The Catbird Seat is a short story written by James Thurber. The story is about a guy named Martin who has worked a job at F&S for many years. Ms. Barrows joined their company a couple years earlier and is a rude lady.. She joined as a special specilist but she acts in multiple different departments. She easily influences the company and changes the regulations. When she starts making a move in the finance department, Martin who works there comes up with a plan to get her fired. Martin was known throughout the company to be a very nice person.. Martin goes to Ms. Barrows apartment and tries to kill her there. He then pulls out a cigarette and starts smoking. He also talks trash about the companies boss and how he's going to blow him up one day. The next morning Ms. Barrows tells all this to the company boss, but he doesn’t believe him because Martin is known as a nice guy. The companies boss soon fires Ms. Barrows as she seems delusional and crazy. Throughout this story we see a different perspective on gender roles.
The way females are percived are different from how males are perceived. Normally females are known as soft, nice, and caring people. However, in this story the female is shown as the antagonist and has very manly characteristics. For example, Ms. Barrows watches a lot of baseball, smokes, and drinks. She also comes off as rude or aggressive. She's very loud and likes to say rude phrases. The male in this story is shown as a nice and quiet person. Martin drinks milk, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, and doesn’t know baseball people. In many of the characters eyes Martin is a weak and caring person. In this story the traditional characteristics of male and female are swapped to an extreme. By the end Martin ended up the one that got Ms. Barrows fired and not the other way around.
Understanding of the other gender isn’t something that is easily done. Throughout the story, Martin doesn’t like Ms. Barrows at all. He thinks she's annoying, aggressive, not someone who is a female. Ms. Barrows scary and confident attitude scares him almost. When she starts dropping some hints that some people from the finance department are going to get fired. Martin finally has to find a way to protect his job. The same job hes had for twenty two years. He goes to Ms. Barrows apartment to try and scare her. He also acts completely different from what his image is at work and how he acts normally. This forces him to come out of his shell of being this weak and nice person everyone thinks he is. This shows that sometimes one gender isn’t better than the other. In the beginning it showed that Ms. Barrows was at the top and the one who had the most power. However, by the end Martin had more power than her and she was the one that ended up getting fired.
Sometimes qualities that help you get on top are what drag you back down again. Ms. Barrows a woman that doesn’t have the normal qualities of a woman. In the company she is close with the boss using her charms as a woman and is able to get anyone easily fired from any department. It looks like Ms. Barrows has more power than Martin at the beginning. However, when Ms. Barrows talks about Martin smoking. To his coworkers and boss Martin trash talking the boss and smoking a cigarette is something that Martin wouldn’t do. As Ms. Barrows realizes Martins plan, she couldn’t do anything but watch her life fall apart. Her outgoingnes is what led to her fall in the end.
In conclusion, that male vs female is the main theme in this story. Martin who looked like he was the weak and kind guy ended up defeating the overpowering and aggressive Ms. Barrows. In the beginning Ms. Barrows constantly said things that came off as aggressive and unladylike. However, those are the things that allowed Ms. Barrows to get to the top of the company. Using her confidence and feminine charms she managed to seduced the president of the company. However, at the end when she told everything that happened with Martin the night before. She was considered crazy because everyone thought that Martin wouldn’t do such a thing. When she realized that was Martins plan, no matter how much she tried saying that what Martin did was true. No one believed her. The same tactics that she used to climb to the top ended up making her fall down again. The story also swaps the generic male and female. For a male they are normally considered strong and overpowering, however in the story Martin is show as this weak guy who can’t do anything for himself. The female in the story Ms. Barrows also has this overwhelming confidence that a generic female doesn't have. In the end, both females and males are equal and one gender isn’t better or stronger than the other.
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