Owls Do Cry
...ale “climbed the gold silk rope to the top of the tower” and the ledgers were written “in a beautiful blue ink.” When Francie and Daphne thought of Francie, cycling to the woollen mills these came to both of them “a red and gold and black thought.” And Daphne thinks about the birds following her sister to protect her “all the gold finches will follow Francie in a cloud to protect her; and if it is near winter the wax- yes hungry for honey, will make their green and yellow cloud to follow her…” However, when the Withers children go to the rubbish dump on the fatal day of Francie’s death Chicks was upset because Francis had promised aniseed balls and instead said that they were getting acid drops – “but Francie had said aniseed balls, and all the way Chicks had been imagining them, brown in the mouth first, then white with a tiny rim or shadow, then pure while like a warm hailstone.” This imagery of Chicks captures the progression from childhood to adulthood, from the world of colour to the world of “no colour” – of whiteness. Images associated with while “colour” are consistently linked to the world of adults, in other words, as time moves on it drains from us all the colour, richness and imagination of our childhood selves. When Daphne is in the asylum the nurses are described as being “five women dresses in white, envying the gold hollow…they are white insects with feelers waving in their heads, each feeler tipped with a trace of white like a separated snowdrop…” Throughout Daphne’s description of her time in the hospital the white imagery is the persuasive one. The doctors and nurses are after everything to destroy all the colour and imagination of her life and replace it with “normality.” Her room contained a picture called “Arrowtown in autumn, with the remarakables.” Daphne comments “the patients fastening their dream upon the picture and creating beyond the tallow and blue cloud their frozen slope of thought whose blizzard emerging from the stillness, cut from snow-block of day-after day dreaming…and the eyes of the world from hour to hour showing through, amazed at the snow storm and not knowing why. And in the morning the pink people come to unlock the door, and struggle though the snow to the frozen bodies…” The way in which the colour is taken from the patients is perfectly captured inn the image of the doctors and nurses “the tribe that wore coats of snow” who, Daphne “raided, every morning the poplar would and the blue and the yellow cloud of people’. The images are paired upon each other - “the sheep were sitting on the lower slopes of the mountain and the blanket of snow higher up”; “the white tribe, smiling and kindly”; and the picnic place - “it was a place of white…when the tablecloth, like a white laden sunlight, was spread upon the ground for all to feast from.’ Sister is described at the picnic in ‘her white uniform… with her body overflowing and freckled, like a white pastry…” and when Christmas and the picnic are compared “first the colour of both was a white of death, the cottonwood of pretended birth, and the star of manuka fixed nowhere far away world to follow.” Again, when Flora Norris came to tell Daphne of her mother’s death “her hand extended with its fingers hung like icicles” and after that “Daphne stayed many days in the mountain room while the snow fell outside in a shuffle and whisper of white and wax-eyes with tiny stalks of bones sat on top of the snow grass…there were a tribe of doctors in white, whirling round and round the chief, like merry-go-rounds about a tall white pole…” When Daphne is about to be given the electric shock treatment “they led her to a room, shinning and clean and white…” and when her head has been shaved it “felt naked and damp like a white hazelnut lying in the rain and snow.” When the letter came from Chicks saying how happy she was that her sister would soon be “normal” “Daphne took the letter and tore it to tinier pieces than snow” put on the brown hat that her father and Toby had bought to her she felt “the heaviness of snow that had fallen all night for years upon the brown roof” and she said to her father, “Go away. The snow is too heavy in falling and it falls criss-cross, like a tapestry, so go away.” Finally, Daphne, going to bed before the day she will be changed forever, says "I die tomorrow, when the snow falls criss-cross to darn the believed crevice of my world"-the death of child hood, imagination, colour, life are expressed in the imagery of whiteness-blackness. Finally, it is the rubbish dump, which acts as a powerful leit-motif of the novel. It serves to give expression to the characters views on what is true treasure and what is false treasure and t...