Daphne Du Maurier and The Birds!
My daughter and I were watching a sweet gathering of small birds on our bird table over breakfast today and I asked her what would happen if the birds decided en masse that they had had enough of human beings. Without hesitation my daughter replied that the birds would begin to attack us and would peck out our eyes.
Robins looked different for a moment afterwards…
Daphne Du Maurier takes the incidental, the ordinary sights and events of a day and renders them uncanny, askew. It is as if the picture has slipped to one side off the wall and we can no longer recognise what we saw the day before. And our eyes are such unnerving possessions afterall. Think of Gloucester’s eye gouging scene in Act 3 of King Lear and the needle/button/eye scenario going on in Coraline. Perhaps no other attachments to our body seem so important in terms of our sense of self hood.
Identity is shaped through our eyes. Our faces rely on our eyes for our distinctive ‘look’ and thus any fear of losing them, of the eyes being threatened by violence seems to feed a primal fear.
Du Maurier’s story The Birds is very different in setting and overall narrative than Hitchcock’s famous film where California has supplanted Cornwall. Both have considerable power to scare us, yet the original works particularly well I feel as we identify so clearly with Nat( the farm hand protagonist) and his family. Domesticity is violated by feathered horror, tapping away at our fears and mental security, so that any attempt made to bring the avian desperados under control is overwhelmed by the sheer might and numbers of the defiant creatures.
‘On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter. Until then the autumn had been mellow, soft. The leaves had lingered on the trees, golden red, and the hedgerows were still green. The earth was rich where the plough had turned it.’
The opening declaration situates the story in a moment of change. The climate has become harsher, the ‘mellow’ aspects of nature yield to something more brutal and the ‘wind’ is somehow blamed or implicated.
Yet what has changed is revealed as far far more dangerous than just the temperature or direction of the wind.
This is a Cold War, an invasion, an infiltration of fhe familiar by the betrayal of the birds, whose anger at their historical oppression by human beings has suddenly come to an end. An avian revolution has erupted from nowhere, yet this nowwhere is a place of many thousand years of grudges!
‘Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes..’
The use of the diminutive term ‘little’ is inspired. Affectionate smallness has become transformed into intense capsules of hatred. How effective too the present participles, giving no relief for the trapped human beings, from the apocalyptic revenge of these now fallen angels of the air.
Truly scary!
Janet Lewison, English Tutor, Manchester, Bolton and Bury.
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