Critical Analysis of Sarah Orne Jewett's Short Story "A White Heron"
Set in an isolated portion of Maine, Sarah Orne Jewett's short story "A White Heron" revolves around conflict, a difficult choice a nine-year-old must make which will lead to her losing a new friend. It is the story of a lonely nine-year-old girl name Sylvia who lives in the Maine woods with her grandmother, Mrs. Tilley. As the story progresses Sylvia met a young and appealing ornithologist, often named as "The Hunter", who is in search of a rare bird he spotted in the area. The hunter counted on Sylvia to let him know of the location of the bird; later on Sylvia had to choose between revealing the location of the white heron to the hunter and protecting the bird. At the end the hunter left disappointed and Sylvia lost her first human friend. Jewett develops her style using point of view, symbolism, and tone to show that in order to satisfy the call of nature one must become part of it.
Considering all the methodical aspects of the story of a nine-year-old girl who must choose between protecting a white heron and losing a new friend, the point of view of the story was most ambiguous to critics. “A White Heron” is told in an omniscient third-person point of view. The narrator went from past tense to present tense three times in the story. One of the times that the narrator used present tense was when Sylvia first heard the hunter approaching in the woods, “this little woods-girl is horror-stricken" (Jewett 5). The narrator seems to have more of an interest in Sylvia’s thoughts and feelings than the other characters’ because nothing more is shown of the other characters’ thoughts and feelings besides what they demonstrate through their words and actions. At tim...
... middle of paper ...
...wett uses various tones in the development of “A White Heron.” The first two paragraphs in “A White Heron,” the narrator creates a blithe and adventurous tone. Jewett purposefully downplayed the difficulty of the journey and introduced Sylvia’s curiosity and her first call to nature; “Sylvia began with utmost bravery to mount the top of it.” (Jewett 779) By using an anxious tone in the story, Sylvia portrays to the readers the idea of a conflict raging between Sylvia and nature. “The way was harder than she thought; she must reach far and hold fast, the sharp dry twigs caught and held her and scratched like angry talons…” (Jewett 779) The simile “like angry talons” adds to the tension of the tone. Through diction, Jewett displays a tone shift from anxious to triumphant and peaceful to emphasize the importance of becoming one with nature in order to answer its call.
• In the gym, the gym teacher announced that they were going to start a new unit. The new unit was volleyball.
In the narrative poem “Cautionary Tale of Girls and Birds of Prey” the author, Sandy Longhorn, tells the story of a young girl who is afraid of a hawk, and her inconsiderate father who doesn’t take her concerns seriously. The story shows how her father is determined to get rid of her fear of the hawk, because he thinks it is both foolish and childish. The daughter very well knows the capability of the hawk, however her father doesn’t acknowledge it until it is too late. In the poem, Longhorn uses alliteration and rhyme to help explore the theme of how being inconsiderate towards others can in the end hurt you as much as it hurts them. The poem takes place on a little farm where the girl and her father live with all of their livestock.
In his poem “The Great Scarf of Birds”, John Updike uses a flock of birds to show that man can be uplifted by observing nature. Updike’s conclusion is lead up to with the beauty of autumn and what a binding spell it has on the two men playing golf. In Updike’s conclusion and throughout the poem, he uses metaphors, similes, and diction to show how nature mesmerizes humans.
Furthermore, they all have an outside threat. The ornithologist might shoot the heron and make it a specimen while the man is suffered from the severe cold weather. In the stories both characters have to deal with the danger from outside world. Sylvia has to climb upon the tree to see where the heron is, the man has to avoid the snow falls from the tree.
We are told of Phoenix?s journey into the woods on a cold December morning. Although we are know that she is traveling through woodland, the author refrains from telling us the reason for this journey. In the midst of Phoenix?s travels, Eudora Welty describes the scene: ?Deep, deep the road went down between the high green-colored banks. Overhead the live-oaks met, and it was as dark as a cave? (Welty 55). The gloomy darkness that the author has created to surround Phoenix in this scene is quite a contrast to the small Negro woman?s positive outlook; Phoenix is a very determined person who is full of life. As Phoenix begins to walk down the dark path, a black dog approaches her from a patch of weeds near a ditch. As he comes toward her, Phoenix is startled and compelled to defend herself: ?she only hit him a little with her cane. Over she went in the ditch, like a little puff of milk-weed? (55). Here, the author contrasts the main character?s strong will with her small, frail phys...
“Why? Why? The girl gasped, as they lunged down the old deer trail. Behind them they could hear shots, and glass breaking as the men came to the bogged car” (Hood 414). It is at this precise moment Hood’s writing shows the granddaughter’s depletion of her naïve nature, becoming aware of the brutality of the world around her and that it will influence her future. Continuing, Hood doesn’t stop with the men destroying the car; Hood elucidated the plight of the two women; describing how the man shot a fish and continued shooting the fish until it sank, outlining the malicious nature of the pair and their disregard for life and how the granddaughter was the fish had it not been for the grandmother’s past influencing how she lived her life. In that moment, the granddaughter becomes aware of the burden she will bear and how it has influenced her life.
Williams includes as a foreshadowing, the sound of the Canada geese flying over and Robert realizes many details of the rural life he had forgotten he experienced when he was young. When he hears the geese, “he ran to the window—remembering an old excitement” and begins to “remember and wondered at the easy memories of his youth” (1667). By putting in details and traditions of the countryside lifestyle, Williams makes sures to indulge readers in the atmosphere of a Rockwell painting but never fails to include incidents of realism. With Robert increasingly remembering his childhood lifestyle, he is beginning to reassure himself that there is meaning to his life after the death he experienced. At the house he finds a bow and arrow where he was “surprised at his won excitement when he fitted the nock” (1667). After he experienced shooting the arrow, he sets out to buy more and fix the bow where he again, remembers old memories about how he had fallen in love with the objects in the store as a
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
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.
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.
Sarah Orne Jewett began writing at an early age as she was inspired by, The Pearl of Orr’s Island written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Jewett began writing in the style of the author of her inspiration and thus fell in love with the style of writing that encapsulated nearly every author of her time, local color writing. Local color writing is a style of writing that became popular just after the Civil War. Many writers began writing with a focus on the way of life and nature in their direct surrounding areas and regions. As mentioned by The Norton Anthology: American Literature Volume 2, local color writing embodies the depiction of, “...the topographies, people, speech patterns, and modes of life of the nation’s distinctive regions” (412). Sarah Orne Jewett’s, A White Heron unquestionably fits each one of those categories mentioned.
Bird usually portrays an image of bad luck that follows afterwards and in this novel, that is. the beginning of all the bad events that occur in the rest of the novel. It all started when Margaret Laurence introduced the life of Vanessa MacLeod. protagonist of the story, also known as the granddaughter of a calm and intelligent woman. I am a woman.
The consistent pattern of metrical stresses in this stanza, along with the orderly rhyme scheme, and standard verse structure, reflect the mood of serenity, of humankind in harmony with Nature. It is a fine, hot day, `clear as fire', when the speaker comes to drink at the creek. Birdsong punctuates the still air, like the tinkling of broken glass. However, the term `frail' also suggests vulnerability in the presence of danger, and there are other intimations in this stanza of the drama that is about to unfold. Slithery sibilants, as in the words `glass', `grass' and `moss', hint at the existence of a Serpent in the Garden of Eden. As in a Greek tragedy, the intensity of expression in the poem invokes a proleptic tenseness, as yet unexplained.
“A Bird came down the Walk,” was written in c. 1862 by Emily Dickinson, who was born in 1830 and died in 1886. This easy to understand and timeless poem provides readers with an understanding of the author’s appreciation for nature. Although the poem continues to be read over one hundred years after it was written, there is little sense of the time period within which it was composed. The title and first line, “A Bird came down the Walk,” describes a common familiar observation, but even more so, it demonstrates how its author’s creative ability and artistic use of words are able to transform this everyday event into a picture that results in an awareness of how the beauty in nature can be found in simple observations. In a step like narrative, the poet illustrates the direct relationship between nature and humans. The verse consists of five stanzas that can be broken up into two sections. In the first section, the bird is eating a worm, takes notice of a human in close proximity and essentially becomes frightened. These three stanzas can easily be swapped around because they, for all intents and purposes, describe three events that are able to occur in any order. Dickinson uses these first three stanzas to establish the tone; the tone is established from the poet’s literal description and her interpretive expression of the bird’s actions. The second section describes the narrator feeding the bird some crumbs, the bird’s response and its departure, which Dickinson uses to elaborately illustrate the bird’s immediate escape. The last two stanzas demonstrate the effect of human interaction on nature and more specifically, this little bird, so these stanzas must remain in the specific order they are presented. Whereas most ...