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46 pages 1 hour read

James Thurber

The Catbird Seat

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1942

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Themes

Routine and Efficiency as Values

Mr. Martin is an avatar of efficiency. His department runs smoothly, and he finds any breach of etiquette—etiquette as he defines it—intolerable. His reliability makes him an ideal employee but a boring companion. Mr. Martin’s commitment to running an efficient office is the only thing in his life that the reader knows he cares about. With the rise of factories, efficiency was in ever-greater demand at the turn of the century. Mr. Martin, although he works in an office and not in a factory, represents the ideal worker. He is unimaginative—aside from his fanciful murder plot—abstemious, and wholly devoted to efficiency. His need for routine is not merely a quirk; it makes him a deadly enemy when Mrs. Barrows threatens his workplace routine.

Mr. Martin’s commitment to routine makes him rigid and uncompromising. Mr. Martin is not the boss of the company, but he acts as if he has a disproportionate stake in it, and the reader may wonder why efficiency matters so much to him. The office appears to be the only place where Mr. Martin has purpose. He never reflects on enjoying anything but the occasional glass of milk and a well-run office. No effort is wasted by Mr. Martin, and normal appetites and pleasures appear not to tempt him. Mr. Fitweiler even cites Mr. Martin’s abstention from alcohol and cigarettes as the reason for his efficiency.

In the work setting, efficiency can be a means of greater production, less wasted time, and greater profit to those who own the businesses. Efficiency and infallibility are the two compliments Mr. Martin receives in “The Catbird Seat. His adherence to routine is the only thing that draws attention to him until Mrs. Barrows appears. Her suggestion that they might have too many filing cabinets could imply that the office is not as efficient as Mr. Martin believes. However, he is unable to entertain the notion that she could improve on his system. Any deviation from his own idea of efficiency and routine is unacceptable. Mr. Martin’s rigidity and lack of imagination resemble a drone-like worker bee more than a human. Mr. Fitweiler’s comment that “Man is fallible but Martin isn’t” (1) sounds, on the surface, as though Mr. Martin is some kind of divinity—but in the context of the character’s psychology, the words become ironic and instead suggest something robotic and impersonal. 

The Battle of the Sexes

James Thurber often pitted men and women against one another in his stories. “The Catbird Seat” is, at one level, a story about a man versus a woman, or the gender roles squaring off in conflict. At the time of the story’s publication, it was not uncommon for men and women to work alongside each other, but it was less common than it is today. The story treats Mr. Martin as a paragon of consistency, efficiency, and the nobility of office work. Mr. Martin perceives Mrs. Barrows as a chaotic intruder who threatens his equilibrium in the office.

Thurber presents the struggle between men and women—not only as workplace combatants, and not only as a struggle for men and women to understand each other, but as a parody of traditionally venerated characterizations of gender. It is as if Mr. Martin and Mrs. Barrows scarcely speak the same language. They inhabit the same space—the office—but have different views for it. The need for women to change situations that are (according to the male characters) already satisfactory is a staple of Thurber’s stories.

Once Mrs. Barrows arrives, Thurber presents Mr. Martin as an anxious, insecure man who resents her strength and confidence. Mr. Martin does not view her attributes as strength and confidence, however. Rather, he views her with suspicion, fear, and insecurity. It is significant that he describes Mrs. Barrows as having charmed their boss at a drunken party; the actual anecdote given to Mr. Martin includes only that Mrs. Barrows rescued Mr. Fitweiler from an uncomfortable conversation he was having with a towering drunken man—but Mr. Martin’s re-rendering of the story suggests that Mrs. Barrows weaponized her sexuality to salaciously hoodwink Mr. Fitweiler. The distortion in Mr. Martin’s account signifies his underlying misogyny as he automatically vilifies and sexualizes female power. Mrs. Barrows does later offer Mr. Martin alcohol, and her drinking is another symbol of what Mr. Martin perceives as her threat. Even though imbibing is not aberrant behavior, the fact that Mrs. Barrows drinks and Mr. Martin abstains shows another gulf between them. She is capable of indulging her appetites, while Mr. Martin barely even has appetites, other than glasses of milk and a well-run office.

Despite Thurber’s superficial parody of traditional femininity, he typically portrays women as stronger than men. However, at the end of the story, Mrs. Barrows is outnumbered. Rather than entertain her accusations against Mr. Martin, Mr. Fitweiler is quick to believe that she has had a psychological “breakdown.” This casual assumption of a woman’s erratic temperament, and of her feeble psychological constitution resulting in “hysteria,” was also more common—or at least more openly done—at the time the story was written. At the story’s conclusion, Mr. Martin and Mrs. Barrows both understand each other better than at the beginning, but this understanding is not reconciliation. 

Delusion and Psychological Disturbance

The characters in “The Catbird Seat” all operate under some sort of delusion. Mr. Martin is the most obvious example. When Mrs. Barrows intrudes into the department, Mr. Martin could respond in various ways, such as communicating with her, ignoring her, or trying to find a compromise. Instead, he decides to murder her. When the murder plot fails, he settles for sabotaging her career and making her look as though she has a mental health condition. Mr. Martin responds to a trivial set of circumstances with comically excessive force: He pronounces the death penalty on Mrs. Barrows. Outside of a farce, this would be a sinister character. In “The Catbird Seat, Thurber uses what would be Mr. Martin’s mental health (in any other type of story) as the driving comedic force behind the story’s tension.

Despite all of his accolades as an office worker, Mr. Martin never shows a propensity for rational action outside of work. Although the reader has to take Mr. Martin’s word for it (and Mr. Martin himself hears it secondhand through gossip), Mr. Fitweiler fell under Mrs. Barrows’s spell as she “somehow worked upon him a monstrous magic” (2) at the party. While Mr. Fitweiler may not have a mental health condition, Mr. Martin believes that Mr. Fitweiler is still under a kind of delusion insofar as he was suggestible to Mrs. Barrows’s charms. Even though seduction and inebriation are not details for which he has any evidence, Mr. Martin suggests that Mrs. Barrows’s influence can only be the result of her sexual wiles and alcohol at the party.

At the story’s conclusion, Mrs. Barrows reports Mr. Martin to Mr. Fitweiler. She wants to convince their boss that Mr. Martin is dangerously unstable and that he threatened to kill Mr. Fitweiler while under the influence of heroin. The reader knows that Mr. Martin is indeed capable of murder—or at least, of contemplating and planning it—but Mr. Fitweiler finds the accusation so outlandish that he dismisses her as hallucinating. He then tells Mr. Martin that she had a “severe breakdown” involving a “persecution complex.” The assertion caps the story with irony; Mr. Martin is the one who is truly deluded and convinced of his own persecution. Nevertheless, Mrs. Barrows’s mental health has been cast in doubt, while Mr. Martin retains his appearance of calm infallibility. His plot shifted when he realized that, rather than murdering Mrs. Barrows, he could frame her as an erratic, mentally unstable woman who has singled him out for abuse because of her professional jealousy.

Mr. Martin’s stalwart allegiance to the company is ultimately symptomatic of a troubling intensity. His level of devotion to his filing system makes him appear neurotic, not merely efficient.

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