In “A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett, the narrator uses third person omniscient narration and shifts between the main characters’ perspectives to substantiate Sylvia’s position as the only protagonist of the story. As the story follows the account of a young girl, Sylvia, in the 19th century New England countryside, the perspective of the third person omniscient narration switches amongst Sylvia, her grandmother, and the hunter. Through Sylvia’s grandmother’s perspective, the reader is given an insight into Sylvia’s past. For example, Sylvia’s grandmother, Mrs. Tilley, explains that Sylvia had grown up in a “crowded manufacturing town” (1.2) and that Sylvia was “Afraid of folks” (1.2). This perspective provides context as to why Sylvia possesses such a great affinity and appreciation for nature and the countryside. Likewise, because Mrs. Tilley’s perspective highlights Sylvia’s discomfort and anxiety in the metropolitan setting, pathos is used to make the …show more content…
Although the hunter acts friendly and kind to Sylvia and her grandmother, it becomes clear that his motives are skewed. He is described to have not noticed “this hint of family sorrows in his eager interest in something else.” (1.17). This indicates that his benevolence stemmed not from his good heartedness but from his drive to capture the white heron. Moreover, the sentence “He was sure from the way the shy little girl looked once or twice yesterday that she had at least seen the white heron, and now she must really be made to tell” (2.11), discloses that the hunter tried to beguile Sylvia into telling him the heron’s location by giving her attention. In depicting the hunter as a negative influence, the antagonist, and contrasting his personality to that of innocent Sylvia, the narration validates Sylvia as the
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.
The novel Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a book that was written in order to provide “Some instructions on writing and life.” Lamott published the book in 1994 in hopes to share the secrets of what it is truly like to be a writer, as both a warning and as encouragement. Bird by Bird shares with the reader the ironic truth of being a struggling writer through personal experience and humorous stories. Lamott uses memories from her past to help illustrate her points and to help the reader get to know who she is, not only as a writer, but as a person. The author focuses on the true struggles and benefits of being a writer while using metaphors and analogies to express her points, she also wraps her life stories around almost every writing tip.
Foremost, we need to examine the hunter from his psychological progression from his past. In the story, his views are often overshadowed by the narrater or by our learned emotion to see the story as a picture. He states that he has emotional baggage from a previous relationship (Houston, MLM, 805) and tries to explain how much she hurt him. That would bring any of us to a point of building a sort of emotional wall. From this the narrorater begins to build a sort of case against him with her friends instead of looking and progressing him past that point of rejection from his past girlfriend.
The short story, “The White Heron” and the poem, “A Caged Bird” are both alike and different in many ways. In the next couple of paragraphs I will explain these similarities and differences and what makes them unique to the stories.
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.
Our first introduction to these competing sets of values begins when we meet Sylvia. She is a young girl from a crowded manufacturing town who has recently come to stay with her grandmother on a farm. We see Sylvia's move from the industrial world to a rural one as a beneficial change for the girl, especially from the passage, "Everybody said that it was a good change for a little maid who had tried to grow for eight years in a crowded manufacturing town, but, as for Sylvia herself, it seemed as if she never had been alive at the all before she came to live at the farm"(133). The new values that are central to Sylvia's feelings of life are her opportunities to plays games with the cow. Most visibly, Sylvia becomes so alive in the rural world that she begins to think compassionately about her neighbor's geraniums (133). We begin to see that Sylvia values are strikingly different from the industrial and materialistic notions of controlling nature. Additionally, Sylvia is alive in nature because she learns to respect the natural forces of this l...
In conclusion, Sylvia’s decision was arduous. She experienced many different emotions while figuring out which choice to choose. At first she was excited because she could get a reward that would help her family. Then she felt sad as nature was one of the very few things she enjoyed and a small piece of it would be destroyed if she chose to collect the reward. In the end, she chose to preserve the small piece she could. As she grew older, she began to wonder if she made the right decision. She also begins to wonder if the friendship with the hunter was worth discarding for the greater good of the bird. At the end of the short story, Sylvia asks herself “Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been, who can tell?” (45) These feelings and motivations lead Sylvia to choose to free the white heron instead of using it for personal self-gain.
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...
Once upon a time, in the pastoral English countryside there lived a fair haired young lady named Catherine. The fairytale life Catherine envisioned for herself growing up came to a sudden halt the year she turned fourteen. In the novel, Catherine Called Birdy, written by Karen Cushman, the author carefully sews together the uneven fabric of Catherine’s life down to the last miserable stitch. In this tale, Catherine struggles to cope with not only the marital plans her unfeeling father has arranged for her, but also the vexatious lady lessons she is required to do daily.
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.
When driving home her cow in the dark Sylvia’s “feet were familiar with the path, and it was no matter whether their eyes could see it or not” (Jewett 682). Sylvia is familiar with the woodlands to such an extent that she forms a strong physical connection to the natural world because even her “feet were familiar with the path.” She also refers to her cow as a “valued companion” and considers the cow’s pranks as an “intelligent attempt to play hide and seek” to which she responds to “with a good deal of zest” (Jewett 682). Sylvia escapes urban society because she was “afraid of folks,” and now relies on her “valued companion” to fulfill her need for friends and playmates. In doing so, the cow becomes the sole being she interacts with and consists of the totality of her amusement, which in turn prompts a close emotional attachment and relationship. Prior to coming to the farm, she had lived “in a crowded manufacturing town” but now feels “as if she had never been alive before.” Sylvia is content in her isolation from humanity at the farm where she only lives with her grandmother, and finally feels “alive” in a setting where she is alienated from other people and surrounded by nature and animals. She in turn seems content and welcomes her close relationship to the natural world around her and willingly gives up human interactions to achieve this. After trailing through the woods late into the night she feels “as if she were a part of the gray shadows and the moving leaves.” Sylvia comes to the realization that she becomes “a part of” and finds a sense of belonging in the natural world, which shows her close emotional
“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.
...usting civilization upon it? (P. Miller, p.207). With all this, the author has achieved the vividness implication that aggressive masculine modernization is a danger to the gentle feminine nature. In the end of the story, Sylvia decides to keep the secret of the heron and accepts to see her beloved hunter go away. This solution reflects Jewett?s hope that the innocent nature could stay unharmed from the urbanization.
Mrs. Mallard’s repressed married life is a secret that she keeps to herself. She is not open and honest with her sister Josephine who has shown nothing but concern. This is clearly evident in the great care that her sister and husband’s friend Richard show to break the news of her husband’s tragic death as gently as they can. They think that she is so much in love with him that hearing the news of his death would aggravate her poor heart condition and lead to death. Little do they know that she did not love him dearly at all and in fact took the news in a very positive way, opening her arms to welcome a new life without her husband. This can be seen in the fact that when she storms into her room and her focus shifts drastically from that of her husband’s death to nature that is symbolic of new life and possibilities awaiting her. Her senses came to life; they come alive to the beauty in the nature. Her eyes could reach the vastness of the sky; she could smell the delicious breath of rain in the air; and ears became attentive to a song f...