Eudora Welty's "A Still Moment" and Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron"

Abstract

Eudora Welty's "A Still Moment" and Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron" Anna E. Beaudry (bio) A hunter and a heron unite Eudora Welty's "A Still Moment" and Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron." Joseph Rosenblum notes similarities in plot and focuses on the "mystical experience with the heron" that both stories share (72). Thomas L. McHaney and Peter Schmidt have acknowledged Welty's debt of influence to Jewett and other female regionalists, and Helen Fiddyment Levy makes a passing connection between the stories. Nonetheless, little has been done to consider the ecocritical possibilities that the stories have in common: firstly, the posture towards nature that each author seems to advocate for involves a kind of curative hybridity. By hybridity, I mean a blending of the human and more-than-human that serves as an antidote to the symptoms of modernity's ills, like consumerism and progressivism. Secondly, these stories share an invitation to engage in intimacy with nature and place. The hunter and the heron are the most obvious links between the stories, but these figures carry a particularly ecocritical weight as well. The hunter in Jewett's story is intentionally modeled after John James Audubon, while the hunter in Welty's story is Audubon. In each story, the bird depicted is the Snowy Egret, a small white heron, mislabeled Snowy Heron or White Egret in Audubon's iconic painting. This heron became the subject of national attention when it was hunted to near extinction in the late nineteenth century due a ladies' millinery craze involving the bird's remarkable breeding plumage. According to the famous ornithologist-artist Roger Tory Peterson, Snowy Egret plumes "were worth $32 an ounce, twice their weight in gold"; the high demand for these plumes led to "[e]very heronry [being] ferreted out and destroyed. … Where there had been hundreds of thousands [End Page 151] of egrets in our southern states there soon remained but a few hundred."1 In order to bring awareness to the crisis, Jewett's story transplants the heron away from its home in southern marshes to the Maine coastline, despite the fact that the bird rarely is found further north than Massachusetts. "A White Heron" lends itself, as many of Jewett's works do, to an ecocritical reading of her fiction. Welty, by contrast, returns the bird to its natural habitat, setting her narrative in the Natchez Trace, Mississippi. Welty's choice of the heron is an interesting one; Diana R. Pingatore, in her guide to Welty's short fiction, draws attention to Welty's close adherence to source texts for the three men who appear in "A Still Moment," all of whom are based upon historic persons. Albert Devlin has a 1977 note on a possible source for the heron, a vision of a white horse recorded by one of Murrell's fellow outlaws (64). In a 1965 interview with Welty that confirms Devlin's theory, she mentions this vision specifically ("An Interview" 22). What neither Devlin nor Pingatore reflects upon, however, is why a heron? On one level, a bird makes sense to include with the figure of Audubon, but why that particular species? Considering the significance of the white heron in Jewett's short fiction, Jewett's heron serves as a likely inspiration for Welty, and, considering the precarious history of the bird, perhaps even as a source for Welty's ecocritical bent as well.2 As Rosenblum notes, "both stories begin at sunset," a liminal time of day where shadows and ghosts alike walk in deep glades in the fading light (70). The sun sets over each story's respective wilderness: the Maine woods and the Natchez Trace. Neither story romanticizes the wilderness. Instead, the twilight setting of each story creates a sense of unease and anxiety in the reader and not without reason. The wilderness is a place where anything can happen for good or ill. Heightening this tension, both Welty and Jewett employ Gothic or folklore tropes throughout each tale, setting an uncanny mood. As Elizabeth Ammons and Sarah Way Sherman have noted, Jewett relies heavily on fairytale tropes, drawing specifically on "Little Red Riding [End Page 152] Hood...