The narrator of My Bird, like Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of Kate Chopin’s Awakening, a canonical American text, is a woman who examines her place in society and escapes her gendered confinement. Although a devoted and compassionate wife and mother, she awakens gradually to the truth that she does not want to be restricted by traditional definitions of femininity. “I was sick and tired of my assigned role” (20), she writes. “I am not a mother, not a daughter, and not a wife. . . . I cannot perform any of the roles that have been assigned to me” (70), she laments. She feels bored, “bored of constantly having to take care of the kids, of the peeling walls, the broken water heater, the cockroaches that do not die with any kind of bug killer. She is tired of the long days turning to night, and of long nights that are filled with tears” (70). Married to a man, Amir, who often is away on business, and when home feels “chained” (40), or like “a migrant bird,” who “is trapped in a cage,” yearns “to fly” (68), she realizes she has “no place to go” (86). Even when she contemplates cheating on her quasi-absent husband, her imaginary betrayal is related to space and the suspension of her restrained physical mobility. “He doesn’t know that I cheat on him a hundred times a day,” she concedes. “I leave this life a hundred times a day. Like a terrified woman who has never left home. Gently, slowly, and quietly, even though scared to death, I secretly go to places that Amir cannot even imagine” (35). And so it is that she develops fantasies of flight and promises herself to define herself on her own terms and to “never again be dependent” (87), never again to be captive of an image or a role foisted upon her.

The promise the narrator of My Bird makes to herself is similar to Edna’s. The strategies and tactics the two women adopt to establish their subjective identities, however, vastly differ. While Edna takes refuge in the welcoming sea and has to rely on the pen of Kate Chopin to memorialize her despair and defiance, the narrator of My Bird seeks and finds salvation in the act of writing. She takes up the pen, confronts the truth of her life head on, and throws away “such nonsense like a shared life, the warm family unit, and other rubbish” (106). She begins to make up her own definitions and to reimagine and rebuild her relationships. She undergoes two major and interrelated transformations. She breaks out of the physical confinement that impedes her freedom of movement and abandons the silence that constrains her freedom of expression.