Women’s roles were horrendously restricted by social, economic, and political forces and trends. Some of these may have even been written earlier. Or she is relentlessly abusive and irrationally lashes out.Īm I being unfair? I mean, it’s the 50s. Or she is sexless and ethereal, holy and untouchable. She is the vixen with the pageboy and the seductive wardrobe. She may be attractive but, if she is, she is likely predatory and manipulative, dangerous and calculating. The female blindly follows her mate, habitually chooses the activities he most enjoys and obeys his every direction. Were it not for the caricature of the wife’s sketch, I would have lost sleep over this one.Īnd I might not even have minded the detraction of the wife’s character in that story as much, if the female characters in the other stories had challenged the stereotype-in-a-skirt in the first story.

There is a darkness and despair to the story in its original form that I did not intuit from the film. If I can manage to squeeze my frustration over characterization aside, “The Birds” is even more disturbing than the Hitchcock film based on it. No, she’s annoying in a predictably two-dimensional Little Woman manner. Arb in Riceyman Steps, or Enid in The Corrections. As is, say, Lee Goodstone in Doug Harris’ You comma Idiot, or Mrs. The poor man who must protect not only his two children, but his…oh, might as well make that three children…for his wife contributes nothing positive to the terrifying situation this family finds itself in and, in fact, she hinders the man’s efforts to shore up their defenses and her weakness forces him to make poor decisions which compromise their safety fundamentally.īut she’s not annoying in an interesting way. Perhaps we readers are meant to all-the-more strongly sympathize with the poor man with the incredibly useless wife. The wife in “The Birds” was particularly annoying. I don’t like choosing favourites.)īut the female characters in this collection’s stories are described in such negative terms and presented in such limited and predictable roles that much of the fun was siphoned away. (“The Old Man” was my next favourite, but then I get nervous about choosing favourites after that because there are only six stories in total and I don’t like to think that one of them would end up at the bottom of my list. Yes, there are enjoyable elements to every one. Partly because it’s deliciously creepy.īut deliciously creepy, with a slightly bitter note, as is true of all the stories to some degree.

Montgomery’s novels, in which heroines from Anne of Green Gables to Emily of New Moon to Pat of Silver Bush, named and loved trees. Partly because I’ve long believed that there is more to a tree than one might think, thanks to years of reading L.M.

My favourite story from this collection is “The Apple Tree”.

Daphne du maurier the birds 1952