a white heron 一只白色的苍鹭 解读.docx

Multicultural Literature Edward A White Heron: The Flying Independent Soul of Little Sylvia Process of growth is not always with pleasant surprise to learn new things, but sometimes can be a pressure of compromising with the world around us and abandoning something innocent deep within our soul. This is particularly for Sylvia, a tiny little girl who lived in a conservative village, during whose period of life women tend to submit to men ’s will. By telling a fiction story, Sarah Orne Jewett expresses a good will of keeping the innocence regardless of the temptation from the outside world, and raises the awareness of female independence. Sylvia is the main character in the story. She is a typical little girl who posses all the personalities of pure human nature: innocent, brave, solitary and a little bit shy when she meets strangers. The story opens with Sylvia in village surrounded by nature and she. Sylvia has not always lived in the forest, as the writer tells us, she “had tried to grow for eight years in a crowded manufacturing town, but, as for Sylvia herself, it seemed as if she never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm.”Here the manufacturing town becomes a metaphor of developed human society and personalities, and little Sylvia is quite unadjusted to it. When she thinks of city, only the noisy town and the red-faced boy who used to chase and frighten her comes to her mind. Absolutely, here author creates Sylvia to stand for the human nature which is unshaped and original, quite different from the highly developed ones. Also,the name Sylvia gives us a clue to the little girl’s personality. Sylvia means woods or forests. Maybe the author wants us to think the girl is much like the forests. She belongs to the forests, and that’s why she never had been alive in the city. The white heron in this story is a metaphor of the innocence Sylvia possesses. In this story, the life of the white heron is under threat, and the innocence wit