[In the article below, Moreno explicates “A White Heron” as a feminist quest myth in which Sylvia's journey has a psychological, physical, and spiritual meaning that can be interpreted using Jungian terms.]

In her short story “A White Heron,” Sarah Orne Jewett presents the quest myth in feminist terms. Since Sylvia, the protagonist, lives with her grandmother in the country, her bond with nature and the maternal is continually being formed and strengthened. Until the boy stranger, an ornithologist, enters the woods near her grandmother's farm, Sylvia's life is virtually devoid of male contact. (One previous encounter she had with a boy, “the great red-faced boy” of the city, was frightening to her.) But the young Sylvia is lured by the prospect of love and trusts the boy stranger. In an attempt to please him, she journeys alone into darkness in search of the elusive white heron, a symbol of spiritual transcendence. As Sylvia has no desire to dominate or destroy, she ultimately chooses to join nature instead of man. Through this journey, which may be seen as psychological, physical, and spiritual, Sylvia becomes one with the realm that the ornithologist endeavors to master through aggression but cannot.

In the opening scene, Sylvia dreamily drives a cow home through shadow-filled woods, which suggest the psychological process she must undergo. In Jungian psychology, the maturation process is called individuation. An aspect of this process involves the various parts of the self coming to terms with one another. Jung's colleague M.-L. von Franz states that in mythical terms the ego and the shadow, parts of the personality, are linked, the shadow being the darkness with which the ego is in conflict (Franz 168). Jung calls this conflict “the battle for deliverance” (Henderson 118). The shadow-filled woods through which Sylvia walks indicate she is engaged in this battle.

Sylvia's journey takes place in June: early adulthood on the calendar of human life. Jewett emphasizes Sylvia's age; she is a “little girl,” nine years old, on the brink of puberty. Furthermore, Sylvia is juxtaposed with a cow in the opening scene, suggesting her close attachment to the maternal. The dichotomy of the maternal symbol and the child points to the adolescence which Sylvia is about to enter on her physical journey.

The number nine has spiritual as well as physical implications: Jung's colleague Jolande Jacobi states, “The nine has been a ‘magic number’ for centuries. According to the traditional symbolism of numbers, it represents the perfected form of the perfected Trinity in its threefold elevation” (Jacobi 297). Indicative of Sylvia's spiritual journey, her trial, is the direction she walks: eastward. But, as the sun is setting, she walks away from the light, not toward it. For she must first pass through the darkness of night in order to reach the light of dawn, as is typical in myth: the hero must go into darkness, which represents death (Henderson 118). Sylvia's symbolic death is her passing away from one physical stage/spiritual state, while her symbolic rebirth follows at the beginning of a new day: the day she finds the object of her quest, the white heron.

From the initial scene, Sylvia's journey involves her sensual/sexual encounter with nature. In the country, Sylvia experiences a physical awakening. She has come to the country from the city (perhaps symbolic of society and the lack of individual identity), and at the farm she feels alive for the first time, “as if she never had been alive at all” (Jewett 228). As she walks through the water in bare feet, her heart beats “fast with pleasure” (Jewett 229). Jewett sets the tone for Sylvia's physical journey with her sensual, strong imagery: “twilight moths struck softly against her … there was a stirring in the great boughs overhead … She was not often in the woods so late as this, and it made her feel as if she were a part of the gray shadows and the moving leaves” (Jewett 229). As Sylvia develops an affinity with nature, she also discovers her own identity.

Just as the reader becomes aware of Sylvia's bond with nature, the absence of men in Sylvia's life also becomes clear: Sylvia lives on the farm with her grandmother, who chose Sylvia out of her daughter's children to live with her in the country. No mention is ever made of Sylvia's father. She is completely surrounded by maternal figures and imagery, from her own mother, to her grandmother, to Mistress Moolly the cow, to the regenerative vegetation around her. She feels as much akin to the woodlands as she feels alienated from the masculine, mechanistic city.¹

As Sylvia wanders home through the woods with the cow, “the thought of the great red-faced boy who used to chase and frighten her” causes her “to hurry along the path to escape from the shadow of the trees” (Jewett 229). Juxtaposed with this fear-evoking remembrance is the present threat of the boy stranger's whistle.² Jewett adds to the tension of this threat by switching from past to present tense: “suddenly this little woodsgirl is horror-stricken to hear a clear whistle not very far away. Not a bird's whistle, which would have a sort of friendliness, but a boy's whistle, determined, and somewhat aggressive” (Jewett 229). As the boy stranger intrudes on Sylvia's woods, Sylvia instinctively attempts to hide herself in the bushes as would a child in a mother's skirts when confronted by a stranger, or as would a white heron in the leaves of a tree when threatened by a hunter.

The boy stranger seems to represent male dominance and sexuality, and the human world as opposed to the natural world. He, perhaps, may be seen as a devil figure. The stranger is sexual: carrying a gun, an obvious phallic symbol; asking to spend the night at Sylvia's house; and demanding that Sylvia give him milk. The stranger also demands to know Sylvia's name, but he doesn't tell her his. The boy's aggressive whistle indicates the force of his desire to acquire Sylvia's knowledge of the whereabouts of the white heron, which he intends to kill. As the boy stranger speaks with Sylvia and her grandmother, he makes known his offer of money to anyone who can show him the heron's nest. He tempts Sylvia not only with money, but also with the promise of friendship. If, as Joseph L. Henderson suggests, “… the bird is the most fitting symbol of transcendence” (Henderson 151), then in effect the stranger is asking Sylvia to sell her soul.³

The second scene takes place the following day in the woods; Sylvia becomes more confident with the boy stranger and loses her initial fear of him. The stranger presents Sylvia with a jack-knife, another phallic symbol, a bribe for her to trust him. Jewett's language is implicitly sexual: “All day long he did not once make her troubled or afraid except when he brought down some unsuspecting singing creature from its bough” (Jewett 233). It is when he “brings down” a creature that Sylvia feels afraid, but she is nonetheless attracted to him: She “watched the young man with loving admiration. She had never seen anybody so charming and delightful; the woman's heart, asleep in the child, was vaguely thrilled by a dream of love” (Jewett 233). The sexual tone of the passage continues as “they pressed forward again eagerly, parting the branches,—speaking to each other rarely and in whispers; the young man going first and Sylvia following, fascinated … her gray eyes dark with excitement” (Jewett 233–34).

In the next scene, before sunrise the following morning, Sylvia sets off on her lonely journey into the woods to discover the white heron's nest. Her intention is to please the boy stranger with the knowledge he has been seeking. She is not aware as she begins her journey that it will lead to what Henderson terms a “release through transcendence,” that her “lonely journey or pilgrimage” is indeed a spiritual pilgrimage, one of “release, renunciation, and atonement, presided over and fostered by some spirit of compassion” (Henderson 151).

When Sylvia mounts the tree from which she hopes to see the white heron, she abandons her passivity and experiences a physical and spiritual awakening. According to Jung, the tree is a symbol of “evolution, physical growth or psychological maturation” (Jung 90). Jung suggests the tree may also symbolize the phallus. Essential to the sexual interpretation of this scene is Jewett's personification of the tree.⁴ It is described as a “great tree … the last of its generation” (Jewett 234). When Sylvia approaches the tree, it sleeps, as if human. The tone of the passage is expressly sexual: Sylvia mounts the tree “with tingling, eager blood coursing the channels of her whole frame” (Jewett 235). The tree “seemed to lengthen itself out as she went up, and to reach farther and farther upward” (Jewett 236), as though it were a phallus becoming erect. At the top of the tree, Sylvia's heart is beating, her face is “like a pale star,” and she stands “trembling and tired but wholly triumphant” (Jewett 236). When Sylvia sees the white heron, her ecstasy is spiritual as well as physical. She “gives a long sigh” and is “well satisfied” (Jewett 238).

Jewett switches verb tense in this scene from past to present imperative (the switch lends tension and immediacy to the scene just as the change of tense in the first scene does); the imperative voice seems to be that of a higher being, the divine, instructing her where to look in order to see the white heron. Or perhaps this imperative voice is the voice of the Self, about which Franz speaks: “How far [the psyche] develops depends on whether or not the ego is willing to listen to the messages of Self” (Franz 162). The voice tells Sylvia, “And wait! wait! do not move a foot or a finger, little girl, do not send an arrow of light and consciousness from your two eager eyes, for the heron has perched on a pine bough not far beyond yours, and cries back to his mate on the nest, and plumes his feathers for the new day!” (Jewett 238). While the words “light and consciousness” express Sylvia's transcendence to a higher level of spiritual consciousness, the heron's mate and nest reflect Sylvia's own maturing sexuality. The young girl has journeyed through the darkness of night to discover the white heron and emerges into the new day. She has taken a lonely journey from west to east and now faces the rising sun, which in many societies represents “man's indefinable religious experience” (Jung 22).

After coming down from the tree, Sylvia appears before the grandmother and the boy, her clothing torn and soiled by the semen-like pine pitch. Not until confronted by her grandmother and the ornithologist does Sylvia experience an epiphany. Since she intends to tell the boy the location of the white heron's nest, the time for her to speak is the “splendid moment” for which she has waited. But Sylvia finds she cannot speak, for she hears her lover whisper into her ear: “The murmur of the pine's green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together …” (Jewett 239). Although Sylvia has been tempted by the stranger and believes “he is so well worth making happy” (Jewett 239), she recalls her moment of ecstasy and finds she cannot betray nature, her spiritual lover. In so doing, she has allied herself with the natural world and rejected the human world.

Sylvia's lonely journey is an initiation into adulthood; she has experienced “that moment of initiation at which one must learn to take the decisive steps into life alone” (Henderson 152). On her quest for the white heron, she has defied the temptation of the boy stranger and has matured psychologically, physically, and spiritually. While the ornithologist attempts to dominate nature by destroying it, Sylvia joins nature and protects it in a loving embrace.

Notes

1. In his article “America's ‘Lonely Country Child’: The Theme of Separation in Sarah Orne Jewett's ‘A White Heron,’” Theodore R. Hovet sees Sylvia's connection to the maternal in nature as her refusal to enter adulthood and the modern, pre-industrialized world. Hovet theorizes that Sylvia remains a dependent child, while the boy stranger has crossed into adulthood, lives in the modern world, but continues to search “in an endless and destructive quest for the lost world of childhood” (171).

2. Critic James Ellis states, “Clearly … this young man with his whistle is to be equated with the great red-faced boy of the town who used to chase and frighten her” (4). Ellis concurs that Sylvia ultimately takes nature as her lover instead of man.

3. It is interesting to note that William Butler Yeats saw the heron (or herne) as a symbol of the divine in his plays The Herne's Egg and Calvary.

4. Critic Gayle L. Smith in her essay “The Language of Transcendence in Sarah Orne Jewett's ‘A White Heron’” maintains that the personification of the tree is part of the “transcendental vision” that Jewett uses throughout her story (73).

Works Cited

Ellis, James. “The World of Dreams: Sexual Symbolism in ‘A White Heron.’” Nassau Review: The Journal of Nassau Community College Devoted to Arts, Lettres & Sciences 3 (1977): iii, 3–9.

Hovet, Theodore R. “America's ‘Lonely Country Child’: The Theme of Separation in Sarah Orne Jewett's ‘A White Heron.’” Colby Library Quarterly 14 (1978): 166–71.

Jewett, Sarah Orne. “A White Heron.” The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories. Ed. Mary Ellen Chase. New York: Norton, 1981. 227–39.

Jung, Carl G., M.-L. von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi, and Aniela Jaffe. Man and his Symbols. Garden City: Doubleday, 1964.

Smith, Gayle L. “The Language of Transcendence in Sarah Orne Jewett's ‘A White Heron.’” Critical; Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett. Ed. Gwen L. Nagel. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. 69–75.