Tom and Miss Ophelia alone seemed to have any presence of mind; for Marie was in strong
hysteric convulsions. At Miss Ophelia's direction, one of the lounges in the parlor was hastily prepared, and the bleeding form laid upon it.
The birdwoman's narrative flight is that of Cixous and Clement's newly born woman who can "fly and flee into a new heaven and new earth of her own invention" (50) in her heterogeneous text combining
hysteric convulsions, witches' flights, mad tarantella and vertiginous rope dance, with acrobatic somersaults, grotesque contortions, clownesque grimaces and overall spasmodic fits of laughter--all out-maneuvering the symbolic order, in a histrionic hysteric festival of metamorphosis providing pleasures of a Fevverish text.