Literary comparison and analysis

Female Freedom

The short stories "The White Heron" by Sarah Orne Jewett and "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin focus on strong and sensitive heroines who seek to forge some sort of path of autonomy in a world of men. It is without question that men control the worlds that these characters find themselves in, and each protagonist struggles to find some sort of autonomy within those worlds. Both stories depict the successful achievement of liberation from these masculine worlds by the heroines -- though the liberation occurs in dramatically different ways.

Sylvia in "The White Heron" is accosted with the adult world of men when she encounters the hunter in the forest. However, she doesn't succumb her values to this strange and exciting world. If anything she becomes stronger for it. Sylvia becomes friendlier with the hunter, and he even provides her with a jack-knife as a gift. Clearly this is symbolic of the adult and foreign world of sexuality that Sylvia will unavoidable be entering in just a few years. However, there's a disconnect between their values as the hunter has a more acquisitional nature with the things that he loves: Sylvia finds it increasingly distressing that he appears focused on hunting everything that he says he loves. For the hunter, there's an intertwining between love and capture, and they're intertwined by blood. However, despite the fact that there's this amity which flourishes between them, Sylvia never succumbs to the values of the hunter. Sylvia's freedom is in part a result of the fact that she solidifies her bond with nature and the rest of the natural world.

Sylvia's freedom is enhanced and solidified with the discovery of the heron's nest. In the text, the living creatures of nature, confirm that she is one of them: "The old pine must have loved his new dependent. 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, 12). This description demonstrates that even nature knew that this child could be trusted, even at that moment Sylvia still thought she might tell the hunter where the nest was. When Sylvia climbs to the top of the pine tree and sees the heron and the heron's nest, a certain amount of unity is achieved, liberating her from this world of men, and anchoring her even further to the liberty of her own autonomy. "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, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron's secret and give its life away. This description further demonstrates the unity and solidity which is achieved between the living world of nature and Sylvia.

Kate Chopin's story of an hour details a different kind of liberation: Louise Mallard is a woman in a suffocating marriage who eventually achieves liberation through information and death. After hearing the incorrect information of her husband being killed in a terrible train accident, Mallard climbs to the top room of her house: this moment is analogous to Sylvia climbing to the top of the pine tree and experience the freedom of that moment. Louise's freedom is so close she can practically taste and experience it herself. She is like a bird perched on the top branches of a tree.

"She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves" (Chopin, 36). The news of her husband's death means that she will no longer be beholden to his will. She will have the freedom of the birds above her. The newness of spring is akin to the newness now present in her life. The bird's eye perspective that she has on the town is synonymous to the new heights she feels her life has climbed to.