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.