The Vocalisations and Silences of the Infrahuman in Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘A White Heron’

This article aims to advance the research on US, 19th-century regionalist writer Sarah Orne Jewett’s position on the nonhuman in her most famous story, ‘A White Heron’ (1886), by intersecting the perspectives of posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, and the new materialisms, with that of literary soundscapes. Moving from previous assessments of Jewett’s participation in the environmentalism emerging in the US in the second half of the 19th century, it tries to answer the ingrained critique of the aporia inherent in the animal question – i.e. the use of human language to represent the nonhuman – through an accurate examination of the silences and vocalisations depicted in the story. Through her soundscapes, Jewett signifies her intentional and ethical use of the literary device of anthropomorphism, and an intuited, radical take on the animal question.