Sarah Orne Jewett journal

Fady Keilo
2/5/09
Eng 48B
Sarah Orne Jewett
“The young man had known the horrors of its most primitive housekeeping, and the dreary squalor that level of society which does not rebel at the companionship of hens.”

As a native of the rural areas around Maine, it’s quite clear that Jewett had a deep love of the area’s beautiful scenery and the “at home with nature” lifestyle that the local inhabitants practiced. As a young lady, hampered by rheumatoid arthritis (according to wikipedia), she frequently took walks as part of her treatment. Through these walks in nature and the beautiful local flora and fauna, Jewett developed a deep and passionate love for nature and its beauty. While the more “civilized” people of urban and industrial settings would frown upon such a lifestyle and deep bond with nature, it’s obvious from Jewett’s writings that the eventual urbanization of her childhood home was a driving factor in her story “White Heron”.

As an economic and social criticism of the times, Sarah Jewett’s use of a simple farm family and a wealthy young hunter as the characters in her story speaks volumes. The young man, having no love for the local land and being almost a stereotype of the capitalist, offers the poor “peasant” farm family a large sum of money (10 dollars to be precise) to divulge the location of a rare white bird that the hunter wished to admire by killing and stuffing. This young man, almost bourgeois in his demeanor and mannerisms, acts as if he is being gracious by coming into the “simple” home of this rural family. The way in which he describes the average home of the local rural people (used as the quote above) is almost innocently pompous. The fact that the family does not accept his rather large reward is confusing, as he doesn’t understand how a poor family wouldn’t want money. He can’t understand that not everything is a commodity to everyone, and that the little girl might have more love for the bird than for his measly ten dollars (which would be about 400 dollars now). As perhaps a Marxist criticism of capitalist society at the time, the “capitalist pig” hunter would be the wealthy industrialist who wishes to lay waste to the local inhabitants by destroying the land in pursuit of capital wealth and wage-enslaving the locals into only being able to survive off of laboring in his factories. Another spin on the Marxist criticism would be that the white heron represents independence and self reliance as opposed to wage earning in order to survive in an urban setting. As the stereotype of the literary scholar goes, the possible meanings of all the different symbols and archetypes is endless.