of the story is. It could be good versus evil, nature versus mankind, flesh versus spirit, innocence versus experience. In all of those, the Heron represents theantithesis of the hunter. Personally,i think the heron represents all of nature. People (i.e. Sylvia) can either choose to betray it or honor it.

There is definitely a dichotomy or a binary opposition set up here between culture and nature. This opposition is also suggestive of the town and country duality. The White Heron represents nature. The White Heron is in its natural habitat. The hunter is the intruder. While he is polite, his presence and action threaten the purity and sanctity of nature and the world where the White Heron is not threatened. 

This is why it is significant that Sylvia refuses to tell the hunter where the bird is. Initially, she wants to please the hunter. She is also lured by the promise of money. This lure of material wealth and/or possessions is often linked with notions of city (and town) life as opposed to country life which is more often associated with notions of simplicity and nature. In the end, Sylvia proves to be more like the White Heron than the hunter. She sides with nature in this choice between material culture and the natural world. 

She was just thinking how long it seemed since she first came to the farm a year ago, and wondering if everything went on in the noisy town just the same as when she was there, the thought of the great red−faced boy who used to chase and frighten her made her hurry along the path to escape from the shadow of the trees. 

Note that, early in the story, Sylvia "had to hunt" for her cow. The author uses the word "hunt" but when Sylvia "hunts" she is playing a game with the cow, treating the cow like a playmate (like a person). Thus, Sylvia looks at nature's creatures as her equals. The hunter hunts to kill and make a profit. Sylvia has a kinship with nature and the animals that overrides her desire to please the hunter or to make money. She feels like a part of nature: 

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. 

The white heron's secret is the location of its nest, which the young hunter has been unable to locate for himself. He asks for Sylvia's help, and she stays awake all night thinking of how to learn the location of the heron's nest so that she can tell the hunter, a young man, earning herself ten dollars as well as his gratitude. The narrator describes her excitement, saying,

What fancied triumph and delight and glory for the later morning when she could make known the secret! It was almost too real and too great for the childish heart to bear.

Sylvia is breathless with enthusiasm to find out the nest's location so that she can share it. The next morning, she climbs a very old and tall tree, as she knows that she ought to be able to see everything from there, and, sure enough, she spots the heron and its nest. The narrator says,

She knows his secret now, the wild, light, slender bird that floats and wavers, and goes back like an arrow presently to his home in the green world beneath.

However, when it comes time to tell the hunter what she has seen, Sylvia "cannot tell the heron's secret and give its life away." She thinks of how she and the heron flew through the golden air and how the pair of them watched the world together. Sylvia loves nature and the bird's life more than she does the ten dollars or the hunter's gratitude.

In "The White Heron," Sarah Orne Jewett draws numerous parallels between Sylvia, the little girl, and the elusive bird. In the morning scene in which Sylvia climbs the tall pine, both the girl and the heron are white, innocent, rare, free, above the world, natural, and priceless. One can easily see that the bird is a symbol of Sylvia.

From a feminist perspective, then, we can take Sylvia as an "everywoman." If the girl represents womankind, the story showcases ideal feminine qualities. That Sylvia is pre-adolescent means that, while she has a vague interest in romance with the opposite sex, it's not a ruling drive for her. From that we can infer that women, ideally, live for more than pleasing and catching a man. Sylvia, while tempted by the relationship the hunter offers and the "treasures" his ten dollars would buy, decides that other things are more important. In the same way, a woman shouldn't allow the potential material comfort that marriage provides draw her away from the things she loves or cause her to give up her core values. Instead, each woman, like Sylvia, should follow her natural impulses to grow into the unique person she is designed to be. The beauty of a woman who follows her heart and freely pursues her passions is as rare, and as intrinsically valuable, as the majestic heron. Though many will try to "stuff and preserve" women as mere trophies, women must resist such people, even if it means forgoing some materialistic comfort. "Gifts and graces" of another kind will be granted to such a woman.

The white heron could simply represent women in general and their relative position to men in the nineteenth century. During this era, women had precious few rights: women could not vote and any property they brought into a marriage became the legal property of their husbands—they had, in fact, no real legal identity but were subsumed under their fathers' and then their husbands' identities. The hunter, then, would represent men, and their desire to capture and confine women within the rules of marriage.

The hunter literally wants to kill the white heron so that he can preserve its beauty, but it isn't its feathers or its wings or its eyes that makes it beautiful; it is its life—all of these parts imbued with life. However, its life is not valued; the hunter only values the bird because it is rare and lovely and he wishes to add it to his collection. The hunter's gun, then, seems to be a phallic symbol, with which he hopes will render the bird helpless, in submission.

This question can be easily answered in two parts.

First, white is typically the color used to represent innocence or purity. In this case, Jewett is referring to sexual purity.

Secondly, birds often represent freedom, and the ability to move from place to place on one's whim.

When you combine these two common symbols, you get an uncommon suggestion that women can maintain freedom and purity. The bird is a paradox, a seeming contradiction, and Jewett wants you to consider that contradiction and all its implications.

What does the story, now that you understand this symbol, now reveal about womens' liberation?

"A White Heron," first published in 1886, belongs to the local color movement in American literature which flourished after the Civil War. Although it is primarily romantic in tone and theme, the story does depict Sarah Orne Jewett's New England setting in realistic detail, a strong element in local color writing.

Most of the story is conventional in literary technique, but Jewett's shifting point of view was not conventional at all in the literary period in which she wrote. In some ways, the unconventional point of view seems to anticipate the transition into modernism in American literature that did not occur until the 1920s.  

Because of its numerous types of conflict, several themes can be found within the story, but "A White Heron" is clearly an initiation story. The primary theme concerns Sylvia's growing self-awareness. In the beginning of the story, Sylvia is a shy, lonely girl who has moved to the country to live with her grandmother. Sylvia finds peace in her natural surroundings, but her emotions become confused when the young hunter comes into her life, and she feels the first stirrings of romantic love. When the hunter offers her money to help him find the white heron, so that he can kill it and stuff it for his collection, Sylvia decides to help him. Her motivations are strong: She wants to earn his approval and wants to earn the money for her grandmother. Sylvia knows her own mind when she goes to the forest to find the heron's nest, but she has yet to know her heart or define her values.

After climbing the great pine, however, and sharing the heron's world at daybreak--among the tree tops of the forest and with the ocean in view--Sylvia is initiated into a spiritual union with the natural world and an understanding of her own nature and values. She will not play any role in the destruction of the beautiful heron, not for money and not for love.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s stories are generally classified as local color writing. These texts describe the settings and events of a particular age and place – in Jewett’s case, Maine in the 1880’s. Her work has also been said to have elements of regionalism, and Jewett’s own intentions that her work was to be a catalogue of social history which would endure, certainly indicates that this was part of the intent of her writing.

The story, “A White Heron” also has leanings towards a Romantic ideal, as the gently nymph Sylvia turns her back on the worldly stranger and chooses to protect the habitat of the heron rather than receive payment from the eager hunter. Sylvia becomes part of the environment as she climbs the tree to locate the elusive heron’s nest-

with her bare feet and fingers that inched and held like bird’s claws to the monstrous ladder.

Jewett was influenced by the writers of the Romanic period – Willam and Dorothy Wordsworth in particular. However, her writing is as much involved with defining social conscience and behaviors than placing humanity within the natural world.

Local color was a slightly patronizing term which indicated writing which had little depth. The genre is becoming more understood and appreciated in recent years, and the merits of local color writing are more valued of an exploration of fiction, particularly from women writers of the time.

In deciding upon the thesis statement for an analysis of character, the writer may first consider the approach that he/she will take toward this analysis.  That is, there are a number of interpretations of Jewett's "A White Heron"; for instance, some critics consider it a bildungsroman, others consider it much like a myth, and, as Elizabeth Ammons writes in her criticism of the short story, a fairy tale. No matter which approach to interpretation the writer takes, though, there is clearly an interplay among the characters that is central to the themes of this story.

As an example of the one approach that "A White Heron" is much like a fairy tale, Sylvia, whose name is a derivative of sylvan, meaning of the forest, seems a combination of human and fairy as she spends her days in the forest, delighting in her communion with its denizens.  Having escaped the crowded industrial town of her birth, this "little maid" feels that she has not been alive until moving to pastoral home of her grandmother, Mrs. Tilley. 

As the narrative progresses, the external world intrudes with the appearance of the hunter and his request that she find the white heron's nest for him.  With this request, too, the grandmother gives "amazed attention," as well. It is this conflict with human desire--she "watched the young man with loving admiration" as her heart "thrilled by a dream of love"--and her spiritual awe of the

great power [that] stirred and swayed these young creatures who traversed the solemn woodlands with soft-footed silent care

that leads to Syvlia's search for the heron's hidden nest and her ultimate decision to keep the bird's secret after her transcendental experience symbolically near the "dead hemlock-tree by the green marsh." This myth-like heroine cannot give away the heron's secret. Ammons interprets the actions of Syvia as an anti-bildungsroman,

[Sylvia] chooses the world of her grandmother, a place defined as free, healthy and ‘natural’ in this story, over the world of heterosexual favor and violence represented by the hunter.

With this interpretation of the story as a fairy tale, therefore, a thesis statement regarding the analysis of characters may include the statement that the sprite-like character of Sylvia, finds identity and harmony only in the pristine world of nature as her interplay with other personages results only in detriment to her happiness. 

A little girl named Sylvia lives with her grandmother, Mrs. Tilley, in the country. Sylvia has thrived here on her grandmother's farm, and

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 had never been alive at all before she came to live at the farm.

Sylvia even thinks about a "wretched geranium" that had belonged to one of the neighbors in town, as though she pities the poor flower that could not grow there. She is often compared to elements in nature: when she is alarmed, she hangs her head "as if the stem of it were broken," a simile that compares her neck to a flower's stem; another time, her face is said to be "like a pale star"; another time, her fingers are "like bird's claws." When Sylvia is approached by a hunter from the city, he offers to pay her ten dollars to tell him where the heron's nest is. He wants to kill the heron and stuff it to keep in his home. Although Sylvia learns the nest's location, she ultimately cannot bring herself to tell the hunter. She "cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron's secret and give its life away." Thus, we might read Sylvia, whose name is actually taken from the word sylvan (which refers to one who spends a lot of time in nature and the woods), as a symbol of nature and the hunter as a symbol of society or industrialization. She could also represent innocence and purity, while the hunter represents maturity and corruption.

Sylvia is a nine-year-old girl who spends most of her life wandering the woods near her grandmother's home near the Maine coast. Her only friend is her grandmother's cow, Mistress Mooly, with whom she plays a game of hide-and-seek each night. One day, she encounters a man in the woods, who is lost after a day's hunting. He follows her home, and he spends the night. The man reveals that he is an ornithologist, collecting specimens for his collection; he is specifically looking for a rare white heron, one which Sylvia has seen in the woods. Together they go hunting for the heron the next day, but they do not spot the bird. Sylvia develops a crush on the young hunter, and she heads out early the next morning in hopes of spotting the heron. She climbs a tree and, sure enough, she discovers its nest. But when she returns home to join her new friend on another hunt, she fails to reveal the location of the nest and the bird about which she has dreamed.

In the short story "A White Heron" by Sarah Orne Jewett, a young girl named Sylvia lives with her grandmother in a house in the midst of the woods. One evening while Sylvia is leading the cow home along a forest path, she comes across a hunter who is searching for a rare white heron that he intends to shoot and stuff for his collection. He ends up staying with Sylvia and her grandmother, and he offers Sylvia money if she will lead him to the elusive bird. At first Sylvia agrees, thinking of the things that the money could buy, but after she climbs to the top of a tall pine tree and spots the heron, she realizes that she does not want the hunter to take its life, rejects the money, and refuses to tell the hunter where the bird is.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a protagonist is "the principle character in a literary work (such as a drama or story)." By this definition, the protagonist of "A White Heron" is definitely Sylvia. The story is told mainly from her viewpoint, it begins and ends with her, and it is her decision at the end not to disclose the location of the heron that resolves the story and reveals its theme.