Author's Note-- Well, this is my district assessment from the spring. I really have nothing to say here, because I didn't really like the story that much and I found it somewhat hard to respond to... Honestly, I personally don't really like this piece. See what you think.
True Irony with Doves, a Fowler, and Royalty
As I read this novel sitting upon my lap, I can only imagine how the main character feels. Horrible, in love, in regret or despair – there’s no way of knowing the true feelings unless you are truly the author yourself. Once you finish the book, you quickly go and grab your computer, go to Google, and then type in the search bar ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon’ and see what results come up. After reading all of the summaries on the websites that come up from your results, you realize that you completely took that novel in the wrong way that it was intended to be taken. Sometimes, you can never know if you are really analyzing what the author is trying to get across, and this is exactly what happened in the short story “The Hundredth Dove” by Jane Yolen.
While reading this short story, the whole time I thought that the mode of literature was romance, but after I had finished it and analyzed it some more, I realized that it was actually following an ironic plot line. On the ironic plot line, it starts out with the world being in chaos, and that’s exactly what was happening in the story – the king was not listening to his future wife, which is always a big issue. Then it gradually falls into a serious conflict, which in this story was Hugh, the fowler, losing his power because the dove kept escaping from him, which made him very distraught. At the end of the plot line comes death symbolism. The death of royalty was a huge part of the death symbolism. Hugh was so earnest to gain his power back and capture the dove, so he killed the poor bird just so he could feel satisfied with himself knowing that he didn’t lose the battle, and to accomplish the king’s task.
When Hugh had twisted the dove’s neck, he had also killed the queen at the same time. In this short story, the queen was a huge representation of the dove, and the author gave a lot of clues leading up to the ending where it was given away. The author had described both the animal and the lady in the same ways – the lady was “neat as a bird, slim and fair, with black eyes.” (page 1). Lady Columbia’s name also meant dove in another language, and when the king first asked the fowler to go capture the birds, the lady said, “Please do not serve them sire” (page 1) because she didn’t want most of her bird friends to be killed and eaten by her own future husband. Right before the wedding had started, Hugh had killed the white dove, and when he returned back to the king’s kitchen with the birds, he found out that there was no wedding because the queen had been murdered; hence the bird also being killed at the same time.
The main types of stories or novels that people enjoy reading are the kinds that are out of the ordinary or unrealistic. Because of this need for impractical reading, that is most likely the reason why the author had chosen to write in irony, because that way it is automatically improbable, which this short story just happens to be. Nobody can just shape shift into an animal whenever they would like to. It’s physically impossible. Sure you can go around and act like you’re flying like a bird in the sky, but the outside physical looks will not be an actual bird. Another thing is that the king had told the fowler to go capture exactly one hundred birds, and finding exactly one hundred of those in one single flock is not common at all.
Irony is the mode of literature that makes us feel better about ourselves, which indeed this story did. Nobody would want to have killed their one true love by mistake. The purpose of reading or writing something that is ironic is to show us a world that we don’t want to experience, and to make us forget our own problems or lives because of it. “The Hundredth Dove” does exactly that by making us focus on what’s truly important in life, and not the little tiny things that make no difference, but in fact shape us into the people that we are.
