‘No one ever thought nature was just going to eat us’:An Ecocritical Perspective on Conor McPherson’s The Birds

Abstract

Literary criticism has long been concerned primarily with the analysis of human stories. When the natural environment has featured in texts, it has been treated primarily as a backdrop or setting-as nothing more than a stage on which a human drama is enacted. Conversely, an "earthcentered literary criticism" begins with the assumption that the natural environment is foundational not only to human survival and flourishing, but also to our cultural and individual identities. To study literature without a close attention to issues of place and environment is to behave as if humans exist in a void, when in fact we are defined by our relationship to a rich matrix of physical geography, weather phenomena, plants, and nonhuman beings. Ecocriticism takes seriously that these natural forces have stories of their own, and that our own stories cannot be told well or fully understood without attention to ecology. This paper explores one of Conor McPherson's most famous plays, The Birds (2009), from an ecocritical perspective. The work is a bold adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's short story of the same title, and can be read as a commentary on the woeful circumstances humans encounter if we find ourselves in tension with the natural world. In other words, the play deals with the human condition pushed to its limits, and questions what humans are capable of doing to each other in an "apocalyptic" situation. The present paper attempts to answer the following questions: how is nature represented in The Birds and which ecological terms can be applied? In this paper, I argue that, by undertaking an ecocritical reading of how McPherson represents nonhuman beings within stage directions, it is possible to better understand the ways in which humans' disconnect from the natural world both caused, and affects the outcome of, an apocalyptic situation.