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Analysis Of Sarah Orne Jewett's A White Heron

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Looking through the literature book’s authors, I realized that a good portion of the authors included are female despite the time frame for the selections, the late 19th and early to mid-20th century, which was known for a different view on the capabilities and status quo of women from today’s. Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story A White Heron, follows a young girl who is torn between the decision to save a rare bird or make some money and please a new companion. In the story, the girl meets a hunter who is looking for a rare bird called white heron to add to his collection of birds he has killed, and he is willing to offer a money prize if she can tell him where one is. She goes on a journey to find the bird in which she climbs the tallest tree …show more content…

John believes that his wife needs to get better from a nervous condition, so he takes her out to a country house to recover. He is often condescending to her and her needs, and whenever he does talk to her it is usually about his own problems. Furthermore, he does not permit her to do anything that involves work or creativity not even to write. The narrator writes in a secret diary as to provide any form of freedom and creativity that she desires as a human. John eventually finds the diary and destroys it, and John confines the narrator to a room with a yellow wallpaper that the narrator despises. The yellow wallpaper could be symbolic to the narrator because it resembles bars that confine her from social interaction and free thinking. Eventually this drives the narrator mad beyond repair and the story ends there. A major theme of this story is how culture at the time restricted women’s free thinking and acting capabilities to a point where they are just meant for a few purposes. Women were commonly suppressed during this time almost as if they were obedient children. This can be seen in another example in the story with John’s sister, who despite seeing that the narrator’s condition wasn’t getting better from the treatment being given, still chose to be obedient to

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The significance of the color yellow in the story is that yellow represents sickness. The woman drives herself crazy by staring at the yellow wallpaper. The intended audience goes from her love interest at that point in time to simply questioning the heavens. For example, in the text it says, “Her poems about death confront its grim reality…her poems about religion, she expressed piety and hostility and she was fully capable of moving within the same poem from religious consolation to a rejection of doctrinal piety and a querying of

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Only the charwoman goes near him. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator feels trapped by her husband and physician, John, because he is controlling and believes he knows what is best for her. The woman that the narrator sees in the wallpaper is eventually revealed to be

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The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the main character in the short novel. She is a young newly married mother in the upper middle class who is very imaginative. The narrator is going through a stage of depression and believes the house they have temporarily moved into is haunted. What the narrator is actually experiencing is called Postpartum depression, depression suffered by a mother following childbirth. This illness can arise from the combination of hormonal changes, psychological adjustment to motherhood, and fatigue.

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Adventure and desire are common qualities in humans and Sarah Orne Jewett’s excerpt from “A White Heron” is no different. The heroine, Sylvia, a “small and silly” girl, is determined to do whatever it takes to know what can be seen from the highest point near her home. Jewett uses literary elements such as diction, imagery, and narrative pace to dramatize this “gray-eyed child” on her remarkable adventure. Word choice and imagery are necessary elements to put the reader in the mind of Sylvia as she embarks on her treacherous climb to the top of the world. Jewett is picturesque when describing Sylvia’s journey to the tip of one unconquered pine tree.

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This passage from “A white Heron”, by Sarah Orne Jewett, details a short yet epic journey of a young girl, and it is done in an entertaining way. Jewett immediately familiarizes us with our protagonist, Sylvia, in the first paragraph, and our antagonist: the tree. However, this is a bit more creative, as the tree stands not only as an opponent, but as a surmountable object that can strengthen and inspire Sylvia as she climbs it. This “old pine” is described as massive, to the point where it, “towered above them all and made a landmark for sea and shore miles and miles away.” (Line 8).

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It's yellow color symbolizes the way the narrator feels about her situation. "Unclean", "dull", "sickly" is how she may have felt deep down about her relationship with her husband and the life she lived under him. The wallpaper itself becomes a symbol for her. She uses it as a coping method and projects her feelings onto it and the woman she sees in it. The windows symbolize how she is trapped in this marriage and she can only view the beautiful outside through the many windows, reminding her of what she cannot have.

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The narrator is a woman who is imaginative trying to make her mind think and realize the meaning of the yellow wallpaper. She describes the wallpaper as, “repellant, almost revolting; smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow turning sunlight” (Gilman 641). This specific wallpaper makes the narrator feel a certain way. At first, she does not like the color or how it looks. But then not having anything else to do in the room, she starts examining the wallpaper.

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The house is in a super-isolated place. The house represents the narrator 's personal emotions; restricted and isolation. In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the symbolism of the the wallpaper and the diary demonstrate the psychological difficulties, that were caused by being disrespected and thought less of, during the 19th century for women across the United States. In the “Yellow Wallpaper”, the woman 's husband John neglects her symptoms of postpartum and says she has a slight hysterical tendency.

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It 's here where she discovers the yellow wallpaper that leads to her mental demise. What is the symbolic meaning of the yellow wallpaper and how do her interactions with the wallpaper represent the change in her feelings towards her husband and society. The yellow wallpaper symbolizes women 's suffrage and the struggles women went through, and her interactions with the wallpaper represent the problems woman had with their husbands and society. The main symbolism present in the story is how the yellow wallpaper represents woman suffrage and the problems they endured during the 19th century.

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She wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in an effort to open the public’s eyes to the unfairness of this treatment. By infusing Jane’s narrative with childish language and actions without ever actually calling “Jane” by her name, Gilman creates a universal experience any woman of the time could insert herself into. This allowed women to fully realize the injustice they faced. John’s belittlement of Jane also serves to create both a universal and eye opening experience for the women reading it. Additionally, for those who were willing to read into the symbolism, the nursery and the meaning underlying it added to the injustice Gilman conveys.

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Secondly, there is also a sense of confinement throughout the story. The Yellow Wallpaper fits the winter or the anti-romantic phase of Northrop Frye's monomyth diagram as it, "tells the story of imprisonment … and fear." (Bressler 152). The narrator is imprisoned in the room which has yellow wallpaper. Basically, the room where the narrator is staying in is like a prison.

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(678) in this statement she is challenging herself and this shows the reader she is facing some confusion. The yellow wallpaper in the main characters (the narrator) bedroom is a major point in the story. The yellow wallpaper plays a major role in the woman’s insanity. The woman’s obsession with the wallpaper creates her problem and affects her mind and judgment. This is shown in, “It dwells on my mind so!”

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John constantly tries to "fix" the narrator by giving her "phosphates or phosphites - whichever it is, and tonics, and journey's, and air, and exercise" as well as forbidding her to work until she is well again. The narrator feels depressed and alone, especially since her child has been taken away from her and everybody is too focused on "fixing" her to see the problems she is dealing with. This causes her to form an attachment to the yellow wallpaper plastered around her room as her mental state deteriorates. As her state of mind worsens, she begins to think that she is seeing a woman trapped in the wallpaper. The narrator believes that the wallpaper pattern changes because the trapped woman shakes the walls and creeps around the room over and over, when in reality, it is the narrator who is continuously crawling around the room, scraping the wallpaper from the walls.

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At first it is seen as nothing but an old ruined wallpaper with a “bad” pattern. As the story progresses she stares at the paper for hours and sees a sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in certain light. She hen sees a desperate woman trying to leave the wallpaper which shows how the women feel trapped. The author uses the yellow wallpaper as a symbol of the oppressive life that many women have today and back then.

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The idea of marriage and what was considered an ideal union has drastically evolved. Marriage has only become an option in our civilization it’s no longer a social requirement, neither a priority for a female or male to get marry. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrates a controlling and dysfunctional relationship that also relates to “The Story of an Hour” where Kate Chopin also reveals a dysfunctional and unhappy marriage. When paired together, both pieces of writing portrait the other side of marriage where everything is not just a happy ending and it’s shown as incarceration and loss of freedom. Also, both writing take place in the nineteenth century, a time period when marriage was considered the right thing to do

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