Using of Vision in the Short Stories, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “A White Heron,” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Vision is used to affect the realism in the short stories, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “A White Heron,” and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In each of these stories, vision is used in different ways. In the stories, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “A White Heron,” and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the authors used the readers' senses, the culture, and the location to show the effects of vision on the realism of each story.
There are several ways that vision establishes elements of realism. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” there is a vision that pertains to the reader's senses, created through the use of vivid details made by the author. This can be seen when Bierce uses vivid descriptions to help portray the story of the man’s escape. Bierce wrote, “He felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest exploded, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek”. This gives the reader a strong sense of realism, as they can imagine how he felt being underwater for such a long period of time. The reader can imagine what he saw, and how he felt as this was happening to him.
In the story, “A White Heron,” Sarah Jewett uses vision to portray the landscape and culture of the Northeastern United States. When the main character, Sylvia is introduced, she connects automatically with the nature around her. She lived in a noisy, big city, with her mother and siblings, before being taken to her grandmother’s house in the woods. In this story, realism is shown through the authors showcasing of landscape and people. The hunter is a great example of this. The hunter offered Sylvia ten dollars if she would tell him the location of the White Herons nest. This proves to be a difficult decision for her and shows that she has good morals because she kept the location of the nest private.
In the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator’s descriptions allow readers to envision the setting that the narrator is experiencing. In this story, a young woman, who has bad mental health, becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room. She and her husband rent a summer estate with her family. The obsession with the wallpaper causes her descent into psychosis. The narrator describes the wallpaper as, “… the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw- not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old, foul, bad elbow things”. This description allows the reader to have a realistic image of the environment that the woman lives in. In addition to the literal images that establish realism for the readers, the author incorporates a strong element of realism with the visions created by the incorporation of supernatural elements. The woman in this story thinks that she sees a woman stuck behind the wallpaper, and how she tries to climb through. This idea adds skepticism to the reader about whether or not the woman in the wallpaper is real and if the woman is a reliable narrator. The author, Charlotte Gilman, constructs a set of confidence and allows this confidence to extend into the atmosphere in a way that the reader can sense and understand the narrator’s situation.
