On Not Shooting Sitting Birds
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| "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by Jean Rhys | |
| Publication | |
| Publisher | The New Yorker |
| Media type | Magazine |
| Publication date | August 19, 1976 |
“On Not Shooting Sitting Birds” is a work of short fiction by Jean Rhys originally appearing in The New Yorker (August 19, 1976) and first collected in Sleep It Off Lady (1976) by André Deutsch publishing.[1]
The story has been compared to a "miniature" Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys's novel about her life in the West Indies and as an ex-colonial in England.[2]
“On Not Shooting Sitting Birds” is included in the 1987 volume Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories by W. W. Norton & Company.[3]
“On Not Shooting Sitting Birds” is presented from a first-person point-of-view by a reliable narrator. The story is set in England during the Belle Époque , circa 1910.
The unnamed narrator, a youthful middle-class white woman raised in a British Caribbean colony, agrees to have dinner with a young Englishman whom she finds attractive. Anticipating a pleasant evening that she is certain will culminate in love-making, she purchases a “pink…milanese silk chemise and drawers” for the occasion.[4] She arrives at the engagement with romantic notions of English society and its upper-class social norms.
While dining, she detects that the Englishman is increasingly anxious. He asks her guardedly, “But you’re a lady, aren’t you?” She deflects the query too lightly with “Oh no, not that you’d notice,” which only increases the gentleman's rigid class-conscious suspicions.[5][6]
The young woman shifts the topic to game hunting, a topic she assumes will appeal to any Englishman. She describes the avian game species of the West Indies—of which he is entirely ignorant and uninterested—and invents an imaginary narrative concerning a hunting party on her family's estate. Consciously dissembling and unconsciously deluding herself, she concocts a largely fictional narrative derived from unreliable childhood memories. The so-called hunting party was no more than her two older brothers, just boys at the time. When they fired their guns, she had fearfully crouched behind a bush with her fingers plugged her ears. During her dinner, she inadvertently makes remarks that lead the gentleman to conclude that the presumably adult hunters had shot birds perched on tree limbs—a gross violation of British bird hunting etiquette. He interrupts her: “Do you mean to say your brothers shot sitting birds?” His tone is one of outrage and disgust. The young woman realizes she cannot redeem herself by revealing the truth; she grows cold in response to his reaction. The pair part ways at her apartment, each offering a curt goodnight.
While removing her lovely pink chemise in her bedroom, the woman consoles herself: “Some other night perhaps, another sort of man.”[7]
Narrative form and structure
“On Not Shooting Sitting Birds” is more an autobiographical record than a work of fiction, according to biographer Miranda Seymour.[8] She characterizes the work as “an artfully structured reminiscence of Rhys’s childhood in Dominica.”[9]
Biographers Cheryl and David Malcolm identify three distinct narratives. The main narrative concerns the events surrounding an evening the narrator/protagonist recalls spending with an attractive young English gentleman. The second narrative is an idealized childhood remembrance of a family bird hunting outing in the West Indies. The third narrative is the narrator's mature reassessment of the events surrounding the shooting party.
In each one the invisible, colonial female otherness of the protagonist/narrator points to a power and authority possessed by the male character which is as much cultural and national as it is sexual in its origins.[10]