Selling Sympathy

In one of her most widely recognized films, Audrey Hepburn takes the role of a book store clerk obsessed with a famous French philosopher and “empathicalism.” Empathicalism, as she haughtily  tells Fred Astaire, is the idea of being able to fluently communicate with a stranger regardless of language barriers by putting oneself in that stranger's place and sharing his or her emotions. Of course, the French philosopher turns out to be a fraud and Audrey Hepburn instead falls in love with Fred Astaire and they float down a river in France singing happily. Notwithstanding the light mockery the film pokes at soft-hearted idealists, the androgynous French empathicalists raise a valid point. Despite the convergence of cultural, idiomatic, philosophical, and moral differences within the human race, individuals can still relate to another through common emotions and empathize with one another. By placing a common emotion--romantic jealousy--in a parrot within the pages of “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”, Robert Olen Butler strips the painful emotion of any cultural or age-specific markers, thus making the protagonist of the story both relatable and pitiable.
    Superficially, the plight of the precocious parrot is perceived as rather adorable. The reader is immediately informed that not only is the parrot sitting in a pet store capable of human thoughts but is also somehow the deceased husband of the woman who enters the store. Not only does this straight-forward approach cut down on the reader’s confusion—and therefore immediately establishes an amiable relationship between audience and author that could later be exploited for sympathy--but the presence of pets and pet stores brings idealistic childhood memories into play. While there might have been a time where the reader demanded an explanation of how the man was transformed into a parrot, a deluge of Disney films featuring talking, thinking, feeling animals over the years has groomed the American audience to immediately accept this sort of anomaly and feel sympathy for the plight of any furry creature. Parrots, in particular, are undeniably lovable. Mrs. Proschek claims the yellow-naped parrot as being “the most charming and delightful creature imaginable”(Greene 495); two qualities that when combined with this particular parrot’s constant uncertainty, slightly self-deprecating remarks such as “I am a yellow-naped Amazon, a handsome bird, I think” (Butler 106), open admission about being consumed by past feelings of jealousy, and unbearably personal declarations of affection towards his former wife creates a rather pathetic creature. This blend of sweetness and inadequacy with the protagonist's incredibly relatable history of making mistakes seamlessly extracts sympathy from the reader.
    However, once the story is analyzed beyond the ‘a parrot is cute and therefore can easily win the affections of its audience’ theory, the question of why a parrot was specifically chosen by the author must be considered. Butler could have easily chosen a stray cat or dog; either of which would not only create a sadder story for the husband, but also has the potential to parallel a reader’s own personal story. Instead, Butler chose a bird: an archetype generally reserved for messengers. The irony of an archetypal bird being unable to communicate effectively brings up a wealth of possibilities. Butler specifically classifies the parrot as a yellow-naped amazon early in the story. In contrast to other parrots, Bradbury insinuates that yellow-naped Amazons vocal communications are even more extraordinary by claiming that “yellow-naped Amazons appear to have a distinct example of each of the nine call types with the exception of alarm calls” (de Waal 303). From the stark juxtaposition between the protagonist’s behaviors and how an archetypal bird and a wild yellow-naped parrot should act, it could be concluded that Butler chose a yellow-naped parrot in order to highlight miscommunication. According to Miller, “communication occurs when events in one place or at one time are closely related to events in another place or another time” (Silverstein 1). Perhaps Butler chose a parrot for his story in order to parallel the failure of the protagonist to communicate with his wife while he was alive--as a human--with the protagonist being unable to communicate with his wife once he is a parrot in order for the husband to come to terms with his personal failures. If this theory is accepted, then Butler has effectively paralleled yet another inevitable human experience: being forced to hold back any unspoken thoughts from loved ones once they have passed away. Normally, addressing this experience would create sorrow and self-reflection, rather than sympathy. However, by reversing the situation and giving the deceased the burden of taking his words to the grave--or perch in this case--the connection between the protagonist’s plight and the reader’s is weakened. Instead of the audience feeling sorry for themselves, the audience feels sorry for the parrot.
    Branching off from the idea that the parrot is a parrot because it represents miscommunication in the husband’s past life, there also remains the very probable possibility that “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” is a story of rebirth, a modified version of yet another soul-cannot-leave-this-earth-without-making-amends story. In the first paragraph, the husband is looking around at the other parrots and wonders “if it’s the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way” (Butler 103) and spends a great deal of time reflecting on his life as a human until he finally decides to fly away and join the other birds outside the window. It takes no great leaps of faith nor extraneous analysis to deduce that the husband’s soul has somehow been reborn and cannot leave this Earth until he comes to terms with his jealousy. Even with this shallowest of analyses, there still remains the element of pity as the protagonist clearly struggles with letting his love go.
    However, once the purpose of the parrot as a main character in the story are addressed, the question of whether “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” is a fictional story with a ‘real’ parrot, or if it is a real story with a symbolic parrot must be addressed. If the reader diverges from the protagonist’s claims that he died falling out of a tree attempting to spy on his wife and has been turned into a parrot--and thus chooses to believe that the husband is alive and the parrot is merely a symbolic manifestation of his jealousy--even more gray areas regarding the nature  and mental well-being of the husband open up. Phrases such as “her husband, the man that I was, is dead to her” (Butler 106) and “for a moment I still think I’ve been eloquent”(Butler 108), paints a dynamic picture of the husband’s jealousy. However, even as this basic premise is expounded upon, Butler still manages to keep pulling sympathy out of the reader by creating an enigmatic and pitiable character.
    If the parrot is just a coping mechanism for the human husband, then the story begins to revolve around the theme of jealousy rather than rebirth. From simply reading the text, this theory seems unsubstantiated. After all, the husband admits that he was jealous, admits that it was jealousy that directly lead to his ‘death’, and admits that he still cannot handle the thought of another man being with his wife after he is gone. Once he decides to fly away, the reader assumes he has moved on. However, according to the psychiatrist Hildegard Baumgart, jealousy is such a tangled, incredibly unsettling emotion that “even in our allegedly liberal age, writing about triangular relationships, betrayal, real or imagined infidelity, even reconciliation and self-control, is still problematic’ (Baumgart 2), and that it is much easier to analyze jealousy in the context of literature because “writers usually follow plot lines to their conclusion, while in real life these lines often become blurred” (Baumgart 3). It’s entirely possible that the husband is attempting a personal catharsis by manifesting his jealousy as a parrot.
    Of course, once the parrot is seen symbolically, the rest of the story must follow suit. When the parrot and wife first meet, one of the husband’s first thoughts is: “she seems to know about birds. She knows that to pet a bird you don’t smooth his feathers down, you ruffle them. But of course she did that in my human life, as well. It’s all the same to her” (104). From the placement of this thought in the course of story, if could be inferred that the husband has been plagued with jealousy from the beginning of their relationship, or that his wife has always acted in a manner that would constitute suspicion. Besides vague mentions of the birds outside, the only other specific bird the husband mentions is a blue-fronted Amazon in the pet store. Despite only “sitting on the perch next to [him] for about a week” (Butler 107), and describing her as “very sweet” (Butler 107), he still claims that he knew she’d break his heart all along and leave him for another bird. As the husband specifically casts himself and the female bird as two different parrots, it is imperative to contrast these two classifications. While male blue-front Amazons are incredibly talkative, the “females are usually incapable of learning much” (Greene 339) and are usually classified as unintelligent and quiet. The stark contrast between the two symbolical parrots could indicate the protagonists’ general perception of his own wife.
    The husband also spends a majority of his time in a “large black wrought-iron cage, very large” (Butler 104) in his ‘former’ house. While the connotation of a cage is usually fairly generic, when taken in context of the analysis of romantic jealousy, the cage aligns with a jealous individuals “voyeuristic trait of staring, the need to stare. This exhibitionistic compulsion consists in the need to talk about it, the need to bring up again and again one’s own sufferings and torture that the Other is allegedly inflicting” (Kern 230). Considering that the husband places several different men with with wife while he is trapped in his cage, the reader can conclude that the husband has become unwaveringly neurotic and self-destructive.
    Once the basic symbols have been addressed, the content of the husband’s thoughts must be addressed. If, by comparing his wife to a blue-front Amazon, the husband could be thinking of his wife as uncommunicative and unintelligent even by bird standards, then the question of why he showers her with adoration throughout the story arises. According to Kern, jealousy “erodes love from within” (Kern 264). This, in combination with Baumgart’s practical observations that hatred “distorts the ability to see clearly and impinges upon other people close to one, either as nervousness and aggression or in an exaggerated, all-consuming devotion”(Baumgart 27) could indicate that the real-life husband has reached the limitation of his struggles. However, the story is not simply a declaration of love. The husband’s story runs in circles of alternating statements of adoration, suspicion, and pain. According to Baumgart, this is typical as:     
    Jealous individuals are often very talkative during counseling sessions. They     repeat     themselves and certainly do not always come to ride themselves of their     suffering, but     to receive confirmation that it is ‘justified’ and to be listened to again   and again in their     torment. In this way, jealousy becomes the main preoccupation. It not only greedily     ingests what it needs for its continued existence, but it devours everything else...even and     especially his or her own self-image. (Baumgart 28)
Given this information, it becomes relatively easy to pick out the hidden phrases and veiled emotions from underneath the veneer of a charmingly neurotic parrot. However, the revelation of an incredibly flawed individual still does not prove detrimental in eliciting sympathy from the reader because the story is still relatable--even if the reader has never had a similar experience or lived vicariously through someone else undergoing similar behaviors, the world of film and literature has expounded upon this story for hundreds of years.
    The main character in "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot" is pitiable no matter how delusional the reader believes him to be, and tends to parallel common experiences in either life or literature. Butler's short story is an incredibly unique piece of fiction because it manages to touch a nerve in virtually any reader regardless of their age, gender, or history. At its very basic, it is the story of a helpless parrot; at its most contorted, it is the agonized grievances of a perpetually unhappy husband spilling out and taking the form of a parrot.

Works Cited
De Waal, Frans and Tyack, Peter. Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2003, Print.
Silverstein, Albert. Human Communication: Theoretical Explorations. New Jersey:     Lawerence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, 1974. Pring
Greene, W. T. Parrots in Captivity. US: TF.H. Publications, Inc,1979. Print.
Baumgart, Hildegard. Jealousy: Experiences and Solutions. Chicago: The University of  Chicago Press, 1990. Print
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Love. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.
Butler, Robert Olen Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot. New York: Touchstone, 2007. Print.