The Birds Essay | Critical Essay #3

The Birds Critical Essay #3

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, the human condition, and feminist principles.

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...
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