“Birds are not aggressive creatures, miss, they bring beauty into the world. It is mankind, rather, who insists upon making it difficult for life upon this planet.”
Clare Beams’ novel, The Illness Lesson, may not look like a horror thriller at first blush, but it takes a page from Daphne du Maurier’s short story “The Apple Tree”/Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds when it opens with a flock of red birds descending on the farm where Caroline Hood and her father, Samuel, reside. The birds – a startling red with odd behaviors – were named “trilling hearts” by Caroline’s late mother, and the birds lend their newly minted moniker to the school Samuel decides to found for young ladies on the farm grounds.
A school isn’t the first entrepreneurial endeavor on the property. Samuel originally co-founded the farm as an intellectual utopia, modeled by Beams after Bronson Alcott’s ill-fated Fruitlands. Like Fruitlands, Samuel’s utopia went south, dissolving friendships and reputations alongside its demise. The book, though, is not about Samuel or the school, but about the teenage girls who fill it, and what happens when women’s minds and bodies are molded and corseted into forms not their own.
It starts with a red feather pinned to a board in student Eliza’s room. Then, fainting spells overtake the girls one after the other. The diagnosis, of course, is hysteria, a blanket term for all symptoms that the doctor on call believes (so he says) to stem from sexual repression. Good things do not follow.
Through the onset of the girls’ illnesses, the red birds encroach closer on the students and teachers, building nests, despite the winter weather, in roofs and eaves. The nests are messy and mud packed, but more concerningly, constructed of bits and bobs stolen from the girls: strips of dress cloth, hair ribbons, and spare lace. Caroline recognizes pieces of fabric from dresses she wore as a young girl, long lost. The birds, it would seem, are adept at theft with a preference for the objects of girlhood.
Theft, in its many forms, is at the heart of the book, as is the oppressive nature of other people’s desires: the desire to shape the way the girls think, desire for their bodies, and desire for domination and possession over women as a whole. It’s no coincidence that the birds are red, the color of violence, blood, romance, vampires, and danger.
“Could the others see now that they were being invaded? These birds were not some beautiful, romantic happening, some transforming touch to turn life into Pearson’s novel or Samuel’s essays. They were strange, savage creatures that carried their inscrutable nature with them and sent it raining down on top of other, feebler plans, and could the others smell it?”
The girls swim in the expectations and desires of others at all times – their parents, their pastors, their teachers, their suitors, and each other:
“Tabitha said tentatively, ‘I don’t see any birds.’ ‘But we know they’re there,’ Eliza told her. ‘All around us.’”
Unlike Hitchcock’s dive-bombing killer birds, Beams’ birds wait in the rafters, silently amassing the belongings – both corporeal and spiritual – of their targets, until what they desire is wholly consumed, the invisible marks left forever inscribed on their victims. Beams’ novel is a fitting illustration of trauma and its impact that carries through today, and a reminder that even if we don’t see it or fall victim ourselves, the silence of the unsaid is thick, and the violence of repression – both of a person’s true self and in speaking physical and mental violence aloud – leaves marks not even time can erase.