Birdsong

Gender as Pageantry is the overarching theme of the story. The story calls attention to the role gender expectations play in the narrative as soon as the narrator introduces Chikwado.

The reader learns through exposition that Chikwado’s daily habits include attending religious services dedicated to helping women find a husband. Initially, Chikwado is treated as an outlier due to the bias inherent in the narrator's point of view; however, it seems that the narrator herself is an outlier. The narrative portrays Chikwado’s marital goals as an obsession: “[Chikwado] would come to work the next morning sleepy, the whites of her eyes flecked with red, but already planning to attend another service” (Paragraph 4). However, her behavior is seen as normal because it aligns with the goals of the other women at the narrator’s workplace. Marriage was “all [their] female co-workers talked about” (Paragraph 4) at lunch. Due to this information and the narrator’s own admitted distance from the topic (“While they talked, I would look out the window” (Paragraph 4)), the story’s gendered landscape becomes clearer.

It is only when the narrator reveals that her lover likes birds and that she changes her personality to suit his interests (“…I became a person who liked birds” (Paragraph 9) that the story creates parallels between the pageantry of