City Verses Country in A White Heron
...chooses to keep the birds secret, and accepts the heartache for letting the boy go. The country is portrayed as a nice quiet and peaceful place. The woods are filled with vast amounts of trees, flora, birds, and other animals. In the county, there are swampy pastures and a shady forest with a beautiful view of the moonlight and sunset. When living in the country, one has all the time you need and more; Sylvia used her time by going into the wilderness and observing nature. When Sylvia first saw her grandmother’s house she said that “this was a beautiful place to live in, and she never should wish to go home” (1.3.5). For the young ornithologist who stopped by for the night while he was hunting birds, “It was a surprise to find so clean and comfortable a little dwelling in this New England wilderness. The young man had known the horrors of its most primitive housekeeping, and the dreary squalor of that level of society which does not rebel at the companionship of hens” (1.14.1). Sylvia had reached that kind of loneliness in a sense when she began to be entertained by the cow, “sometimes in pleasant weather it was a consolation to look upon the cow’s pranks as an intelligent attempt to play hide and seek, and as the child had no playmates she lent herself to this amusement with a good deal of zest” (1.2.6). The city is portrayed as a busy and noisy place. Growing up in this overly crowded city, Sylvia had been tortured by a red-faced bully. There is no wildlife, or tall old pine trees. While living in the city, she had never been given the chance to run freely in the woods and observe wildlife, climb trees, or tame robins and squirrels. The small amount of flora that existed in the city was not flourishing, thinking of the plants in the city, Sylvia remembers “a wretched dry geranium that belonged to a town neighbor” (1.2.20). The one thing that she would not have a problem finding in the city is a relationship, but the marvels of the forest mean more to Sylvia than any boy ever could. To show Sylvia’s desire to stay in the woods over the hunter boy, Jewett says, “were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been, --who can tell? Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summer-time, remember!” (2.14.7). The two different settings in this story a...