Birdsong

Bird courtship plays an important symbolic role in the story, representing both Gender as Pageantry and the mechanistic, compulsive aspects of attraction and desire. This symbol first becomes clear when the narrator, at her lover’s urging, takes an interest in birds for the first time in her life. Thinking back on this moment, she remarks, “with him I became someone else: I became a person who liked birds” (Paragraph 10). The narrator’s involvement with this married man places her at odds with herself, suggesting a loss of free will.

The lover begins signing his text messages “CwithaD”—an inside joke that develops out of a conversation in which he claims that most birds do not have penises. By comparing himself to a rooster, he unconsciously reinforces the motif, suggesting that the love affair between himself and the narrator is something beyond their conscious control—like birds, they are compelled to enact predetermined roles in relation to one another. For the narrator, the pet name is a marker of intimacy between them. Yet, when she learns that he also uses “CwithaD” with his wife, despair replaces her feelings of closeness. She imagines herself “morphing into a slack, stringless marionette” (Paragraph 56)—another metaphor suggesting a loss of agency.

Like birds in the midst of an intense courtship, the narrator and her lover’s relationship is based on pageantry, with each member playing their part in a choreographed dance whose outcome is predetermined. At the beginning, the narrator wants to believe she is bucking social norms, engaging in a romance of boundless possibility. By the end, she realizes that the norms governing this relationship are every bit as rigid and sexist as those of any marriage.