Jewett’s “A White Heron,” collected in a volume of stories of that title in 1886, is a masterpiece of the genre, a powerful fable playing off the attraction felt by a young girl for a handsome young hunter against the larger love she feels for the natural world.
By contrast, Faulkner dramatizes the problem of having a hero too young to grasp a larger moral order by deliberately shifting the narrative perspective outside Sarty’s consciousness at a number of important junctures. Once, when Abner realizes Sarty would have told the truth if given a chance, an authorial voice intrudes with an insight well beyond the boy’s capabilities: “Later, twenty years later, he was to tell himself, ‘If I had said they wanted only truth, justice, he would have hit me again.”’ This foreshadowing of a calmly retrospective view registers Sarty’s own gradual recognition of his developing independence, his growing need to stand up for something larger than sheer family solidarity.
The difficulty of this evolution is conveyed in the fabric of the narrative, in an ambiguous dependence on the pronoun “he” that occasionally confuses Sarty with his father, mirroring the process by which people are entangled in the history of their families and dramatizing the inherent difficulties in any attempt to escape paternal authority.
A White Heron
Jewett’s Irish stories, in short, do not appear to fix on any discernible portent, like an epiphanic white heron, that might consecrate or confer the status of enduring myth on the communal or regional place. With possibly one exception, neither do the stories project any community of women without men, such as the matrifocal society, Dunnet Landing, in The Country of the Pointed Firs.
Although nineteenth-century female naturalists did not seem to grasp the ways that their culture “mocked” their separate sphere, at least one novelist did. Sarah Orne Jewett’s late nineteenth-century stories crossed the boundary between the literary domestic novel and the nature essay, posing a more problematic relationship between the female naturalist and the public round than the naturalists were able to do themselves. 36 Jewett voiced her analysis from within the constraints of nineteenth-century sensibility.
An early British traveler meeting any of Jewett’s heros in The Country of the Pointed Firs or her other short stories would have celebrated the discovery of another American Eve. Jewett’s stories are set in a dying New England whaling village. Secluded from the materialistic lures and threats of the city, her heros model a genteel but humble country life driven by virtue, modesty, and selfless devotion to the domestic round. They are appreciative of and knowledgeable about their native terrain.
Jewett supported late nineteenth-century women’s efforts to protect nature. Her interest in the Audubon women’s attempts to end the slaughter of birds is evidenced in “A White Heron,” in which a young girl, Sylvie, refuses to reveal the location of a heron’s nest to a visiting ornithologist who is hunting for just such a specimen.
None of Jewett’s protagonists are “natural” women in the contemporary meaning–in the meaning Griffin has in mind when she has her lion devour the scientists. All act within nineteenth-century, middle-class gender proscriptions about the role of cultured females. In this way, they remain surrounded by culture. Her life among the sheep refines Esther, the little shepherdess. Joanna’s retirement to the hermitage supports rather than subverts gentility-she isolates herself out of shame for being tricked by a scoundrel. Implicit in such behavior is women’s role as conservator of the values of home, family, and civilization in the face, not of wild nature, but of irresponsible men bred by the new urban wilderness.
But something is awry in this pastoral image. Men from the public sphere come here only for plunder, not for refuge. They threaten nature and women when they appear. They make it difficult for women to achieve a full domestic life: in the end, Sylvie must choose between the heron and the ornithologist. She chooses the bird after seeing him at his nest watching over his family. In saving the bird, she saves as well the values of America domestica.
Barn Burning
The 1930s was also a rich period of regional and ethnic writing that treated class. “Barn Burning” (1939) is among Faulkner’s finest stories and the best introduction to issues that recur in his fiction, including most importantly the conflict between family ties and community abstractions. More poignantly than almost any other figure Faulkner created, tenyear-old SartySnopesistormentedby “the old fierce pull of blood,” caught in the tension between preadolescent loyalty to his father Abner and a growing awareness of Abner’s moral savagery in defying community standards.
Present and preterite tenses shift abruptly in the story, with Sarty’s immediate anxieties conveyed by exclamatory italics that interrupt a straightforward chronicle of his developing moral integrity. The theme of a child’s anxiously coming to terms with the need for social mores has fascinated the best of American authors (James, Crane, and Hemingway, among others), and was masterfully explored in The Adventures ojHuckleberry Finn, which succeeds through Mark Twain’s ironic trick of not allowing Huck to understand his own moral heroism, keeping his narrative always in the first person.
The story begins with a fiercely loyal boy immersed in his father’s perspective but already conflicted at the prospect of testifying on Abner’s behalf in court. Sarty both endorses his father’s irrational perspective against the judge (“’Enemy! Enemy! he thought”) and reveals deep reservations
Though “Barn Burning” is most importantly about a boy’s coming of age, it raises other related issues, one of them economic: uneducated sharecroppers are kept impoverished by a system that allows rich landowners to indulge their taste in carpets imported from France. Abner’s acts of retaliation, motivated by resentment of that system, are craven, even sociopathic (scarring rugs, burning barns), and hardly gestures of heroic defiance.
But an implicit part of postbellum life in the rural South is the exploitative economics that offers less and less to such as the Snopes, and Abner’s brutal behavior is in some measure the result of his brutalized condition.
A startling aspect of Faulkner’s achievement in the short story form is that his most brilliant successes succeed with quite different materials in narratively various ways. “Red Leaves” (1930), for example, is often acknowledged as his most extraordinary story, not least because of the nuanced use of a selectively omniscient point of view in describing the bizarre Indian ritual of burying his slave with a leader.
Other authors might have played up the exotic features of these materials, but Faulkner quickly moves beyond such concern by manipulating the narrative perspective (sometimes in the slave’s consciousness, at others with the pursuers, at still others quietly omniscient) to enforce the reader’s conflicting sympathies both with and against tradition. The narrative develops just the opposite of “A Rose for Emily” and achieves a different effect, at once gutwrenchingly suspenseful and hilarious, culturally alien and yet movingly familiar on the subjects of death and tradition.
Conclusion
The purely comic strain in Faulkner is revealed nowhere better than in “Spotted Horses” (1931), which introduces the Snopeses, the clan whose ratlike persistence and witless endeavors animate Faulkner’s late novelistic trilogy, The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1960). The story is told by Ratliff, a sewing-machine agent, who recounts in humorous dialect the wily, inscrutable Flem Snopes’s rise in life: “That Flem Snopes. I be dog if he ain’t a case, now.” A month after wedding the local merchant’s daughter, Flem takes his wife to Texas to conceal a premature pregnancy, returning a year later with twenty wild horses to sell.
In fact, Flem never admits to owning the horses, much less profitingfrom their sale, and in the equine havoc wreaked on the town, he avoids any blame. Once sold, the horses cannot be caught, racing through houses, roaming the countryside, leaving broken wagons and legs behind. The rare mix of satiric comedy and pathos that Faulkner achieves in the story is represented best in the character of Mrs. Armstid, whohadresistedherfoolishhusband’s purchase of a horse, had even won the Texas salesman’s promise of a refund, and yet can only passively accept Flem Snopes’s patent lie that he had nothing to do with the trade. After all, the Texas salesman has left town and therefore Flem cannot help her, save for a nickel candy for her young “chaps
The conclusion of The Mountain Lion offers an alternative ending to “A White Heron,” the ending Jewett rejected in favor of isolating Sylvie, forever nine years old and forever in an idealized garden that served as a refuge from the threats of male-dominated society. Ralph’s interest in both Molly and the lion is a form of possession. Just as he cannot allow the lion to exist outside his influence, neither can he allow Molly.
Once he is filled with knowledge, so must she be, though he knows that such knowledge will destroy her love for him. As the ornithologist had tried to implicate Sylvie in his form of nature study by making her participate in his hunt, so Ralph finally whispers stories of sex to Molly. When she resists, her reward is death.
Works Cited
The Bedford Anthology of American Literature The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition, Advisory Board, 2001-present.