The use of bird iconography dates to seventeenth century Dutch paintings that would later be adopted by the French and the English. The use of birds in fine art in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries shows a direct connection between the obsession with Victorian natural history and the materialization of nature. In addition, the use of bird iconography was often used to symbolize gender roles and the belief that a woman’s virtue was of utmost importance. When birds in cages were typically depicted, they were usually shown in a domestic space with a young girl or an older woman in close proximity. By showing the caged bird, the artist symbolizes the safety of a woman staying in a domestic space. There are also cases in which dead or wounded birds are depicted to show the dangers of being outside of the birdcage as an analogy for a woman losing her virtue. Due to this well-known phenomenon and its continuation in art and media, I will discuss the history of bird iconography by using Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) as a catalyst in showing that this icon is still used within the post-modern era. In looking at the historical connection of the film with Victorian bird paintings, a clear connection will be formed that shows the continued use of this iconography.

Alfred Hitchcock was and is one of the most well-known filmmakers in history. Hitchcock himself was born in the Victorian era (1899) in England and with a career that took place throughout a large section of the 1900s, his films often showed popular themes of his time; two of these included topics of gender and domestic violence. In Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism, Cohen says “he treated sex and violence first indirectly, then in stylized representation, and finally with graphic directness.”[1] In making this connection, Cohen divides Hitchcock’s career into three sections. The first takes place throughout the years that he was creating films in Britain that oppose the structure of nineteenth-century novels. These films also include themes that relate to gender and familial relationships.[2] The second phase, (1939-early 1960s) Cohen classifies as the period in his career when he started to adhere to what his earlier films spoke against; creating films “to reclaim, for cinematic use, the novelistic concept of character that narrative film … had initially sought to suppress.”[3] During this time, Hitchcock also experienced a strengthening of his relationship with his daughter, Patricia Hitchcock. Lastly, the second section of his career begins to overlap with the third where he begins to move away from all former influences of his previous films. Most prevalent in his last three films, (1968-1975) they “cease to refer to a novelistic tradition or a family nexus.”[4]

[1] Cohen, Paula Marantz. “Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism.” The University Press of Kentucky. (1995).

[2] Cohen, Paula Marantz. “Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism.” The University Press of Kentucky. (1995).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

The section that I will be focusing on is the second section where Hitchcock reclaims the use of English literary novels in his films. In this section, he created films such as Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), Marnie (1961), and The Birds (1963). Though the films have their differences in plot, they share some commonalities. All four had originally been published in book form, from which Hitchcock adapted them into films. Another connection the four films share is that they have a blonde, female central figure that experience male control. These women are idealized in a sense and attributed to being created due to Hitchcock’s own obsessions with how he thought women ought to be.[1]  

[1] Jhirad, Susan. “HITCHCOCK’S WOMEN.” Cinéaste 13, no. 4 (1984).

A connection between the literary world of Daphne du Maurier’s original story entitled The Birds and Alfred Hitchcock’s adaption of this story is the idea of the Female Gothic. In Literary Women, Ellen Moers defines the Female Gothic as the work of women writers since the eighteenth century that "in Gothic writings fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural, with one definite auctorial intent: to scare.”[1] In The Threat of the Gothic Patriarchy in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, Bishop compares The Birds (1963) to the idea of the “Female Gothic,” an eighteenth and nineteenth century term used to describe the ways that female writers would convey issues of women being confined into a domestic setting. A well-known example of this can be seen in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman where, in 1892, she describes being confined to her house by her husband, who doubles as her doctor, because she is in a melancholic state. The bars that she notes on the windows add to the idea of the domestic house as a cage for her. In the Victorian era, women were noted to fall into a melancholic state often and would be confined to houses or eventually sent to asylums. This starts to closely relate when talking about the similarities between Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). On this, Bishop says that all four films “address the psychological underside of the otherwise normal family, reflecting and manifesting contemporary concerns regarding female independence, patriarchal control, family tradition, and the tensions between social classes.”[2]

[1] Moers, Ellen. “Literary Women.” Doubleday & Company, INC., (1976).

[2] Bishop, Kyle William. “The Threat of the Gothic Patriarchy in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds.’” Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, vol. 65, no. 2 (Fall 2011).

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is one modern example of art that uses the same themes as Victorian caged bird paintings. In the film, we meet Melanie Daniels, a San Francisco socialite, that seems to rebel against society’s idea of how a woman should behave by playing various “pranks.” The film not only addresses human domination of nature through domestication but also has many underlying topics related to sex and gender.

In the opening scene, Melanie walks into a pet store that has many birds and bird cages on display. After Melanie talks with the store clerk about a bird she has ordered, Mitch Brenner enters and addresses her as if she is an employee. We later find out that he is a lawyer, and he knew who she was the whole time. Mitch tells Melanie that he wants to buy a pair of love birds for his 11-year-old sister’s birthday. This is the first example in the film that has strong connotations to Victorian bird iconography. Paintings in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries of bird cages are attributed in art history to having meanings dealing with puberty and the transformation into a woman. One example of this can be seen in Waking by John Everett Millais (Figure 1).

The young girl in the painting is believed to have just awakened and realized that she had begun her first menstrual cycle. The shock on her face as she looks up toward a bird cage in the upper right corner relates to becoming a woman, but still holding onto her virtue and youth as well as how “the borderline position of the cage, more than two-thirds of it cutoff by the top of the painting, seems to coincide with the position of this young girl, who also seems to be at a sexual crossroads of life, perhaps between childhood and puberty.”[1] This idea also comes up in the color symbolization of the doll’s red dress against the white sheets; it could symbolize menstrual blood of womanhood as well as the doll being a connection to the girl’s childness. On the left side of the bed, there is a discarded flower on the floor that hints toward the girl’s future deflowering as well as an alphabet book that relates to her youth. The girl is likely around 11 or 12 years old, about the average age of puberty, which is the same as Mitch’s sister whom he wants to buy the love birds for.

[1] Shefer, Elaine. “The ‘Bird in the Cage’ in the History of Sexuality: Sir John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 1, no. 3 (1991).

When Mitch makes his request for the love birds, he specifically notes that he doesn’t want them to be “too demonstrative” or “too aloof,” but wants them to be “just friendly.”[1] This shows that he wants the birds to act as good role models for his young sister that is likely going through bodily changes of her own. Mitch then asks if caged birds make Melanie empathetic toward them and she says they can’t just let them fly around the shop. It is clear that Mitch wants the caged birds to show his sister that it is safer to be caged or in a domestic space as opposed to a wild lifestyle such as Melanie’s. When one of the birds escapes, Melanie and the store clerk try to catch it. Before they can capture it, Mitch places his hat over the bird when it lands. As he places it safely back into the cage, he says, “back in your gilded cage Melanie Daniels.”[2] At this point, Melanie realizes that he knows who she really is and is referring to her questionable behavior for a lady such as the how she supposedly swam in a public fountain in Rome naked, though she denies it. Mitch “draws a parallel” here to show that he does not approve of her demonstrative behavior and believes that she should be safely caged like the birds in the shop. In Hitchcock’s Women, Jhirad poses that it is the corruption of the women in Hitchcock’s films, for Melanie Daniels, it is her demonstrative behavior, that justifies the violence they experience.[3] This way of thinking is common in society blaming women for any harm that comes to them. It even goes back to Victorian sex workers that were forced into prostitution to pay their own way given it was the most profitable occupation for women at this time. The way that Hitchcock was said to idealize women into how he thought they should look and behave, could be one explanation for his deviances in Melanie Daniel’s character from Daphne du Maurier’s original story The Birds. As previously mentioned, during this time he had developed a stronger relationship with his daughter. Though Patricia Hitchcock was much older than Cathy Brenner, he might have been having thoughts of “keeping her caged” given that she was starting to make her mark in Hollywood and even starring in some of his own films. This celebrity lifestyle that Patricia Hitchcock was experiencing is very similar to the lifestyle of the socialite Melanie Daniels.

[1] Hitchcock, Alfred, director. “The Birds.” Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, (1963). 1 hr., 59 min.

[2] Hitchcock, Alfred, director. “The Birds.” Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, (1963). 1 hr., 59 min.

[3] Jhirad, Susan. “HITCHCOCK’S WOMEN.” Cinéaste 13, no. 4 (1984).

In addition, Hitchcock was infatuated with Tippi Hendren, star of The Birds and Marnie. While working on these films, Hendren experienced unprofessional events such as Hitchcock hiring a private investigator follow her and hand choosing her wardrobe for her.[1] After filming The Birds, Hitchcock sent Hendren’s five-year-old daughter a look alike doll of her mother’s character, Melanie Daniels.[2] Though it was meant to be a joke, it would be difficult to not take the underlying message as Hitchcock “caging” both Hendren and her daughter.

The history of the social construct of women being safer within the interior does not just come from the risk of being raped, but also being snatched from the streets by older women sex workers and brought into prostitution. In both cases, the goal was to find what the Victorians called “green fruit”[1] which referred to a young virgin. The sex industry in eighteenth and nineteenth century London was foundational in the building of the city. With prostitution turning over one of the largest annual incomes in the city, like wealthy people in more respectable trades, those involved in prostitution would invest in construction projects throughout the city. Though prostitution did not create wealth, "it was the service industry par excellence that distributed money into different strata of society and generated an estimated gross turnover of around £20 million per annum.”[2]

[1] Ibid.

[2] Jhirad, Susan. “HITCHCOCK’S WOMEN.” Cinéaste 13, no. 4 (1984).

The constructional influence of the sex industry on London during this time is very important, but it also altered many social and cultural constructs that led into the uses of bird iconography. According to Cruickshank, the sex industry “was a sophisticated and well-organised enterprise that crossed class boundaries, overlapped with most aspects of daily life, and enjoyed a highly ambiguous relationship with the law.”[3] It is because of this that it also had a significant impact on fine arts. The term “defeathering” also became popular when referring to the taking of a woman’s virtue; an artistic concept utilized by Millais’ The Woodman’s Daughter through the placement of a single feather loose on the soil near the girl’s feet.[4] This idea of “defeathering” is just another way that women have related to birds through gender roles.

[1] Shefer, Elaine. “The ‘Bird in the Cage’ in the History of Sexuality: Sir John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 1, no. 3 (1991).

[2] Cruickshank, Dan. “London’s Sinful Secret.” St. Martin’s Press (2010).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Shefer, Elaine. “The ‘Bird in the Cage’ in the History of Sexuality: Sir John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 1, no. 3 (1991).

Though there are a few common reasons as to why women would get involved in prostitution, two of the major ones were poverty and male deceit. In the early 1700s Richard Steele wrote in the Spectator blaming prostitution on men rather than the personal situations of whores that caused them to resort to such means. Cruickshank quotes Steele’s article saying that the “villainy of the practice of deluding women, entice ‘little raw unthinking Girls, and leave them after Possession of them without any Mercy to Shame, Infamy, Poverty and Disease.”[1] This was a new way of thinking during that time and started to show that female sex workers were not solely to blame on their occupation.

[1] Cruickshank, Dan. “London’s Sinful Secret.” St. Martin’s Press (2010).

Another very large commonality between caged birds and Victorian women specifically is the thought of both as material objects to be bought and sold. In reference to T. B. Clovin’s The Birdcage and William P. Frith’s The Canary, Shefer explains that “with the birds out of the cage, as they are sometimes found in these paintings, and the women gently playing with or feeding them, these paintings may have hinted at more erotic meanings, that is, that the pets are for sale.”[1] The act of wife selling was not unheard of in the Victorian era. Just like an occasional caged bird, they were auctioned off in the town square to the highest bidder. This auction of women took place to avoid divorce and leave the wife without a husband to provide for her. That said, men were occasionally auctioned of by their wives but very few accounts of this happening survive today.

[1] Shefer, Elaine. “The ‘Bird in the Cage’ in the History of Sexuality: Sir John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 1, no. 3 (1991).

There are also heavy contexts of domestic violence in The Birds. After Melanie meets Mitch’s sister, Cathy, she tells Melanie of the work that Mitch does in the city as a lawyer for “hoods.” She describes one incident where his client shot his wife in the head six times. Cathy goes on to say, “Six times! Can you imagine it? I mean, even twice would be overdoing it, don’t you think?”[1] Melanie then asks Mitch why her husband shot her to which he responded that he was watching a ball game on T.V. and his wife changed the channel. Cathy is more in awe that he shot his wife six times rather than shot her at all. In addition, both Melanie and Mitch laugh it off as a joke that she was shot for changing her husband’s channel. This conversation seems to be added information that doesn’t relate to the environmental activist themes of the film but does show how the characters cope with gender issues in thee 1960s. The underlying domestic violence theme could also relate to the time in which the film was released. The 1960s were an important time for women’s rights in how there were movements toward equal work for equal pay and combatting domestic violence.

[1] Hitchcock, Alfred, director. “The Birds.” Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, (1963). 1 hr., 59 min.

A second reference to domestic violence comes later in the film during one of the most iconic scenes. When Melanie visits the schoolhouse to check on Cathy, she waits outside and smokes a cigarette as more and more crows start to appear on the school playground. Though most of the emphasis is placed on the murderous birds, part of why this scene is so eerie is due to the song that the children are singing throughout. The song is a Scottish folk song titled Wee Cooper O’Fife about a barrel maker who beats his wife because she will not cook, clean or sew. In reading the bird uprising like the rising of women against traditional gender roles and domestic violence, it fits perfectly to have a well-paced folk song about domestic violence act as the final straw before the birds attack the entire town. An interesting question brought up in the later diner scene is why did the birds wait until now to rise? This question starts to poke at what I believe to be Alfred Hitchcock’s confusion of what is taking place in his own reality and women further advocating for equal rights. There is also a connection to Hitchcock’s own view on strong women. Jhirad quotes Hitchcock in Spoto saying that ‘she could appear to be a frail little blonde with no strength at all. But when she whines. She’s such a nag that he will do anything, but anything just to stop her.’[1] Hitchcock’s reaction here is strangely similar to the relationship between the barrel maker and his wife in Wee Cooper O’Fife. The wife is expected by her husband to perform the tasks suited to women, cooking, cleaning, and sewing, but once she rebels, he resorts to “anything” to stop her whining, even domestic violence.

[1] Jhirad, Susan. “HITCHCOCK’S WOMEN.” Cinéaste 13, no. 4 (1984).

In addition, Bishop discusses the importance of houses in these films. The Brenner house in The Birds is seen as a safe place from the avian murderers as opposed to the horrors that take place in the Psycho house. This stark difference could be the most important information as to why The Birds is so closely related to the Female Gothic and historical uses of bird iconography. Bishop contrasts Mitch Brenner’s bachelor apartment in the city to the family farmhouse that he schedules a trip to in Bodega Bay. He explains the ways in which the farmhouse is first introduced to the viewer as a safe haven across the bay, an “idyllic vision of the pastoral.”[1] The idea of the pastoral was also popular in bird cage art in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. In reference to the foliage on the bird cage in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Shefer says the “cage resembles the cottage in the woods, the Victorians' way of romanticizing rustic living, where virtue and morality could best be found.”[2] This goes to show that the romanticizing of the Brenner farm house in The Birds is showing the pure and virtuous life of Mitch Brenner’s sister in stark comparison to the rebellious life of Melanie Daniels in the city.

[1] Ibid.

[2] Shefer, Elaine. “The ‘Bird in the Cage’ in the History of Sexuality: Sir John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 1, no. 3 (1991).

The retreat to the Brenner house upon the avian attack further seals this idea of the pastoral as a cage when Mitch starts to seal them inside and board all the entries keeping the rebellious birds, likened to rebellious women, out of the house. It is this point in the film when Bishop relates the childhood house of Mitch Brenner to becoming uncanny. A safe place that he always knew is now his family’s own personal cage. The connection between houses and bird cages also lives on into the twenty-first century though bird cages that are in the physical shape of a house. This has become a common shape of bird cage in the twenty-first century and shows the idea of domestication in an uncanny way. In order to make it very explicit that birds and women belong in a caged, domestic space, there are examples of antique bird cages from the 1700s that are shaped like church steeples and even pose a cross at the top (Figure 2). These examples extend the idea of the house and domesticated space as a cage for the safety of birds and women.

Looking to the importance that understanding the history bird iconography has even within the twenty-first century, Sia’s Elastic Heart (2013) music video shows Dance Moms star Maddie Ziegler dance fighting with Shia LaBeouf within a larger-than-life bird cage. Sia herself does not appear in the music video and chose for the entirety of the music video to be about Ziegler and LaBeouf. The music video received backlash on social media saying that Sia was promoting pedophilia due to the awkward age gap and obvious dance gestures toward something more than platonic between the stars. An example of this is when Ziegler is lying on the ground, LaBeouf lays beside her and starts to touch her mouth. Sia later Tweeted that she had expected accusations of pedophilia. In an interview with Maddie Ziegler, she said Sia had told her that she would be playing a werewolf and that she was the one with the power, not LaBeouf. This power that Sia puts into Ziegler’s head fuels the emotion in her performance of wanting to fight LaBeouf in a believable way. It has been asked in tabloids why Sia chose these two actors as opposed to an older female lead. By using a young female dancer, Sia uses a cage and young girl icon with the perfect history to convey the female rising above male standards of women. This is enhanced in the music video when Ziegler is able to fit between the bars of the cage and escape while LaBeouf has to remain within its confines. The problem with the success of the music video was that the public either thought she was promoting pedophilia or were completely obvious to it and did not understand it at all. It is because of this collective, not understanding, that Sia was giving the power back to young women, that the understanding of bird iconography becomes important in media literacy even in the twenty-first century.

Even though Hitchcock’s film, The Birds, was released in 1963, it can be assumed that Hitchcock, and his Victorian upbringing, would have been familiar enough with the ways in which Victorian bird iconography was used to show the expected behavior and roles of women. In living a life in multiple decades where sex and gender were discussed with regard to traditional gender roles, the Women’s Rights Movement, discussions of domestic violence, and more, Hitchcock developed a career that epitomized this timeline of topics relating to gender. Through the small glimpses of Hitchcock’s own beliefs of an ideal woman throughout his films, we can see the battling notion of changes in time and place within society. Jhirad adds that Hitchcock’s “view of a woman as a precious object to be placed on a pedestal, revered at a distance, then, when she wobbles, to be knocked off and smashed into pieces.”[1] This is surely true for Melanie Daniels in The Birds for when she falls off the societal pedestal of expectations with her pranks, she moves away from the Victorian and Hitchcock’s own ideal woman.

[1] Jhirad, Susan. “HITCHCOCK’S WOMEN.” Cinéaste 13, no. 4 (1984).

As Hitchcock creates work in both Britain and America and in looking at key moments in The Birds, it become clear that he has one foot in the twentieth century in having glimpses of a strong female lead that is her own free person in society while his other foot is in the nineteenth century saying that women need to be caged for their own safety and controlled by a man.

This universe that Hitchcock creates that inhabits core beliefs of societies of multiple centuries shows a personal timeline in the way that Hitchcock is questioning his own relationships with women and applying them to a larger social construct.