Different Love in a White Heron

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Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” is saying that the protagonist, Sylvia, who is living with her grandmother, Mrs. Tilley, in countryside. One day Sylvia comes across the young stranger who is a hunter also an ornithologist in woods when she is on the way home with her cow. The young stranger actually is seeking a kind rare bird—heron, but he has yet found their habitation and gotten lost. He asks the little girl for help if he can stay her house for one night. Later, the hunter lodges in her grandmother’s house with permission. As the story progress, they make friends, and the little girl starts to know the ornithologist shooting birds, collecting them and researching them. He tempts the little girl to help him search herons by money because she is the one familiar with this area. Not for money, but the loving admiration to the hunter and his pleasure, Sylvia sneaks out of the house in the late evening, to find the heron when the grandmother and hunter are sound asleep. She climbs up the top of a pine tree and sees the heron, but she ends up keeping the secret not to tell the hunter where they inhabit because she doesn’t want that the heron is killed. She keeps the heron’s life but she end up suffering the loneliness because the hunter eventually leaves her with disappointment. The little Sylvia loves birds, so does the ornithologist, and it is interesting that there are two different ways to love birds based on a gender factor. Men instinctively show a strong sense of owning what they love and they also like to conquer things by offensive methods; instead, women care about the relation with what they love, and protect them. In the story, the ornithologist says it to Mrs. Tilley “I am making a collection of birds myself. I have been at it ever since I was a boy.", "Oh no, they're stuffed and preserved, dozens and dozens of them,", "and I have shot or snared

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