Sylvia is the main protagonist in the short story “A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett. Sylvia is only nine years old and lives on her Grandmother’s farm in the country. Sylvia is a complex character psychologically and emotionally for her age. The story reveals the complexity of a young girl maturing into a woman. Under the influence of Jewett’s regionalist writing, Sylvia’s character is more three-dimensional and sentimental, revealing layers of her personality through nature imagery and sexual symbolism in her surroundings and relationships. Likewise, in Mary E. Freeman’s “A New England Nun,” the domestic imagery symbolizes a more significant meaning of sexual escape from the burdens of marriage that threaten Louisa Ellis’ artistic haven in which her selfhood is housed. For many women of Louisa’s time period, autonomy came only with the denial of sexual pleasure, just like a nun’s life. Jewett’s short story can be compared Freeman’s in terms of women’s bond with their natural surroundings and how its imagery marks the emergence of their sexual freedom in a male dominated society.
There is a wide array of nature imagery in “Heron” that symbolize the coming of age of Sylvia and how she decides to be a woman of nature rather than a woman of society. Trees are abundant throughout the story, especially the pine tree. Sylvia climbs one large pine tree to see the white heron's nesting place in total isolation and from the point of view that is secret and safe. Paula Blanchard says that the “lofty old pine of ‘A White Heron’ [is] widely interpreted as a phallic symbol” (234) itself where nature’s presence is “a symbol for human psychological states and a character in its own right” (242). Sylvia cherishes the isolation and seclusion of the woods and the secret location of the white heron’s nest, which the hunter seeks so desperately. The mythical significance of the tree seems to be its role as a bridge for Sylvia, connecting her to the woodlands and to the sky where birds reign. She does express a wish to fly like the birds: “…and Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among the clouds” (Jewett 816). The landscape is described beyond the confines of those woods as an endless expanse of nature’s beauty, where “westward, the woodlands and farms reached miles and miles into the distance; here and there were church steeples, and white villages, truly it was a vast and awesome world!” (Jewett 816). According to Blanchard, in the story “nature is a powerful and seductive protagonist. It has claimed Sylvia long before the hunter appears and literally given her life” (242). By climbing the great pine tree Sylvia comes very close to the act of flying as a human without wings. Along with the story’s theme of "growing up", the climbing of a tree symbolizes that the climber is transitioning from one stage of life into another. Sylvia’s transformation in nature from a girl into a woman marks her sexual awareness and maturity.
Bird imagery is probably the most obvious and symbolic in the “Heron.” As Sylvia brings the stray cow home again, she communes with the birds and their world by “listen[ing] to the thrushes with a heart that beat fast with pleasure” (Jewett 812). Sylvia is suddenly jolted back into the other world, where men prowl, when she hears the whistle, “not a bird’s-whistle, which would have a sort of friendliness, but a boy’s whistle” (812). Sylvia thinks that the “enemy” has discovered her and only after much apprehension and caution does she begin to like the tall young man who is a bird hunter. Later in the story, Sylvia seems to morph into a bird herself when she climbs the pine tree observing the heron’s nest before she makes her final decision whether to unveil the secret she and nature share with the hunter. Richard Cary remarks on Jewett’s character’s strong bond with nature, claiming that they are often “endowed with such ingenuous sensitivity to the moods and meanings of nature that they appear absolutely at one with landscape and weather, their natural habitat” (54). Sylvia climbs the tree without shoes or protection, “with her bare feet and fingers, that pinched and held like bird’s claws to the monstrous ladder reaching up, up, almost to the sky itself” (Jewett 816). Sylvia climbs the tree with such ease, as she has climbed it so many times before, like a bird is so naturally familiar with his own surroundings. The further she climbs, the more difficult it becomes and the more she morphs as “her thin little fingers clumsy and stiff” begin to resemble “angry talons” (816). She takes on the feathery lightness of birds when the smaller limbs of the tree are described as possibly not being able to “advantage this light, weak creature on her way!” (816). By the time Sylvia reaches the top, she is a bird, able to see even the distant “white sails of ships out to sea” (816) and “the wild, light, slender bird that floats and wavers, and goes back like an arrow presently to his home in the green world beneath” (Jewett 817). As a heron, Sylvia gains freedom to be herself, to make her own choices and to live her own life. Furthermore, she earns for herself three rewards: “she has achieved knowledge of nature, knowledge of self, and a merger of self with nature. To divulge the secret of the heron would be to divulge the secret of self; to destroy one would be to destroy the other” (Carey 102). As a young girl, a wild, untamed virgin, Sylvia is very much aware of her own secret power that she will never tell.
In “Heron,” the hunter symbolizes the patriarchal society and the allure of masculine sexuality that Sylvia is fighting against. If Sylvia gives the secret of the heron’s location to the hunter, she will be giving herself to him in an act of sexual submission and final offering of individual feminine power. The hunter’s violence towards birds, by only killing them for the sport, demonstrates the threat to Sylvia, as a symbolic bird herself, and the potential sealing of her own death by surrendering to him her secret. Elizabeth Silverthorne states that “From a feminist critical perspective, Sylvia’s rejection of the temptation to please the young man who attracts her may be seen as a rejection of material and fleshly pleasures because of the need to be true to her own nature, which is inextricably tied to the nature around her” (126). Her metamorphosis into a “white” bird symbolizes her purity and virginity that is endangered by act of hunting itself and the proof of its bloody prizes carried in the hunter’s “lumpy game-bag”. Sylvia’s apprehension is sensed early on by his uncommon whistle and later when she accompanies him in the woods as he carries his gun, a rather phallic image, while she wonders “why he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much” and knows that she “would have liked him vastly better without his gun” (Jewett 815). The hunter never shows any direct violence or insincerity towards Sylvia. Sylvia's conflict arises when she must decide whether to tell the hunter about the heron's nest. However, she realized that “in sacrificing the heron, she would have sacrificed her own integrity” (Silverthorne 127). She decides to keep the secret to herself, somehow retaining her childhood innocence in the process. Sylvia gains female control over her life’s destiny, choosing a life connected to nature rather than the typical women’s work she is expected to perform living on a farm.
Freeman’s sense of regionalism, with its focus on the natural surroundings of women, is evident in the short story “A New England Nun” where the protagonist, Louisa Ellis, is an engaged spinster who enjoys ripping seams and sewing them back together. Louisa's triumph comes when she is able to let go the man named Joe Daggat that she has been engaged to for fourteen years and finally allow herself to be truly happy in a solitary, yet peaceful life. Leah Glasser remarks on how the story “offers a brilliant analysis of the autonomy the single woman can achieve through her work, whatever form it takes, the self-fulfillment it brings, and its fragility in the face of marriage” (36). The character of Louisa Ellis is realistically drawn by her quaint and common lifestyle. However, Freeman also offers this female protagonist from a deeper psychological perspective of the world around her and its relation to her sexual liberty. Louisa’s surroundings are all images of her work that “are deliberately delicate and on the brink of vanishing,” symbolizing a deeper exploration of “Louisa’s buried sexuality and the necessity of that burial” (Glasser 36). Louisa is not as shallow or superficial as she may appear. Her diligent efforts to maintain the tidiness and orderliness of her home, in essence her “space”, is symbolic of the woman’s fight for control over her own body in a society that enforces standards keeping the female body corseted and silent.
Louisa’s sanctuary is her home and is described in much detail throughout the story. Her kitchen contains a little square table precisely in the center, covered with starched tablecloth, where she used real china everyday—to the envy of the neighbors. Her living room is seen by Joe Dagget as “her delicately sweet room” in which he feels “perplexity and uneasiness” as if he was “surrounded by a hedge of lace” (Freeman 850). The constant domestic imagery of needles, thimbles, scissors, baskets, ribbons, tea, china, a garden, a green gingham apron, and books, creates a domestic haven in which Louisa is dominant and unthreatened. However, like Sylvia’s woods are invaded by the hunter, Louisa’s home is invaded by Joe Dagget. His rearrangement of her books and albums and tracks of dirt on her rug leave Louisa feeling violated: “Louisa, on her part, felt as much as the kind-hearted, long-suffering owner of the china shop might have done after the exit of a bear” (Freeman 850). Glasser notes that Louisa’s “hobby is to distill the essences from rose petals, and she stores the oils in vials for no apparent use. This small detail indicates Louisa’s stored-up yet though ultimately unrealized and useless sexuality” (36). Louisa’s self-imposed nunnery is a deliberate attempt to preserve her artistry, her home and her sexuality. The pet canary that she keeps, which “fluttered wildly beating his little yellow wings against the wires” when Joe visited is symbolic of Louisa’s bird-like nature. Glasser observes the image of the caged bird as a metaphor for the controlled wild nature of Louisa: “Although she may inwardly “flutter wildly,” Louisa is careful to keep the wires of her cage firmly shut whenever Joe visits" (36).
Louisa Ellis is expected to marry and make a home with her husband as a submissive wife. The value of marriage and home-making is heavily ingrained in women’s prospects in life. However, Louisa is not so willing to give up her freedom. For Louisa, the prospect of “marriage would require the loss of her own home. Her ‘maidenly possessions’ would be ‘robbed of their old environments’ when moved to Joe’s home where ‘they would appear in such new guises that would almost cease to be themselves,’ just as Louisa senses she will be herself in her role as Joe’s wife” (Glasser 36). Instead, Louisa chooses to defy society’s standards for her life, making the decision to be a nun and be happy. Louisa’s rejection of marriage results in a continuation of domestic duties that giver her self-pride and satisfaction. Louisa becomes an artist in her own studio, creating her own masterpieces, with no male influences to stifle her individuality. Glasser states that Freeman’s “story captures contradictory voices, the victory and the loss in the choice to remain a ‘nun,’ faithful to oneself and to one’s work” (36). Louisa’s domestic work may be deemed menial or worthless, but Freeman intends to show something else. Louisa’s craftiness gives her a kind of power over her home, body and soul that would be void if she were to become the wife of Joe, working to create a home based only on his wants and needs. Louisa would rather remain “cloistered” in her own world amongst “her little feminine weapons” (Freeman 855), surrounded by those objects that personify her sexual freedom from a male world.
Works Cited
Blanchard, Paula. Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work. New York: Addison-Wesley,
1994. Print.
Carey, Richard. Sarah Orne Jewett. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1962. Print.
Freeman, Mary E.W. “A New England Nun.” Lauter, et al 848-856.
Glasser, Leah B. In a closet hidden: the life and work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. University of
Mass. Press, 1996. Print.
Jewett, Sarah O.. “A White Heron.” Lauter, et al 811-817.
Lauter, Paul, et al. Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. C. Cengage Learning, 2010.
Print.
Silverthorne, Elizabeth. Sarah Orne Jewett: A Writer’s Life. New York: The Overlook Press,
1993. Print.
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