“The Birds” Criticism “Nature Versus Culture and the Human Condition”
Deneka Candace Macdonald
MacDonald is an instructor of English Literature and media. In this essay, MacDonald considers du Maurier’s text as a reflection on nature versus culture, and the human condition.
“... the birds are representative of othered beings, not even the traditionally foreign others of the historical period (Russia), but local others, minorities and marginalized beings who have joined together to become one powerful force in the face of previous control and power.”
In the latter part of the twentieth century, with recurring environmental disasters of every imaginable kind, scholars, pseudo scholars, and the like began to take a marked interest in the growing binary relationship between humankind and animals, or more to the point, between culture and nature. Moreover, this theme of cultural distress has been reflected in contemporary fiction, which often personifies natural enemies of humankind on a variety of levels. Full of striking warfare metaphors, poignant spatial imagery, and provoking references to the “other,” Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” is a clever fictional addition to this growing concern with the phenomenon of nature versus culture.
Du Maurier begins her tale with a marked indicator of the role nature will play in her story:
“On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter.” With this dramatic change in the weather, the birds begin to loom in the sky, illustrating their powerful presence and foreshadowing the dread that awaits Ned Hocken, his family, and ultimately, humankind. It is this relationship between human and nature that du Maurier is primarily concerned with as she immediately sets up a powerful dichotomy between the two: “the figure of the farmer silhouetted on the driving-seat, the whole machine and the man upon it would be lost momentarily in the great cloud of wheeling, crying birds.” This initial image of the farmer astride his machine, battling a “cloud” of birds, is the first in a series of disturbing motifs that continue throughout the story; the message is clear: man/machine cannot successfully battle nature/the birds. Indeed, as “The Birds” continues, readers learn that nature works deliberately against man; it is nature’s tides (the flood tide) that bring the vicious bird attacks, just as it is the ice cold wind that chips against Nat’s hands, discouraging him as he works to defend his home.
Images of war, carnage, and holocaust soon become linked with the open geography of the farm as well as the closed confined spaces of Nat’s home. As he runs for shelter and protection from the raid in the gaping sky, Nat notes that the birds become bolder with each diving attempt at his body:
They kept coming at him from the air, silent save for the beating wings. The terrible fluttering of the birds. He could feel the blood on his hands, his wrists, his neck. Each stab of a swooping beak tore his flesh. If only he could keep them from his eyes. Nothing else mattered.
In addition to the boldness of the birds, it becomes apparent that some of the birds are selfless, attacking for the greater cause “with no thought for themselves.” Nat looks on in horror as the suicidal, dive-bombing birds miss him, crashing, “bruised and broken, on the ground”: “The wings folded suddenly to its body. It dropped like a stone.... They heard the thud of the gannet as it fell.”
To his dismay, Nat discovers that man-made products such as windows are not sufficient protection against nature’s anger. Frantically, he turns to natural products, first wood to board the windows and doors, and then the gruesome bloodied bodies of the dead birds themselves to insulate the broken boards and windows. He reasons that “the bodies would have to be clawed at, pecked, and dragged aside, before the living birds gained purchase on the sills and attacked the panes.”
This image of carnage immediately following the first major bird attack foreshadows further warlike imagery for the story. The birds have literally become an army, their corpses used as a repugnant defense. Further, both the black, cold weather and the viciousness of the birds themselves are attributed to Russian influence, just as Mrs. Trigg’s indifference to the problem is “like air-raids in the war,” reflecting a cold war attitude. Nat’s wife, too, reflects this mentality: “Won’t America do something? They’ve always been our allies, haven’t they? Surely America will do something?”
Later, holocaust images are abundant when Nat neglects to keep the kitchen fire alight. He becomes frenzied as he attempts to pull the “smouldering helpless bodies of the birds caught by fire” from the chimney, unable to think of anything else, unable to heed the cries from his family in the background. When it is over, the kitchen fills with the smell of burning feathers from the “heaped singed bodies of the birds.”
However, the battle with nature and culture stretches beyond Nat’s small farm home in England but to the rest of the country (and the world by implication). Thus, the wireless radio ends its final transmission with the national anthem after its warning of the unnatural behavior of the birds. The telephones go “dead” during the night while the birds attack, and Nat discovers Mr. Trigg’s body beside the telephone, indicating that he made a failed attempt to telephone for help before the birds gorged on his body.
Clearly, mechanical developments in technology are no match for nature’s birds. In addition, man’s attempt to launch an “air raid” on the beasts fails when the birds attack the aircraft, infecting their propellers and sending them crashing into the farmland. Even the wind seems to come alive as it reclaims the dead birds, “sweeping them away” back into the sea during Nat’s attempt to bury their bloodied bodies. Nat and his family are forced to hide, afraid and hunted as the birds launch a systematic attack, in the small confined space of their man-made cottage. The wide open spaces of the farm and the sea are occupied by the birds and are, therefore, unsafe for humanity.
The story ends with a poignant analogy between nature and culture: “Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood.... the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.” Consequently, as Gina Wisker notes in her article “Don’t Look Now,” “the unease she [du Maurier] leaves us with develop[s] into fully fledged refusals of closure, and celebratory transgressions.” Indeed, the people in “The Birds” will not be rescued. There will be no happy ending. They will die.
Throughout “The Birds,” there is the suggestion that the birds that attack Nat Hocken and others are strange relentless beings who must be from outside the natural order of things. Nat initially tells his children not to worry, that the birds “aren’t the birds, maybe, from here around. They’ve been driven down from up country.” This notion is reiterated by Mrs. Triggs later when she says, “I suppose the weather brought them.... Foreign birds maybe, from the Arctic circle.” Not only does this reinforce the already blatant cold war imagery in the story, but it also points to comfortable accusatory “othering” within the text. The vicious attack of the birds has come from elsewhere; local birds would never turn on the local people.
Ironically, the reader discovers that these are local birds. Further, they are several species of local birds: “robins, finches, sparrows, blue tits, larks, and bramblings, birds that by nature’s law kept to their own flock and their own territory, and now joining one with another in their urge for battle.” Most importantly here, as Nat notes, these are birds, who, “by nature’s law” would not normally band together. Metaphorically, on one level, the birds represent Mother Nature as she works to bring the birds of many species together in an angry army to attack and punish humanity.
On another level, the birds are representative of othered beings, not even the traditionally foreign others of the historical period (Russia), but local others, minorities and marginalized beings who have joined together to become one powerful force in the face of previous control and power. They attack the farmer and the farm hands, the patriarchal inhabitants of nature’s land who have reaped her resources. As Wisker notes:
It exposes hidden fears and lurking perversities derived from disgust at difference... at the Other, at the abject, the ‘not I,’ rejected otherness.... The abject also involves anything monstrous and animal like which can take over and destroy.
Thus, the birds will not be stopped; they will not remit. They are relentless, acting with the nature’s floods, timing their attacks to coincide with the ebb and flow of the tides.
“The Birds” is one of many stories in which du Maurier explores the workings of the mind. As a woman interested in the inner struggle with internal evil and the disturbing images of the unconscious mind, du Maurier often explores the notion of horror from these perspectives. Thus, a crucial theme in “The Birds” is the relationship between reason and insanity. The story is expertly constructed to play upon both the characters’ and the readers’ ability to reason in the midst of unreasonable behavior.
Du Maurier presents the reader with ordinary birds — seemingly harmless animals who traditionally represent peace, freedom, and spirituality — but with something distinctly sinister about them: “but even when they fed it was as though they did so without hunger, without desire. Restlessness drove them to the skies again.”
Particularly, this story reflects the teetering between reason and sanity in the character Nat Hocken. Indeed, as Carol LeMasters notes in Roles of a Lifetime, “[du Maurier’s] view of humanity proved darker than anything her literary forbears could have envisioned.” Thus, although Nat is “aware of misgiving without cause,” he attempts to remain entirely reasonable for much of the story, assuring his family and himself that there are logical reasons for the strange unnatural behavior of the birds. He states that “it must have been fright that made them act the way they did,” or that “the east wind brought them in. They were frightened and lost, they wanted shelter.” Nat’s reasonable explanations are confirmed by the wireless that recounts the “suspected reason of cold and hunger” as the bird’s motivation for attack.
Nat’s fear of the bird phenomenon can be seen clearly in his overcompensation to detail in the task of preparing the home. He is decidedly “over practical” throughout the ordeal. He immediately heeds the wireless instructions to protect his home, busily setting about the property boarding up windows, filling the chimney bases, and awaiting further news from the radio. He keeps himself occupied, thinking of food supplies, how many candles they will need, whether or not they have enough batteries and coal for the fire, etc., and where and when they can gather more.
However, as he battles nature’s ice cold wind and goes about his tasks, his own musings about the attacks are full of self-doubt. He is certain that Mr. Trigg’s “shooting match” with the birds will fail, and curses the man for not having the insight to defend his home. Eventually, Nat begins to ascribe human attributes of consciousness, greed, vicious-ness, and awareness to the army of birds attacking his home: ‘“they’ve got reasoning powers,’ he thought, ‘they know it’s hard to break in here. They’ll try elsewhere.’” Moreover, while Nat is initially confident that the authorities will solve this crisis with nature, he begins to doubt their competence: “someone high up had lost his head.”
Finally, as the birds ravenously hunt him and his family, he becomes less rational. Nat eventually resists reason and embraces the terror of the birds. As he lights his last cigarette and watches the empty packet burn, he is resolved to his fate. Wisker notes that du Maurier herself says it best when she acknowledges, in a private letter: “The evil in us comes to the surface. Unless we recognize it in time, accept it, understand it, we are all destroyed, just as the people in “The Birds” were destroyed.”
Source:Deneka Candace MacDonald, Critical Essay on “The Birds,” inShort Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.