In order to make the characters of “A White Heron” feel believable, Jewett does her best to capture their dialects. This is especially true of Sylvia’s grandmother Mrs. Tilley, as seen in the following passage (when she is explaining Sylvia’s love of animals to the hunter):
Squer’ls she’ll tame to come an’ feed right out o’ her hands, and all sorts o’ birds. Last winter she got the jaybirds to bangeing here, and 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. Anything but crows, I tell her, I’m willin’ to help support — though Dan he had a tamed one o’ them that did seem to have reason same as folks.
Mrs. Tilley’s rural Maine dialect comes across in a few different ways in this passage. First, Jewett intentionally changes the spellings of certain words in order to capture the sounds of Mrs. Tilley’s speech—“squirrels” becomes “squer’ls,” “and” becomes “an’,” and “she would have” becomes “she’d ‘a’.” Many of her other words lose the last letter.
Jewett also changes the grammar to show how someone from a rural community in New England would speak, which comes across in the final sentence of the passage when Mrs. Tilley describes how her son Dan once tamed a crow “that did seem to have reason same as folks.” Compare that to a description of how Dan once tamed a crow “that seemed to have as much reason as people,” and it’s easy to see Mrs. Tilley’s dialect coming through.
The way Mrs. Tilley speaks here is notable and so is the content of her speech—she is describing how, in her rural community, people live in harmony with animals and nature. This is opposed to how the hunter, as someone from a city, experiences nature—he wants to control, kill, and showcase it (as seen in his stuffed bird collection).
