Jewett and Welty: Messages in the Ordinary

A long-legged heron picks through the marsh, its elegant head raising itself to search for available fish. The girl watches from the pine tree, her dress stained with sap. An elderly  African-American woman plods along wearily on a path fraught with swamps and wild dogs, risking her safety for her grandson’s health. These scenes, from Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron and Eudora Welty’s A Worn Path, both bring to life the authors’ writing abilities. Jewett, born in South Berwick, Maine, and Welty, raised in Jackson, Mississippi, lived in different times and places. However, both writers used their love of their hometowns to develop stories bursting with life and truths about humanity. In their short stories A White Heron and A Worn Path, Jewett and Welty both use dialect and symbolism to craft realistic, moving tales.

Dialect features in both Jewett and Welty’s stories as an important technique to showcase the geographical areas they loved so much. Jewett, as part of the literary regionalism movement, uses dialect in A White Heron to bring the reader home to the cozy, albeit poverty-stricken, heart of Maine where she grew up. The grandmother in the story speaks with a strong accent, her cut-off words illustrating her lack of education and her weariness of life. Jewett writes, “I believe she’d ‘a’ scanted herself of her own meals to have plenty to throw out amongst ‘em, if I hadn’t kep’ watch…Dan an’ his father they didn’t hitch, — but he never held up his head ag’in after Dan had dared him an’ gone off” (9). Through the grandmother’s rambling, lazy speech, Jewett shows her age and her upbringing in the harsh Maine wild, capturing a people and a region in language.

Welty, while not strictly a part of the literary regionalism movement bridging the romanticism and realism of the 1800s, also utilizes dialect in her story, A Worn Path. Oftentimes she uses speech to mark the difference in social classes. For example, when her protagonist Phoenix Jackson encounters a white man, Welty demonstrates their difference in social status through their interaction. The man says, “‘Now you go on home, Granny!’ ‘I bound to go to town, mister,’ said Phoenix. ‘The time come around.’ He gave another laugh, filling the whole landscape. ‘I know you old colored people! Wouldn’t miss going to town to see Santa Claus!’” (171). The man addresses Phoenix as “granny,” implying a condescension towards her. She, in return, calls him “mister,” knowing her place in the social order as a black woman facing a potentially threatening white man. Phoenix also uses words incorrectly, revealing her lack of education. In response, the man treats her as if she were a child, implying simplistic reasons for her trip to town rather than guessing her true purpose. Welty chooses their words carefully to demonstrate their difference in social status and the reality of Phoenix’s situation in the story.

Jewett and Welty, beneath their tales of realistic life in Maine and Mississippi, also use symbolism to illustrate deeper meaning in their characters’ ordinary lives. For Jewett, the white heron sighted by her protagonist Sylvia suggests the girl’s innocence. Sylvia, questioned about the heron by a handsome young hunter, must choose between childish love of nature’s beauty and gaining the approval of an attractive man. Jewett writes,

What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb? Has she been nine years growing and now, when the great world for the first time puts out a hand to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird’s sake? The murmur of the pine’s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron’s secret and give its life away. (21)

The young man, offering money for information on the heron, awakens Sylvia to the worldly desires of love of man and love of money. Torn between the temptation for wealth and favor and the childlike adoration for nature’s beauty, she chooses to protect the heron, maintaining her innocence a bit longer. In such a deceptively simple act, Jewett demonstrates that Sylvia still holds onto her youthful wonder at the Maine countryside, implying the superiority of nature and innocence, not wealth and human favor.

Welty too uses symbolism to provide deeper meaning to a story that initially appears to merely involve an old woman’s journey to town. As she rests from her wearying trip, Phoenix dreams of a boy offering her marble cake. Mistletoe, symbolizing life and rebirth, hangs above her in the tree, perhaps promising a life someday where different races can live at peace. The marble cake itself could also imply racial integration and harmony with its two colors of cake merged into one. But as Phoenix reaches for the cake, “there was just her own hand in the air” (Welty 168), showing that she cannot yet grasp equality and peace. Through seemingly ordinary objects, Welty draws the reader into a deeper understanding of the factors at play in Phoenix’s difficult life. She, like Jewett, weaves hidden messages into a story of ordinary life to demonstrate profound truths about humanity and life.

While both Sarah Orne Jewett and Eudora Welty lived in different times and places, both of them used similar techniques to draw their readers into ordinary lives that held extraordinary messages. Their writing demonstrates the power of the home to tell a story with depth and universal truths. They used dialect to create memorable characters whose struggles manifest in their language, and through symbolism they portray meaning in the ordinary.

Works Cited

Jewett, Sarah Orne. “A White Heron.” A White Heron: And Other Stories, E-book, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914, pp. 1-22.

Welty, Eudora. “A Worn Path.” A Curtain of Green: And Other Stories, E-book, Harcourt, Inc., 1964, pp. 167-175.