Whenever Leila reflects on her country upbringing, she thinks of baby owls, which stand in for her own innocence. This first occurs as the ball is about to begin. Leila is so overcome by excitement that she can barely remember just a few hours earlier when she thought she might skip the ball altogether and stay at her home in the country where the owls are “crying ‘More pork’ in the moonlight.” In this moment, Leila is feeling like the person she was just a few hours ago—a person who, in her innocence, considered skipping the ball—is barely recognizable anymore. However, Mansfield subtly suggests that, regardless of how distant Leila now feels from those baby owls, she’s not actually so different from them. The owls are innocents whose cry of “more pork” evokes Leila’s own hunger for new experiences. Leila wants to believe that she is unrecognizably older than she was earlier in the evening, but her naïve hunger for novelty at the ball makes her more like the owls than she’ll admit.
Later in the story, however, Leila’s attitude shifts. After the old man informs her that soon she will be old and discarded, she becomes distraught and disillusioned and thinks that she “wanted to be home […] listening to those baby owls.” Now that Leila has learned a difficult truth about her future, she longs not to acknowledge it and to instead return to the innocence she had just moments before. This is why she’s now longing for the owls—they represent, to her, the innocent time before she knew her bleak fate. But it’s clear that Leila’s desire to listen to the baby owls and ignore the real world is unsustainable. After all, the owls are eventually going to grow old, the same way Leila will.
Baby Owls Quotes in Her First Ball
She quite forgot to be shy; she forgot how in the middle of dressing she had sat down on the bed with one shoe off and one shoe on and begged her mother to ring up her cousins and say she couldn't go after all. And the rush of longing she had had to be sitting on the veranda of their forsaken up-country home, listening to the baby owls crying ‘More pork’ in the moonlight, was changed to a rush of joy so sweet that it was hard to bear alone. She clutched her fan, and, gazing at the gleaming, golden floor, the azaleas, the lanterns, the stage at one end with its red carpet and gilt chairs and the band in a corner, she thought breathlessly, ‘How heavenly; how simply heavenly!
Again the couples paraded. The swing doors opened and shut. Now new music was given out by the bandmaster. But Leila didn’t want to dance any more. She wanted to be home, or sitting on the veranda listening to those baby owls.
Baby Owls Symbol Timeline in Her First Ball
