Ana Stevenson explores the meaning of the caged bird metaphor in Neo-Victorian film musicals.
The early twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of Neo-Victorian entertainments, especially films and television series, often adapted from nineteenth-century and contemporary novels. Some examples include The Crimson Petal and the White (novel, 2002; series, 2011).
Neo-Victorian films imitate the cultural mores of Britain during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, coupling nineteenth-century fashion, decorative, and musical aesthetics with modern technologies. These films use location, props, costume, and sound as “visible indications of ‘pastness'” to create a Neo-Victorian aesthetic.
The caged bird metaphor was prevalent across the nineteenth century, especially in art and literature. For Victorians, Elaine Shefer writes, the “bird in the cage” became “a physical and metaphysical metaphor for women’s place in society.” As a metaphor, it could speak to the possibilities of psychic and sexual violence women may experience, hidden in the private sphere of the home.
Many artists and writers, who often tended to be men, used the imagery of the caged bird to celebrate the dependence of women. These women were the beneficiaries and victims of the separate spheres ideology which sought to confine them to domesticity and motherhood.
For the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who used this imagery repeatedly, the women who embraced these qualities were celebrated while those who did not were condemned. Sir John Everett Millais’ Waking (1865), for example, depicts a young girl considering a caged bird as a metaphor for burgeoning sexuality.
Other philosophers and women’s rights reformers, however, who often tended to be women, used the caged bird metaphor as a protofeminist critique of the inferior education and confinement women consequently experienced. “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre,” Mary Wollstonecraft critiqued how women consequently roam around their “gilt cage” only to adore their “prison,” in her celebrated Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
As such an important Victorian aesthetic, the caged bird metaphor is ubiquitous in contemporary Neo-Victorian films. Antonija Primorac examines the competing ways in which contemporary film directors mobilise birdcage imagery: female directors such as … often use the symbol of the “embowered woman” to deconstruct gender stereotypes, whereas male directors such as Baz Lurhmann embrace the erotic aesthetics pioneered by Pre-Raphaelite artists which celebrate confinement.
While use of the caged metaphor may appear to be a remediation for the restrictions of Victorian gender roles, many directors of Neo-Victorian films perpetuate the male gaze by focusing on the aesthetic possibilities of birdcage imagery. Film musicals such as Moulin Rouge! (2001), Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), and Les Miserables (2012) bring together architecture, fashion, and music to render women beautiful behind bars.
The 1980s stage musical and film adaptation of Les Miserables, based on Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, projects the image of Little Cosette as the embodiment of the liberte, egalite, and fraternite for which the Parisian revolutionaries fight. Raised from her working-class origins by the benevolence of Jean Valjean, however, she grows up to become a cloistered bourgeois young lady who is chaperoned continually.
A chance sighting from a distance in the street leads to a love affair with the youthful revolutionary, Marius. When he comes to woo Cosette in her garden, an ornate gilt fence separates the pair, who sing “A Heart Full of Love” to each other. Birdcage aesthetics are used to frame Cosette’s face through this fence, her glossy eyes alone shining through. Marius, however, is both physically and metaphorically free, on the other side of its heavy bars.
Sweeny Todd, a 1980s stage musical and then film based on nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls, depicts the plight of Johanna. The young woman became the ward of Judge Turpin when he abducted and raped her mother; her father, seeking vengeance, was arrested and became a convict transported to Australia.
Judge Turpin keeps Johanna almost complete isolation, confined to the domestic realm so that he may marry her when she comes of age. Echoes of the psychic violence of intense loneliness, and perhaps even some awareness of the threat of sexual violence, can be heard in the lyrics Johanna sings in “Green Finch and Linnet Bird”:
My cage has many rooms, damask and dark.
Nothing there sings, not even my lark.
Larks will never, you know, when they’re captive;
Teach me to be more adaptive. …If I cannot fly, let me sing.
When Johanna absconds from Judge Turpin’s dwelling with the assistance of a working-class boy who has been lusting after her through the window, she is caught, only to be sent to Fogg’s Asylum – a clear allusion to the Bedlam Mental Asylum.
… the caged bird metaphor to aesthetically eroticise helpless women while failing to challenge their subordination.
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