Examples Of Feminism In A White Heron

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Feminism in “A White Heron”
The process of growing up comes with many complicated decisions, such as where a person wants to go in life, that challenge the mind but ultimately help a person grow. Growing up as a woman in the early and mid-1900s required even more thought-provoking and life-style questions and decisions because women were starting to gain some freedoms and rights which were allowing them to choose what they wanted to do in some aspects of their lives. The struggles that these decisions came with are explained by the main character, Sylvia, in the short story “A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett. In the book, Sylvia is a nine-year old girl who moves from a city to live with her grandmother and her cow on a farm. Sylvia quickly develops an attraction to nature but this relationship is threatened after a hunter shows up to the farm and offers Sylvia money in return for the life of a white heron that lived in the area. Sylvia is forced to choose between taking the money or protecting the life of the bird. In the end, she chooses the bird which causes the hunter to leave and Sylvia …show more content…
She was raised on a farm where she spent her days surrounded by nature and animals, settings that she would later recreate through her writing. Her ability to write was due to her parents’ focus on all their children being well educated (“Author Biography”). This focus was unusual for this time period but allowed her to begin writing early and grow over time. Because Jewett was able to write, she was able to give a voice to the suppressed women dealing with the sexism that was taking place because of the societal ideas centered on male-dominance. Jewett wrote and published her first story when she was eighteen and wrote her whole life after until a carriage accident left her injured and she began to focus more on her loved ones until she died on June 24, 1909 in the town where she began her
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A White Heron Literary Analysis

“A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett tells the story of a nine year old girl, named Sylvia, whose character becomes illuminated in her environment once her grandmother has brought her to live in the rural countryside. As a woman writer in the 19th century, Sarah Orne Jewett’s work was extremely criticized for its feministic content and appearance to the world. Both examples of women during this time can be categorized into a strong position as a woman writer in the 19th century. Sarah Orne Jewett’s…

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