LITR 5535: American Romanticism

Student Presentation on Reading Selections 2005

Gina Pendola

April 25, 2005

Presentation: “A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett:

Regional writer

“With the publication of this book, (Deephaven) she entered the company of Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, Harriet Beecher Stowe and other regional writers who were depicting the topographies, people, speech patterns, and modes of life of many distinctive regions of the country.” P.1586

Born in Maine, 1849

The small region she grew up in, and often wrote of, was quickly experiencing change and American Industrialization. Many of the characters in her fiction were based on the rural people she met while accompanying her father on his rounds as the local obstetrician.

Time period--end of the Civil War--many war widows

“Boston Marriage” with Mrs. Anne Fields. “Their relationship was of a kind not uncommon at the turn of the century; indeed such connections were called 'Boston marriages,’ a term that implied shared living quarters and a partnership that paralleled ordinary marriage in its intimacy and exclusiveness. In recent years their relationship --and those of other prominent female couples in the period--has been the subject of much historical and biographical commentary.” P.1587

Realism:

“. . .the attempt to write a literature that recorded life as it was lived rather than life as it ought to be lived, or as it had been lived in times past.” P.1227

Regionalism:

“. . .another expression of the realistic impulse, resulted from the desire both to preserve distinctive ways of life before industrialization dispersed or homogenized them and to come to terms with the harsh realities that seemed to replace these earlier and allegedly happier times.” P.1232

New opportunities for female writers

“A White Heron”:

P.1588

“Everybody said 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 coming to live at the farm.”

“. . . .Sylvia whispered that this was a beautiful place to live in, and that she should never wish to go home.”

“The companions followed the shady wood road, the cow taking slow steps, and the child very fast ones. The cow stopped long at the brook to drink, as if the pasture were not half a swamp, and Sylvia stood still and waited, letting her bare feet cool themselves in the shoal water, while the great twilight moths struck softly against her. She waded on through the brook as the cow moved away, and listened to the thrushes with a heart that beast fast with pleasure. There was a stirring in the great boughs overhead. They were full of little birds and beasts that seemed to be wide awake, and going about their world, or else saying good-night to each other in sleepy twitters. Sylvia herself felt sleepy as she walked along. However, it was not much farther to the house, and the air was soft and sweet. She was not often in the woods as late as this, and it made her feel as if she were part of the gray shadows and the moving leaves. She was just thinking how long it seemed since she first came to the farm a year ago, and wondered 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 the shadow of the trees.”

Questions:

1. How does Jewett depict country life as opposed to life in the city?

2. What is occurring in place of Romanticism? Can some Romantic elements still be seen in the story?

Give examples. (shadows, woods)

3. Is it important to keep some Romantic elements in this story, though it is written mainly in the“Realism” style? How, or would, the story have a different effect without the romantic elements?

4. What elements of Regionalism are present?

(descriptions of the landscape--huckleberry bushes,

white heron; dialect)

5. How does Regionalism compare with Romanticism?