Victoria Wren

[rich]

The Recognitions includes some pivotal scenes w/r/t to wrens (f this
has been mentioned already apologies)

some examples

from a paper by Steven Moore:

Gaddis learned from Robert Graves that "in British folklore,
the Robin Red Breast as the Spirit of the New Year sets out with
a birch-rod to kill his predecessor the Gold Crest Wren, the Spirit of
the Old Year, whom he finds hiding in an ivy bush. [ . . . }The robin
is said to 'murder its father,' which accounts for its red breast. "

The young Wyatt had killed a wren not on Saint Stephen's Day-though
his use of a stone recalls the stoning of
the proto-martyr, after whom Wyatt was intended to be named-but,
significantly, on his mother's birthday (32). Too guilty at the time
to
confess the "murder," he blurts it oUt during his illness a few years
later, to which his befuddled father responds with anthropological
data from Frazer's Golden Bough (47), indicating he is clearly aware
of the symbolic implications of his son's patricidal act. When Wyatt
returns to his father in II. 3 a few days before Christmas, the sight
of a wren
reminds him of his earlier transgression:

-I'll go out like the early Christian missionaries did at Christmas, co hunt
down the wren and kill him, yes, when the wren was king, do you remember,
you told me . . . When the wren was king, he repeated, getting his breath
again, -at Christmas.
The wren had flown, as he turned from the window and approached with
burning green eyes fixed on Gwyon. -King, yes, he repeated -when the
king was slain and eaten, there's sacrament. There's sacrament. (430)

Wyatt's eyes had burned green at his first confession of killing the wren
as a child (47), and the repetition of this sign of anger during his return
(his second coming, as the servant Janet interprets it) follows Wyatt's
ominous quotation of Matthew 10:21: "'and the children shall rise up
against their parents, and cause them to be put to death'" (430).

The recurring references to the robin/wren conflict, to the killing of
the king ("My father was a king," Wyatt tells Ludy at the end of the
novel [892}), to the various myths of "the god killed, eaten, and resurrected"
(536), to Wyatt's use of his father's face in his early Memling
imitation of The Flaying of the Unjust Judge, and to the significant
juxtaposition
of symbolically killing his father on his mother's birthday all
point to a classic case of the Oedipus complex.

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 8:29 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm sure this has been posted but, perhaps, with all the good mythological
> stuff on 'the wren' we overlook this:
>
> Wren: Women's Royal Navy Service.....(Hitch-22...about his mom, a volunteer in
> same)
>
>
>
>