A White Heron (Style)

Style

Set in an isolated portion of Maine, “A White Heron” tells of a lonely nine-year-old girl’s decision not to reveal the location of a beautiful white heron and its nest to a visiting hunter. The hunter leaves, disappointed, and the girl, Sylvia, loses her first human friend.

Narrator/Point of View

Of all the technical aspects of this story, that of a young girl who must choose between revealing the location of a heron’s nest to an appealing ornithologist and protecting the bird, none has proven more problematic to critics than point of view. Many readers have seen Jewett’s abrupt and dramatic changes in point of view as a weakness and a sign of immature talent; however, more recently, readers have seen the shifts as intentional and effective. The story is told by an omniscient third-person narrator, that is, a narrator who is not present as a character in the story, but who looks out or down on the events and who can see more than the characters themselves see. This narrator sees more deeply into (or shows more interest in) Sylvia’s thoughts and feelings than into the other characters’. Nothing is shown of the hunter’s or Mrs. Tilley’s thoughts beyond what they demonstrate through their words and actions. The narrator tells most of the story in the past tense, but three times shifts to present tense: when Sylvia first hears the hunter approaching (“this little woods-girl is horror-stricken”), when she has spotted the heron’s nest (“she knows his secret now”), and when she finds that she cannot reveal the secret (“Sylvia does not speak after all”). These moments give an immediacy that is sharp but that does not last. Each time, the narrator backs up again and stands at a distance. At times detachment falls away completely, and the narrator addresses Sylvia (“look down again, Sylvia”) or nature (“woodlands and summer-time, remember”) directly; it feels as though the reader, too, were on the scene, watching and hoping. Gayle Smith finds in this mingling of past and present, of memory and experience, of detachment and involvement an example of Jewett’s using language to show the transcendence of Sylvia’s connection with nature.

Setting

Setting is important in “A White Heron,” because it is Sylvia’s close connection with nature that sets her apart from other people. Fittingly, the name “Sylvia” comes from the Latin silva, meaning “wood” or “forest,” and the story takes place in the woods, far from the noisy city where Sylvia was born, and near the vast ocean that, until the story begins, she has never seen. “There ain’t a foot o’ ground she don’t know her way over,” and she knows the birds and animals, so she is the perfect guide for the hunter. However, when the two go out together, the young man leads the way. Here, the setting underscores the power differences between the two. The hunter chooses Sylvia specifically because she knows the scene, yet he guides her through it. The nearness of the coast is also important, because it is when the girl reaches the top of the old pine and can see the ocean and “the white sails of ships out at sea” that she realizes that this “vast and awesome world” is hers, and she has found it alone. She does not need the young man to show her the world; this “wonderful sight and pageant of the world” is before her. The time of the story is important as well. In the late nineteenth century, one could easily imagine a girl living in rural isolation, seeing few people other than her grandmother, and one could guess at how exciting and confusing a visitor offering money might be. Sylvia’s innocence of the technological world is essential; she must be wholly in nature because that is where she belongs, yet it must seem unremarkable that she has never seen the sea.

Anthropomorphism

Throughout the first half of “A White Heron,” the forest in which Sylvia lives is an ordinary forest, although her connection to it is clearly deeper than other people’s. It contains trees and animals and bird songs of the expected kinds, and even the birds feeding out of her hands seem rare but not fantastic. But when she begins to climb the old pine tree, the tree is presented as an active, sentient being: “it must truly have been amazed that morning,” “The old pine must have loved his new dependent.” This anthropomorphism, or the attributing of human characteristics to nonhuman beings, is used to high-light Sylvia’s extraordinary oneness with nature. Where at first the tree only seems “to lengthen itself out” as she climbs, by the time she reaches the top the tree’s sentience is clear. The narrator does not say that the tree seems to hold the wind away from Sylvia, or that Sylvia imagines it holds back the wind; the bold statement is that “the tree stood still and held away the winds.” The increasing anthropomorphism echoes Sylvia’s increasing knowledge and power as she climbs.

Pathetic Fallacy

Closely related to anthropomorphism, the pathetic fallacy, or the assumption by the narrator that nature itself has human feeling and cares about human suffering, is used at the end of “A White Heron” when the narrator addresses nature directly on behalf of Sylvia. A direct address to “woodlands and summer-time” seems quaint to modern readers, but Jewett leads up to it by increasing the narrator’s and the reader’s involvement throughout the second half of the story. After the great tree has actively assisted Sylvia in her climb, and after her oneness with nature has been confirmed by her refusal to divulge the nesting place, it does not seem a great stretch of the imagination for the narrator to beg of nature itself: “Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child!”

For early readers, the story was seen mostly as an admirable example of local color writing. The local color movement, which reached its peak in the United States in the 1880s, tried to capture the mannerisms, peculiar speech, dress, and customs of a particular region of the country. Some of its most successful proponents were Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, Bret Harte, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Local color writing was thought to be less serious than other types of fiction, written primarily to be entertaining, even amusing. This is not to say that these writings were not of high quality, but readers did not generally look to them for deep issues and ideas.

By the 1920s, scholars began to take Jewett’s work more seriously, following the lead of Willa Cather, who in her introduction to an edition of The Best Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett ranked Jewett with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain. Commentators began to look again at the short stories and find in them issues of broad significance. While Jewett was still regarded as one of the greatest of the local color writers, she was also noted for the sophisticated way in which she dealt with the conflicts brought about by industrialization and capitalism. No important criticism of her work appeared in the 1930s or 1940s, but “A White Heron” continued to appear in anthologies and textbooks, and was often cited in literary histories as one of the finest examples of the American short story.

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