Birds and other winged creatures appear throughout The Time Traveler’s Wife and symbolize Clare and Henry’s desire to escape the limitations that time traveling imposes on them both. During her first date with Henry, Clare, an artist, explains that while birds are the main subject of her art, the theme she most often explores through her work is “longing.” Adult Henry visits Clare in the past more than a hundred times throughout her childhood, so from a young age Clare becomes accustomed to waiting and “longing” for his return. Though Clare loves Henry, she feels as though she lingers in perpetual limbo. When Henry is away traveling, Clare fills her time with her art. The bird sculptures she creates reflect her desire for the metaphorical wings that would allow her to follow Henry when he goes, freeing her from a life of constant waiting. Clare’s art thus serves as a visual manifestation of this unmet desire.
While Clare creates sculptures of birds to express her longing, she associates a more mystical winged being with her husband: angels. When Clare he first meets Henry as a little girl, she believes that he is an angel because his time-traveling ability makes him seem elusive and supernatural to her. Clare feels ordinary and grounded in time in comparison to Henry, as she can’t follow where he goes. Though birds and angels both have wings, angels can transcend far beyond what birds can reach. Clare continues to associate angels with Henry throughout the novel, and though the specific symbolism shifts over the course of their relationship, they, like birds, always reflect Clare’s effort to reckon with the pain of things she cannot change.
Wings Quotes in The Time Traveler’s Wife
“I’m at the School of the Arts Institute; I’ve been doing sculpture, and I’ve just started to study papermaking.”
“Cool. What’s your work like?”
For the first time, Clare seemed uncomfortable. “It’s kind of…big, and it’s about…birds.” She looks at the table, then takes a sip of tea.
“Birds?”
“Well, really it’s about, um, longing.”
“Clare, why in the world would you want to marry such a person? Think of the children you would have! Popping into next week and back before breakfast!”
I laugh. “But it will be exciting! Like Mary Poppins, or Peter Pan.”
She squeezes my hand just a little. “Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it’s always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.”
[…] “Do you ever miss him?” she asks me.
“Everyday. Every minute.”
“Every minute,” she says. “Yes. It’s that way, isn’t it?”
The dreams merge, now. In one part of this dream I was swimming in the ocean, I was a mermaid. […] Swimming was life flying, all the fish were birds...There was a boat on the surface of the ocean, and we all swan up to see the boat. It was just a little sailboat, and my mother was on it, all by herself. I swam up to her and she was surprised to see me there, she said Why Clare, I thought you were getting married today, and I suddenly realized, the way you do in dreams, that I couldn’t get married to Henry if I was a mermaid, and I started to cry […].
The next evening I’m standing in the doorway of Clare’s studio, watching her finish drawing a thicket of black lines around a little red bird. Suddenly I see Clare, in her small room, closed in by all her stuff, and I realize that she’s trying to say something, and I know what I have to do.
“He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn’t have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and safe. The boxes are so he can be a bird.”
“Say the poem about the lovers on the carpet.”
I blank, and then I remember.
[…] Angel! If there were a place that we didn’t know if, and there,
On some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed
What they could never bring to mastery here—the bold
Exploits of their high-flying hearts,
Their towers of pleasure, their ladders
That have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning
Just on each other, trembling—and could master all of this,
Before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead:
Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,
Forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
Coins of happiness before the at last
Genuinely smiling pair on the gratified
Carpet?”
“There,” says Dr. Montague, clicking off the monitor. “Everyone is serene.”
This is a secret: sometimes I am glad when Henry is gone. Sometimes I enjoy being alone. Sometimes I walk through the house late at night and I shiver with the pleasure of not talking, not touching, just walking, or sitting, or taking a bath. […] Sometimes I go for long walks with Alba and I don’t leave a note saying where I am. […] Sometimes I get a babysitter and I go to the movies or I ride my bicycle after dark along the bike path by Montrose beach with no lights; it’s like flying.
“I made you something,” Clare says.
“Feet? I could use some feet.”
“Wings,” she says, dropping the white sheet to the floor.
The wings are huge and they float in the air, wavering in the candlelight. They are darker than the darkness, threatening but also redolent of longing, of freedom, of rushing through space. The feeling of standing solidly, on my own two feet, of running, running like flying. […] (Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future/ grows any smaller…Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.)
“Kiss me,” Clare says, and I turn to her, white face and dark lips floating in the dark, and I submerge, I fly, I am released: being wells up in my heart.
I know that you have been waiting for me all your life […] Clare, like a sailor, Odysseus along and buffeted by tall waves, sometimes wily and sometimes just a play-thing of the gods. Please, Clare. When I am dead. Stop waiting and be free. […] Love the world and yourself in it. Stop waiting and be free.
[…] when I was young I didn’t understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your hair shining in the sun.
Wings Symbol Timeline in The Time Traveler’s Wife
