Louisa & Rima the Bird Girl
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This study will examine the differences between the main characters in two stories, "Louisa," by Mary Wilkins Freeman, and "Rima the Bird Girl," by Rona Jaffe. In fact, the two women could hardly stand in greater contrast to one another. Essentially, Louisa is a wholly admirable character, whereas Rima is thoroughly selfish and unappealing. This difference is not attributable to their relative situations. Louisa is limited by her material circumstances, but she retains her dignity and self-respect. Rima is never wanting materially, but is always willing to betray herself for little or nothing in return. Rima is certainly not heroic; she cannot blame her situation for her problems, which are primarily of her own making. On the other hand, Louisa is thoroughly heroic because she fights against her situation and the temptations which would allow her to escape that situation through lies. Rima is such a shallow, distasteful woman that it is difficult to blame her problems on a "character flaw," for she is nothing but a character flaw. We find in "Rima the Bird Girl" a woman who simply refuses to grow or learn from her mistakes. She is the child of a dreamy, romantic mother and a weak, unimaginative father (Jaffe 289), so she may simple be wasting her life looking for the strong father she never had, and/or for the fantasy-males from the worlds of poetry and fiction. We first find Rima shouting Yeats' poetry about the mysteries of love (Jaffe 289), and we find her at the end of
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the ad man is crumbling and she offers the following to the narrator:
Four years. . . . Well, last time [with the diplomat] it was five, so you can't say I'm not improving. At least it doesn't take me as long to find out I'm doomed. I am doomed, you know. I'm the girl they recite poetry to, and then in the mornings they always go back to their wives. It must be me, because I fell in love with two completely different men and neither of them wanted to stay with me (Jaffe 306).
Rima never swerves anywhere near self-knowledge again. Even in that statement, she fails to see her problem is that she picks men who are unavailable in one way or another---married, drunk, or, as with the millionaire, stuck in a woman-as-object mode. The inference in Rima's statement is that there is something inherently victim-oriented in a woman and inherently victimizing in a man. Again, even if this were true, it does not adequately serve as an excuse for Rima's ongoing self-destructive hunt for love in all the wrong places. She selects men who a blind person would know to be unavailable jerks, cheats, liars, and souses. One usually associates a "character flaw" in fiction with a character who is otherwise strong and healthy. Rima, however, is a "flaw
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Approximate Word count = 2281
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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