âÂÂOn Not Shooting Sitting Birdsâ is a work of short fiction by Jean Rhys originally appearing in The New Yorker (August 19, 1976) and first collected in Sleep It Off Lady (1976) by André Deutsch publishing.
The story has been compared to a "miniature" Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys's novel about her life in the West Indies and as an ex-colonial in England.
âÂÂOn Not Shooting Sitting Birdsâ is included in the 1987 volume Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories by W. W. Norton & Company.
âÂÂOn Not Shooting Sitting Birdsâ is presented from a first-person point-of-view by a reliable narrator. The story is set in England during the Belle ÃÂpoque, circa 1910.
The unnamed narrator, a youthful middle-class white woman raised in a British Caribbean colony, agrees to have dinner with a young Englishman whom she finds attractive. Anticipating a pleasant evening that she is certain will culminate in love-making, she purchases a âÂÂpinkâ¦milanese silk chemise and drawersâ for the occasion. She arrives at the engagement with romantic notions of English society and its upper-class social norms.
While dining, she detects that the Englishman is increasingly anxious. He asks her guardedly, âÂÂBut youâÂÂre a lady, arenâÂÂt you?â She deflects the query too lightly with âÂÂOh no, not that youâÂÂd notice,â which only increases the gentleman's rigid class-conscious suspicions.
The young woman shifts the topic to game hunting, a topic she assumes will appeal to any Englishman. She describes the avian game species of the West IndiesâÂÂof which he is entirely ignorant and uninterestedâÂÂand invents an imaginary narrative concerning a hunting party on her family's estate. Consciously dissembling and unconsciously deluding herself, she concocts a largely fictional narrative derived from unreliable childhood memories. The so-called hunting party was no more than her two older brothers, just boys at the time. When they fired their guns, she had fearfully crouched behind a bush with her fingers plugged her ears. During her dinner, she inadvertently makes remarks that lead the gentleman to conclude that the presumably adult hunters had shot birds perched on tree limbsâÂÂa gross violation of British bird hunting etiquette. He interrupts her: âÂÂDo you mean to say your brothers shot sitting birds?â His tone is one of outrage and disgust. The young woman realizes she cannot redeem herself by revealing the truth; she grows cold in response to his reaction. The pair part ways at her apartment, each offering a curt goodnight.
While removing her lovely pink chemise in her bedroom, the woman consoles herself: âÂÂSome other night perhaps, another sort of man.âÂÂ
âÂÂOn Not Shooting Sitting Birdsâ is more an autobiographical record than a work of fiction, according to biographer Miranda Seymour. She characterizes the work as âÂÂan artfully structured reminiscence of RhysâÂÂs childhood in Dominica.âÂÂ
Biographers Cheryl and David Malcolm identify three distinct narratives. The main narrative concerns the events surrounding an evening the narrator/protagonist recalls spending with an attractive young English gentleman. The second narrative is an idealized childhood remembrance of a family bird hunting outing in the West Indies. The third narrative is the narrator's mature reassessment of the events surrounding the shooting party.
Central to the narrative of âÂÂOn Not Shooting Sitting Birdsâ were the nature of social hierarchies in England at the time. The narrator is a white woman raised in a British colony of the West Indies; there, a person's social status is based entirely on skin color i.e. the relative amount of European and/or African heritage. By contrast, the Englishman limits his social contacts to white persons of the upper-middle class.
When the Englishman warily asks her âÂÂYouâÂÂre a lady, arenâÂÂt you?â he fears that he has mistakenly âÂÂplacedâ the attractive young woman in his elite social echelon. With a figurative bedroom âÂÂvery obvious in the background,â the matter must be clarified before the evening proceeds: the gentleman might indulge in casual sex with a member of the lower classes - âÂÂa good-time girlâ or an âÂÂamateurâ prostitute - but not otherwise.
Literary critic Sue Thomas writing in the Journal of Caribbean Literature comments on the âÂÂmoral panics over the âÂÂgood-time girlâÂÂâÂÂ
Thomas credits RhysâÂÂs âÂÂalertness to ironyâ in her handling of class and gender issues, âÂÂarticulated through discourses of taste and breeding.âÂÂ
From the narrator's point of reference, any educated white woman in the mixed-race West Indies is a âÂÂladyâÂÂ; her British companion lacks this perspective: he is utterly ignorant of that culture. In the face of the female protagonist's aplomb, he seeks to reconcile her status as âÂÂa ladyâ with her âÂÂunabashed sexuality,â the latter of which he associates with the working-class.
Desperate to establish some common ground with the gentleman, the narrator resorts to sharing an experience familiar to all members of the upper-middle-class: recreational wild game hunting. Her effort to enlist his class sympathy fails, provoking only skepticism and hostility from the Englishman.