Sylvia's Journey In A White Heron By Sarah Orne Jewett

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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

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