A White Heron (Criticism)

Criticism

Cynthia Bily

Bily currently teaches at Adrian College. In the following essay, she examines the universal themes that Jewett uses in “A White Heron.”

To her contemporaries, Sarah Orne Jewett was primarily a local color writer. Her stories and novels were peopled with typical villagers speaking in dialect, going about their daily work as country doctors or farmers or seafarers, moving about among the flora and fauna and landscape of New England. As a young avid reader, Jewett had admired the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, especially her depictions of the common folk of the South, with their strengths and short comings. One of Jewett’s aims as a writer was to present the people of her native Maine in the same honest and respectful light. But if her characters’ speech and dress and mannerisms were identifiably regional, their concerns and problems were not. Like all the best local color writing, Jewett’s fiction uses regional settings, but explores themes that are universal.

Most of Jewett’s central characters are women, and they usually operate to some extent out of the bustle of mainstream society: they are not young women having dramatic adventures and finding husbands, but spinsters and widows and children and professional women leading quiet, sometimes lonely, lives. Their conflicts are internal, their support is mainly from other women, their arena is domestic. It has often been observed that fiction with a male protagonist is considered suitable for all to read, but fiction about women is “women’s fiction.” Perhaps this accounts in part for Jewett’s having been treated as second-rate, although in the century since it was written The Country of the Pointed Firs has never been allowed to go out of print, and “A White Heron” has been anthologized dozens of times.

The story of “A White Heron” revolves around a conflict, a choice a young girl must make between listening to an external voice and heeding an internal one. It is the story of nine-year-old Sylvia, who lives in the Maine woods with her grandmother, Mrs. Tilley. The two women (if the word can be used to describe a nine-year-old) appear to have no near neighbors, and there is no family around. Sylvia’s parents and siblings live in a “crowded manufacturing town” from which Mrs. Tilley rescued Sylvia a year before, and Sylvia has known from the day she arrived on the farm that “she never should wish to go home.” Whatever men were once on the farm have wandered off or died. So the two women are alone, with only a cow, Mistress Moolly, for companionship. For Sylvia, the cow is a true “valued companion,” giving “good milk and plenty of it,” and offering an excuse for lingering walks through the woods between the pasture and home. Sylvia and her grandmother have plenty to eat and a “clean and comfortable little dwelling.” They want for nothing. As Elizabeth Ammons describes it, it is a “rural paradise,” a mythical woman-dominated Eden.

If the forest home has overtones of fantasy or myth, so too is Sylvia a most unnaturally natural child. Although born and raised in the city, her true home is in the forest (even her name is from the Latin for “wood”). Mrs. Tilley observes, “There ain’t a foot o’ ground she don’t know her way over, and the wild creatur’s counts her one o’ themselves. Squer’ls she’ll tame to come an’ feed right out o’ her hands, and all sorts o’ birds.” She is “afraid of folks,” but she is not afraid to be in the woods after dark, even hearing the animals calling and rustling. Rather than causing fear, she listens to the bird calls “with a heart that beat fast with pleasure”; it makes her feel “as if she were a part of the gray shadows and moving leaves.” Interestingly, the only thing that does disturb her in the forest is the memory from her city days of “the great red-faced boy who used to chase and frighten her.”

Startling Sylvia out of this memory is the “determined, and somewhat aggressive” sound and then the appearance of another male, “the enemy,” a handsome young man with a gun over his shoulder and a “heavy game bag.” He is an ornithologist, a scientist who studies birds, and he is spending his vacation in the woods hunting for new specimens for his collection of “stuffed and preserved” birds. Sylvia responds to his friendliness by withdrawing. She can barely speak (she says only four words throughout the story), she does not “dare to look boldly” at him, she hangs her head “as if the stem of it were broken,” she is “alarmed,” “trembling.” Mrs. Tilley, on the other hand, leaps to offer the guest a meal, his choice of bedding, and lively chatter about the farm, her lost family, and Sylvia. As the three “new friends” sit in the doorway after supper, Mrs. Tilley and the hunter chat. She tells him about her son Dan, who was so good with his gun that “I never wanted for pa’tridges or gray squer’ls while he was to home.” The man talks about his own hunting, not for food, but for specimens for his collection. Mrs. Tilley is enjoying the man’s company, but Sylvia avoids focusing on him, and pretends to be more interested in watching a hop-toad on the path.

The hunter is everything Sylvia is not. He is friendly and outgoing, while she is “afraid of folks.” He has traveled freely, while Sylvia has “wondered and dreamed about” but never seen the ocean just a few miles away. (Mrs. Tilley, too, has always stayed close to home, but “I’d ha’ seen the world myself if it had been I could.”) He seems to have plenty of money, and offers ten dollars for the secret of where the white heron nests, but for Sylvia “no amount of thought . . . could decide how many wished-for treasures then ten dollars, so lightly spoken of, would buy.”

It is no wonder that Sylvia is confused. As her fear evaporates, she finds that he is “most kind and sympathetic.” They walk through the woods together, watching the birds, listening to their songs. Her “woman’s heart, asleep in the child, [is] vaguely thrilled by a dream of love.” And yet there are uneasy moments. It does not trouble the girl, but the narrator notices that although they are in the woods Sylvia knows every foot of, the youngman always leads the way, and Sylvia follows. He does most the of talking; “The sound of her own unquestioned voice would have terrified her — it was hard enough to answer yes or know when there was need of that.” Like the girl, the youngman admires birds, but he shows his admiration by killing them. The only times she is afraid with him now is when he kills “some unsuspecting creature.” She is never one with the hunter, never on equal footing. Can the young child recognize that the hunter values Sylvia for the same reason he values the white heron: because in her special knowledge of the woods and the birds she is rare, and therefore useful?

The action of the story comes down to a choice for Sylvia. Having more knowledge than the hunter, she must choose whether to make him happy by telling him where the heron’s nest is (and he “is so well worth making happy”) or keep the secret to herself. Critics have offered many different interpretations about the meaning of this choice. The hunter offers a chance for money, for fulfilled womanhood, for human companionship, for sex. (Although Kelley Griffith, Jr. points out the inherent absurdity in assuming that this temporary partnership between the man and the child could become permanent.) Whatever he represents, it is clear that if Sylvia chooses him she will lose something of herself. She can remain a “lonely country child,” or she can serve, follow, and love him ”as a dog loves.”

What Sylvia finds at the top of the tree is the world, and her place in it. George Held points out that the offer of money separates Sylvia for the first time from the natural world. As she climbs, the connection is restored. Watching the two hawks, “Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among the clouds.” Back on the ground, when it is time to tell the secret, “she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together.” Sylvia knows where she belongs, she knows what she is complete with and whom she would always follow. And she has seen “the vast and awesome world” without anyone’s help.

So Sylvia makes her choice. As Griffith explains, it is a limited triumph, “such a choice is fraught with risk — the risk of loneliness, isolation, disappointment, limited opportunity, and doubt.” Having gone through this experience, Sylvia, who had seemed content to live without human companionship, is now a “lonely country child.”

What is remarkable about “A White Heron” is how well it has spoken to readers of different generations. When Jewett wrote the story in the 1880s, she was concerned by the decimation of the New England forests and the over-collecting of certain animals, including the heron. These concerns resurfaced in the United States in the 1970s, and gave readers an important look at environmental issues. Feminist concerns that faded from public consciousness after women’s suffrage in the 1920s reappeared in the 1970s, and growing public discussion about sexual orientation gave critics new ways to look at the story and at Jewett’s life. Of course, archetypal themes of good versus evil, flesh versus spirit, money versus grace, have always been with us. Jewett’s great talent was in creating characters and relationships so rich that they have touched readers’ hearts and minds for over a century.

Source: Cynthia Bily, “Overview of ‘A White Heron’,” in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

Compare & Contrast

• 1880s: Concern for the environment becomes an issue in the United States in the years following the Civil War, when economic development increases rapidly at the expense of natural resources, such as timber. In 1891, President Harrison signs a proclamation that turns a million acres in Colorado into the nation’s first forest preserve.
  1990s: Forest preservation threatens jobs in the Pacific Northwest, where loggers prohibited from destroying the habitat of the spotted owl face layoffs. Global concern for the environment results in conferences such as the 1992 Earth Summit, held in Brazil. Topics for discussion include global warming and the destruction of the rain forests.
• 1880s: Naturalist John James Audubon (1785-1851) attains great wealth and fame from his paintings of birds. He works from dead models; disliking the stiffness of stuffed and mounted specimens, he requires many freshly killed birds for each painting.
  1990s: The Audubon Society, founded in 1886 as the country’s first bird preservation society, comprises 500 chapters, 9 regional, and 12 state offices.
• 1880s: Many people move to crowded manufacturing towns, like the one in which Sylvia lives with her family, because of the availability of factory jobs. In the 1880s, the industrial sector grows rapidly as machine processes are standardized and new technologies, along with vast resources, make U.S. industries among the most productive in the world.
  1990s: Concerns regarding manufacturing industries are tied to environmental issues. Pollution from factory and automobile emissions is linked to global warming. While wealthier nations make some efforts to regulate emissions, developing countries dependent on industrialization to improve their economy lack the resources and desire to control pollution.

What Do I Read Next?

• The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett’s 1896 novel, is often considered her greatest work and one of the nineteenth century’s best pieces of regional fiction. Set in a New England coastal village and the surrounding countryside, and narrated in a strong female voice, it tells the stories of the typically eccentric people who shape the landscape, and are shaped by it.
• Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) does for the American Midwest what Jewett’s work does for New England: presents universally recognized characters in a highly localized setting. Anderson’s male narrator observes life in his small town, recording the secret loneliness and pain of his neighbors.
• Mary Austin’s 1903 The Land of Little Rain is an early work of Southwestern regional literature. It is nonfictional but very personal, a detailed look at the terrain, plants, animals, and Native Americans in the Sierras, presented by a woman who spent years living in the dry mountains and fighting to protect them from human exploitation.
• Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1987 collection of short stories. Le Guin may be best known as a science fiction writer, but these stories explore the place of women and animals in a male-dominated culture. In “May’s Lion” and other stories, she describes a world of women in which the earth’s creatures are respected and welcomed.
• In one of the best-known works of American natural history, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), Henry David Thoreau abandons civilization for two years and attempts to live a life of self-sufficiency and exploration in a tiny cabin at the edge of Walden Pond.