The Blue Bird
by Maurice Maeterlinck
Summary
Tyltyl and Mytyl, a woodcutter's two children, are woken on Christmas Eve by a fairy who sends them out to find the Blue Bird of Happiness for her own sick daughter, and Maeterlinck sends them through a sequence of symbolic realms rather than a realistic journey: the Land of Memory, where they meet their dead grandparents living on in a kind of gentle afterlife, the Palace of Night, guarded by Night herself and full of locked doors hiding disease, war and the other terrors she keeps contained, and a strange blue lit hall where children not yet born wait their turn to be sent into the world. In each realm the children catch what looks like the bird they are searching for, and each time it turns some other color, or dies, or vanishes, the moment they try to carry it back out into ordinary life; happiness, the play keeps insisting, will not survive being seized and removed from where it was found. Exhausted and finally returned home without ever having captured their prize, the children wake in their own bed to discover an ordinary caged bird kept in their own kitchen has turned blue all along, and Tyltyl gives it away to a sick neighbor girl, who is cured simply by having it, before the bird flies off out of reach again, a plain domestic ending after a play that has spent its whole length in fantastical, symbolic elsewhere.
Maeterlinck gives voice on stage to fire, water, bread, sugar and the family dog and cat, each personified with its own temperament, and the whole play reads as a fairy tale built to carry a genuinely serious argument about where happiness actually lives, close at hand rather than somewhere still to be found. It suits a reader drawn to fantasy staged with real philosophical weight behind it rather than only spectacle.
Historical Context & Significance
The Blue Bird premiered on September 30, 1908, at Konstantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre before reaching Broadway in 1910 in Alexander Teixeira de Mattos's English translation, and Stanislavski's Moscow staging is still performed there, in a shortened children's version, more than a century later. The Swedish Academy gave Maurice Maeterlinck the 1911 Nobel Prize in Literature for his dramatic work broadly, praising a wealth of imagination and a poetic fancy that reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration reaching the reader's own feelings in a mysterious way, language that describes The Blue Bird almost exactly even though the citation named no single title.
Maeterlinck remains the only Belgian writer to have won the literature prize, and The Blue Bird has stayed his most widely performed and adapted work, still regularly staged as a holiday production for exactly the family audience it was written for.