Essay on "Moral Issues in a White Heron"

Essay 6 pages (1981 words) Sources: 1 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

White Heron

Innocence, Experience, Virginity, and Gender: Symbolism in Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron"

Coming of age is one of the most popular themes in literature; stories that fall into this general category can be found in sources as diverse as the Bible, Greek myth, and in every epoch of Western and World literature since. More most of this time, presumably due to the typical gender of most known authors, coming of age stories have focused on masculine characters -- many of Dickens' heroes experience a transition into manhood in his books, for instance, just as James Joyce's characters find themselves stuck in a weird adolescent limbo (the not-coming-of-age story?). Increasingly, however, as women authors found publishers and readers throughout the nineteenth century, tales of young girls coming of age also began to grow in popularity. These stories are just as adiverse as the many types of coming of age stories involving male characters, reflecting the unique qualities of their authors.

Sarah Orne Jewett is one such author, and her story "A White Heron" recounts the tale of a young girl's awakening to the wider world in the New England countryside. Many of the tell-tale signs that this is a coming-of-age story are made quite explicit in the text, as by the end of the story Sylvia has learned to act and think independently in a manner that is quite overt to the reader (though less so to the other characters in the story). With the protagonist being a nine-year-old girl, one could hardly keep from making this a coming of age story of sorts. Yet in many respects, the true meaning of the story is hidden in layers of subtext and symbols purposefully meant to obscure certain aspects of Sylvia's transformation that speak to the true level of awareness to which this character awakes.

Sylvia begins the story as a rather timid girl. She is not overly frightened of the nature surrounding the farm where she and her grandmother live, at least not in the daytime, but her grandmother notes that she has always seemed "afraid of folks" (Jewett par. 3). This and the slight fear that comes over her being in the woods later than she is used to show Sylvia to be innocent and naive. Though she enjoys dawdling in the woods and experiencing nature first hand, she also regards the world as a strange place and is at times more frightened of the tings she does not know than she is attracted to them. She is, of course, a little nine-year-old girl, and this innocence should hardly be surprising; it is notable, however, for the direction that the story takes very soon after these passages reflecting her innocence.

As the story progresses, Sylvia is surprised in the woods while leading her cow home by a young man with a gun on his shoulder who needs a place to stay the night. She is frightened form this man, and even attempts to hide in the bushes so she can perhaps escape unnoticed, but not before he spots her. This man, as she later finds out, considers himself a lover of birds -- he hunts them, either snaring them or shooting them, and stuffs them to build up his collection. One of the prizes he is after, a rare bird that he's been keeping an eye out for five years, is a white heron, one of which has been sighted in the surrounding area. As luck would have it, of course, Sylvia has seen the bird herself. Furthermore, she develops and carries out a plan whereby she can find the location of the bird's nest.

Although it receives very little space in the text itself, the main conflict in the story centers on Sylvia's decision whether or not to reveal the location of the heron to the young man. The issue is whether she is willing to give up the heron either for the money that the mans has offered -- the sum of ten dollars would have been quite large indeed in those days -- or for the love the she has already begun to feel for the man despite his treatment of the nature he adores. She does even explicitly acknowledge the fact that what he does destroys the things that she loves, and the he purports to love -- for him, the birds are simply something to collect. For Sylvia, the heron represents nature in all of its wild and untouched glory. For the reader, of course, the heron takes on other levels of symbolism that are very much related to both the young man's and Sylvia's view of the bird, but that allows a much more profound story -- and a more complete coming-of-age story -- to be told.

Though there is nothing overtly sexual in the story, there are many hints at a budding sexuality in the girl as she takes her first tentative steps towards puberty. Certainly, her infatuation with the young man -- she "could have served and followed him and loved him as a dog loves" -- are the first indications of such feelings towards the opposite sex, and no sex act or even wholly illicit thought need enter into the situation to make this any clearer (Jewett par. 41). At the same time, the symbolism of the heron and its white coloring make it a symbol of purity and innocence if not explicitly virginity. "A White Heron" is a coming-of-age story not simply because it shows a nine-year-old girl who grows a little wiser as the story progresses, but because it tells the tale of a loss of innocence, and even a sexual awakening. The heron itself is a symbol of Sylvia's purty, and though she of course retains this in a physical sense she knows that she has lost something she can never get back.

Her ultimate decision not to tell the young man where he can find his prize reflects her unwillingness to fully let go of the innocent and carefree wonder she enjoys in the woods, and of her desire to hold onto the sense of purity and even strangeness that exists in the world around her. She chides herself for it, wondering why she balks for a bird's sake when the "great world for the first time puts out a hand to her," and in this chiding her true feelings are revealed (Jewett par. 40). She sees this opportunity as "the world putting a hand out," either looking for assistance or offering for her to come along on the journey, or both. Either way, accepting the bargain by taking the world's hand means knowing more about the world and becoming experienced or "worldly." this is something that Sylvia simply cannot bring herself to do; the innocence and purity of childhood that is mirrored in the purity of nature is something that she is incapable of willingly giving up.

As Jewett wrote this before the popularization of Freud, ignoring the all-too-obvious yet most likely unintentional phallic symbolism of the great pine tree will perhaps be forgiven. What happens atop the tree, however, is essential to an understanding of the story. Sylvia has left her house early on the second and final morning of the young man's stay in order to climb the highest tree in the area and scan for signs of the heron coming back to his nest at dawn. Her climb up the tree at once symbolizes her union with nature and her human desire to conquer it, with the narrator referring to it as a "great enterprise" yet at the same time remarking that "more than all the hawks, and bats, and moths, and even the sweet voiced thrushes, was the brave, beating heart of the solitary gray-eyed child" (Jewett par. 32-3).

Once at the top of the tree, the moment of truth comes -- Sylvia spots the bird, and as luck would have it his nest is in the very tree in which she is keeping her watch. She is enraptured by his flight and in watching him once he has arrived at his nest, and "gives a long sigh" when a noisier group of birds causes the heron to move away (Jewett par. 36). She is obviously enamored with the bird; this is the second object of her young love that the reader has seen in as many days of this young girl's life. She is caught between pleasing the first of these loves that she consciously recognized -- i.e. The young man -- by sacrificing the love that she has lived with unwittingly for her entire life, especially since coming to live with her grandmother in the relative wilderness -- her innocence, as symbolized by the heron.

Although the heron does not necessarily symbolize anything having to do with sexuality in and of itself, there are other indicators in the story that strengthen at least a somewhat sexual interpretation for the heron. The young man's desire to possess it… READ MORE

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