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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...
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…
Works Cited
Jewett, Sarah (2004). A White Heron. New York: Godine Publishers
Chopin, Kate (2010). Story of an Hour. New York: Harper Collins.
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