새로운 여성자아의 탄생: 주잇의 「흰 왜가리」

The Birth of a New Woman-Self: Jewett’s ‘A White Heron.’

Sarah Orne Jewett in “A White Heron”(1886), one of her most representative short stories presents a new womanhood which is distinguished from the domestic womanhood presented in the domestic novels published before the Civil War. In “A White Heron,” the heroine Sylvia is no longer required to adopt the pious and domestic womanhood which the female protagonists in domestic novels had been forced to pursue. However, Sylvia shows a new, ‘non-conforming’ womanhood which refuses to accept marriage. Marriage that insures a middle-class comfort of life used to be given as a reward to the women who conform to the American patriarchal society in domestic novels. The appearance of this new womanhood heralds the emergence of a new female authorship adopted by Jewett, which, instead of denying its own literary ambition like the literary domestics, does boldly assert “the autonomy of the literary” like Henry James.