Natural Imposters? A Cuckoo View of Social Relations

Abstract

Avian brood parasites like the cuckoo lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. This reproductive strategy has fascinated peoples around the world for millennia. Fascination with the cuckoo is animated by uncertainty about how to understand the bird’s behaviour, which offends norms of reproductive, familial, and intimate conduct. In these heartfelt matters, the cuckoo’s nesting behaviour is entangled with preoccupations of imposture. To analyse how this entanglement works, the chapter draws on select passages that reference the bird from The Midwich Cuckoos, Wuthering Heights, and Othello: The Moor of Venice. In these texts, the cuckoo’s entanglement with imposture ruptures social and moral orders and casts characters’ values and commitments in a new light, making it an evocative and enduring literary device for re-envisioning social relations from a cuckoo perspective.