Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds by Alison Ridyard

Daphne Du Maurier – “The Birds”

“There were 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, had destroyed themselves”.

It is precisely this breaking of nature’s laws, this inexplicable transgression of accepted boundaries, which is the source of story’s horror. History, Science and our own experience assures us of our privileged position – our superiority over the rest of the animal kingdom, making this mass insubordination, this unparalleled otherness, unfathomable and therefore terrifying.

So unthinkable is the prospect that a species would fight back against oppression, that no protocol exists for dealing with such an uprising, and within a matter of hours, the establishment begins to crumble. Our supposed supreme intelligence soon seems ridiculous, as bringing our communication systems down (radio broadcasts, telephone exchange, the dead postman – sardonically exposing the absurdity of Mrs Trigg’s suggestion of writing to The Guardian about the renegade birds), the birds silence us. The futility of man’s attempts to surmount this attack is symbolised in the sound of the crashing aeroplanes.

The skies, the birds remind us, are “their own territory”.

Whilst their disruption of everyday life and their damage to machinery and property are worrying, it is the abject nature of their blood-stained beaks, their lost feathers, broken wings and stiff dead bodies – ultimately, the threat they pose to the human body – our physical self, which invokes the greatest terror.

“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. He must keep them from his eyes.”

This “anxiety about one’s eyes” Freud tells us “is often enough a substitution for the dread of being castrated”. Whether we subscribe to Freud’s theory or not, having become the bird’s prey, Nat’s survival, his family’s survival, rests on his ability to see the avian assassins. Blind – he would be powerless against his enemies and effectively “castrated”.

However, it would be misleading to suggest that Nat has any chance of defeating the birds; the balance of power is firmly weighted in their favour. Using the tides to organise their strikes, they govern time and limit the opportunities for human endeavour. Ironically, the lull between their attacks becomes our time for scavenging, pillaging and securing nests!

The power of Du Maurier’s tale lies in its unyielding horror – her unwillingness to restore accepted notions of order, recalls to mind the last lines of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mushrooms”:

Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

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