Summary
"The Birthday Present" opens one week before the ninth birthday of Isobel Callaghan, a young girl on vacation at Mrs Terry's lakeside boarding house. Isobel's mother has declared that Isobel will not be receiving any birthday presents, since Isobel's birthday arrives in January and is deemed too soon after Christmas for additional presents. Isobel reflects that her sister, Margaret, is normally favored with a birthday present. Moreover, Isobel's mother has told Isobel not to publicize the fact that it is her birthday.
Isobel remembers that, the year before, she had run among the other vacationers and loudly, joyfully informed them that it was her birthday. Although the vacationers had eagerly and happily thrown her coins, Isobel's mother had been furious about Isobel's conduct and even brought in Isobel's father to scold Isobel. Upon reflection, Isobel considers that the money and the experience of receiving it had been her treasures at first, but had then been turned into sources of shame.
Since then, Isobel has resigned herself to the fact that she will not be receiving presents. Isobel has even accepted that she should not tell people about her birthday; at most, Isobel weighs the possibility of telling a tree and is thrilled by this imaginative scheme. She passes her leisure time on vacation reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and is so absorbed in the book that she doesn't consider the other children around her, or her mother's strictures.
The night before her birthday, Isobel reads in bed (evading her family's normal rule against this activity) and reflects on how desirable a surprise birthday present would be. When she wakes up, she goes outside and discovers Caroline Mansell, who is roughly her own age and whom Isobel tells about her "secret" birthday. For her part, Caroline cannot understand why Isobel wants to keep the birthday a secret and loudly wishes Isobel "Many happy returns!" on the special occasion. Isobel then resolves to celebrate her birthday privately, mostly by hiding out and reading her book.
At breakfast, however, two vacationers named Mrs Halwood and Miss Halwood ask Isobel's mother about Isobel's reading habits. The Halwoods evidently approve of Isobel's intelligence, but Isobel's mother resents the conversation and experiences a moment of high tension when Mrs Halwood asks Isobel's age. Isobel's father is also present, but is oblivious to his wife's discomfort. Isobel herself feels caught between two worlds—a world of solidity and predictability represented by the respectable Halwoods and a world of struggle represented by her mother—and is glad to escape back into her reading itself.
Later in the day, Isobel's mother gives Isobel money and sends Isobel to buy a writing pad. She allows Isobel to keep the change (which amounts to little) once the purchase is complete. When Isobel returns to the boarding house, she finds that all of the other vacationers have assembled for a meal; she arrives in the dining room and finds a parcel wrapped in pink tissue paper at her usual place. The parcel is a birthday gift from Mr Mansell. Isobel opens it with his prompting and finds a brooch inside, a present that pleases and impresses her.
Isobel's mother is visibly irritated and disconcerted by the present. For her part, the nervous Isobel retreats to her room as soon as she has finished eating. Her enraged mother follows her, and begins slapping Isobel and scolding Isobel for apparent ingratitude. However, Isobel's mother walks away without taking the brooch away from Isobel. When she is alone, Isobel wonders why her mother had not taken this last, dreaded step, but ends her reflections on a positive note, convinced that the brooch is fully hers.
Analysis
With the fist section of her novel, Witting immerses her readers in the perspective of young Isobel Callaghan. The prose shifts easily from present to memory to hypothetical scenario and back again, capturing some of the spontaneity of how Isobel thinks. Witting's narration also captures Isobel's private fancies and turns of imagination, from deciding to "tell the tree" about her birthday (6) to the pointed, unusual comparisons that she sometimes uses to explain her world. For instance, Isobel exults "at making her mother uncomfortable. There was a great pleasure but it was like gobbling sweets—she expected some sickness from it" (13). For their part, Isobel's mother and father are referred to only as the "mother" and "father," as they would be in a typical child's mind; their names, May and Rob, are only used at any length in later sections of I for Isobel.
In terms of structure, "The Birthday Present" can read much less like the opening of an entire novel than like a self-contained short story. It is dominated by two characters—the bookish, reserved Isobel and Isobel's petty, aggressive mother—whose traits are well-articulated and whose antagonistic relationship is similarly well established. When flashbacks are used (as with the incident of the coins), they serve as a means of swiftly illuminating the central conflict between Isobel and her mother, not as elaborately novelistic digressions or loose ends. When secondary characters do appear—with the possible exception of Mr Mansell, who gives Isobel a present and thus precipitates the segment's climax—they mostly function to highlight Isobel's literary interests. Sometimes, as in the case of Isobel's uninvolved father, they mostly serve as scenery. Tension builds steadily over whether Isobel's non-birthday will go wrong, a clear and dramatic point of crisis is reached in the scene of violence, and a resolution is then attained in Isobel's final, positive reflection.
Along the way to this flurry of emotions, Isobel does experience moments of personal satisfaction and calm. For these, she is often indebted to literature. While too young to be an astoundingly sophisticated reader (despite the kind words of the Halwoods), Isobel has found what many older, more erudite readers have in the world of texts: an escape from more mundane trials, and the ever-accessible companionship of characters and authors. At least in "The Birthday Present," the question for Isobel is whether literature can provide a successful escape. Isobel herself still feels that "The birthday cast its shadow, in spite of Holmes and Watson" (8), a clear indication that literary adventure, for all its pleasures, may be limited in its ability to override everyday problems.
Even though "The Birthday Present" follows the arc of a short story, it does in fact lay a strong foundation for Witting's entire novel. In part, it does so by foregrounding Isobel's immersion in literature. In part as well, it does so by presenting a relationship so dramatically awful—the relationship between Isobel and her mother—that the reader would continue on just to figure out how such antagonism arose. The ire of Isobel's mother is also intriguing because of how directed, how almost single-minded it is. Isobel's father, sister, and acquaintances are never placed directly on the receiving end of such wrath; in fact, the slapping and shouting that concludes this stage of the novel occurs when Isobel and her mother are completely alone.
So what exactly has turned Isobel's mother so decidedly against her own daughter? It is possible that their two personalities are simply too incompatible to result in anything but conflict. Isobel is reflective, imaginative, and mostly self-confident; her mother is concerned with middle-class propriety and yet doesn't really fit in. For instance, when she reacts to Mr Mansell's gift, "there was a disturbance—a kind of gust of breathing—at grown-up-face level round the table. Isobel looked up and saw that all the grown-ups were turning on her mother the same glare of indignation" (15). Yet it is also possible that Mrs Callaghan's animosity towards Isobel doesn't have especially much to do with Isobel herself—that Isobel is, instead, the most convenient target for her mother's many genuine frustrations. Isobel's mother doesn't want her daughter to appear to be "begging for money" (5) and is mostly distant from her husband. Problems in adult finances and adult relationships could explain this woman's poor temperament much more effectively than anything that young Isobel herself has done.
