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In the fiction developed by Hitchcock, this corrupted woman not only becomes virtuous and respectable as a future wife, but also morphs into the ideally loving and devoted daughter’s prototype: Melanie Daniels, orphan of her mother and without fatherly guidance, is belatedly adopted by Mitch's own mother (played by Jessica Tandy), herself both a mother and a widow. Initially, the latter reacts in an hostile fashion to the young Melanie, as much out of jealousy and maternal possessiveness as out of fear of being abandoned by her son tempted to yield to a stranger's charms -not to mention her visceral mistrust occasioned by the newcomer’s alleged depravity. Lydia Brenner is a neo "Mater Dolorosa". And a key character like all mothers are in Hitchcock’s saga. A deeply neurotic woman because of her inability to assume her role, who takes refuge in the psychic and emotional comfort that the incestuous replacement of her late husband by her own son brings. But also a distraught mother who finally opens her arms to a potentially hostile stepdaughter, in order to escape the turmoil’s pangs inflicted by the black wild birds’ attacks. This new born stepdaughter -an ally by then-, achieves her metamorphosis on the road to salvation by taking on the role of the adopted older sister of young girl Cathy Brenner (played by Veronica Cartwright), Lydia's daughter and youngest of brother Mitch. A child whom Melanie Daniels now protects, guiding her into puberty. Cathy Brenner, a teenage virgin who awakens to the call of the senses by fantasizing about the “Love Birds” that Melanie Daniels (her initiator), offers her. Finally and to complete his avatars of womanhood, Hitchcock portrays an ultimate personification of the “Tortured Woman” evoked by Patti Smith : the neglected mistress, brunette Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette on screen), crucified by the abandonment of the man she loved –and who pays at the cost of her life her unrequited and rejected love.

The group of women surrounding Mitch Brenner thus becomes the symbiotic allegory of the "Tortured Woman" evoked by Patti Smith : the Woman, the one by whom the birds happen, as doom tumbles upon the world. In the fatal and somewhat mysogine roles that Hitchcock attributes to the "Tortured Woman" in The Birds (alternately, a parched and hysterical mother-widow, a futile and depraved woman, a destitute teenager, an abandoned and suicidal mistress), the Hitchcockian Woman in The Birds is the one through whom misfortune happens, encapsulated by the image of black birds that swoop down on the world. This "Tortured Woman" can only find her redemption with the ascension to heaven of Mitch Brenner - here a neo Son of Man.