situation between the tree and her skin. Sarah Orne Jewett shows the story coming to life by the textual evidence in her
The novel opens with the imagery and symbolism that is essential effectively telling the story. A grown Louise imagines the ferry ride to Rass Island she will soon take to pick up her newly widowed mother. The only way on and off the island, the ferry represents more than transportation, it is a lifeline between ...
Sylvia uses her daydreams as an alternative to situations she doesn't want to deal with, making a sharp distinction between reality as it is and reality as she wants to perceive it. For instance, as they ride in a cab to the toy store, Miss Moore puts Sylvia in charge of the fare and tells her to give the driver ten percent. Instead of figurin...
Throughout this poem the speaker contemplates stealing a book of poetry. The poet Julia Alvarez gives the action of stealing the book a deeper meaning while portraying the significance of the book to the speaker. Julia Alvarez does this through the use of many poetic devices. Throughout this excerpt of the poem “On Not Shoplifting Louise Bogan's ‘The Blue Estuaries’” by Julia Alvarez, the poet conveys the speaker's discoveries through the use of imagery and diction in order to portray the overall meaning of the work as a whole.
Nine-year-old Sylvia is a child who lives in the wood. Her name, ‘‘Sylvia,’’ and her nickname, ‘‘Sylvy,’’ come from the Latin silva meaning ‘‘wood’’ or ‘‘forest.’’ Sylvia lives in the middle of the woods with grandma Tilley and hardly sees anyone else. She remembers when she lived in the city but never wants to return there. However, when she comes across a hunter who is an older man, she enjoys being around another human being and is not sure what to do with the conflicting emotions she starts to feel. He offers to give her money in exchange for giving up the nesting spot of the white heron. She is the only person who can give him what he needs. What she has to think about though is the betrayal of her relationship with nature and whether or not it is worth it. In the end, she does not reveal the heron’s nesting place.
Throughout the late 19th century following the Industrial Revolution, society became focused on urban life and began to neglect the importance of rural society and nature. In “A White Heron” Sarah Orne Jewett, through Sylvia’s decision to protect the heron, contemplates the importance of nature and rural society. In particular, Jewett employs the cow grazing scene to show the importance of and solitude that Sylvia finds in rural life. When the hunter appears and Sylvia accompanies him on his journey to find the bird, his actions and speech reveal the destructiveness of urban society on nature. The scene when Sylvia climbs the tree to find the heron, initially in order to please the hunter and satisfy her new love for him, shows her realization
“Perhaps the most obvious meaning of "’A White Heron’" comes from the female creation, or re-creation, myth Jewett offers. The story presents a little girl whose world is entirely female. No brother, father, uncle, or grandfather lives in it; the men have feuded and left or died. Only she and her grandmother inhabit the rural paradise to which the child was removed after spending the first eight years of her life in a noisy manmade mill-town…In the country with her grandmother she is safe. Named Sylvia (Latin for "woods")” (Ammons
At the beginning of this piece, we are quickly introduced to the different lifestyles between the farm she lived in and the one she encountered when she left for New York. Easily distinguished is the contrast made by the use of the word “folks” when she mentions her relatives from “down under” but calls the New Yorkers “people.” The North is seen as a literary archetype as an unknown lucrative place, a strange place where “the flowers cost a dollar each.” This is positioned as a welcome mat to a world of differences between these two environments, which leads us to the core of her childhood life.
The nineteenth century was a time of economic, technologic, and population growth. These changes created problems in everyone’s daily lives. Two examples of things that affected the lives of many were disease and sanitation. Disease and sanitation led to high mortality rates in Nineteenth- Century England. This relates to North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell as it takes place during nineteenth century England and multiple characters died presumably due to disease.
Since its first appearance in the 1886 collection A White Heron and Other Stories, the short story A White Heron has become the most favorite and often anthologized of Sarah Orne Jewett. Like most of this regionalist writer's works, A White Heron was inspired by the people and landscapes in rural New England, where, as a little girl, she often accompanied her doctor father on his visiting patients. The story is about a nine-year-old girl who falls in love with a bird hunter but does not tell him the white heron's place because her love of nature is much greater. In this story, the author presents a conflict between femininity and masculinity by juxtaposing Sylvia, who has a peaceful life in country, to a hunter from town, which implies her discontent with the modernization?s threat to the nature.