A White Heron

Sylvia’s adoration of nature creates one of the story’s most prominent themes: Protecting the Natural World. Sylvia, whose name means “of the woods,” is a nine-year-old girl who explores the wilderness around her grandmother’s farm and revels in the forest and wildlife. Early on, her grandmother reflects:

[T]here never was such a child for straying about out-of-doors since the world was made! Everybody said that it was a good change for a little maid who 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 (670).

Sylvia feels that she belongs to this setting of rural Maine and that she didn’t have a full existence until she entered this scenic landscape. Upon Sylvia’s first moments at the farm, when the cat purrs as she brushes her legs in her grandmother’s quaint home, she whispers that it’s a “beautiful place to live in, and she should never wish to go home” (670). Life in a city didn’t suit introverted Sylvia, revealing through her character that conservationism is viewed as superior to industrialism.