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Chapter 10: Darkness
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in H is for Hawk, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Living with the Wild
Fear, Grief, and Loss
Love, Trust, and Freedom
Time and History
Social Divisions
Summary
Analysis
One evening, Macdonald takes an unhooded Mabel for a walk. While the hawk barely pays attention to the world around her—she’s focused on a tasty, distracting pigeon thigh—the human feels assaulted with sensory input. Hateful, alarming creatures—people, she realizes with some part of her mind—pass by. Mabel begins to watch them cautiously. She bates at the sound of bicycles hissing past, and when a runner startles her. Macdonald feels a brief, overpowering, visceral feeling of hatred for the runner before she remembers that he is a person, too.
After days of staying inside, her world shrunk down to Mabel and the living room, Macdonald experience the world outside as a sensory assault—much like goshawks, whose jacked-up nervous systems she described at the end of the previous chapter. Notably, as Mabel is becoming more accustomed to other people, Macdonald is becoming less, as she identifies with the bird more and more.
Themes
Their second expedition occurs in full daylight. Mabel is tense, but curious. Macdonald finds herself looking at the city through birds’ eyes. She exposes Mabel to new stimuli in small, manageable doses. White’s hawk wasn’t so lucky; White dragged Gos out for lengthy, overwhelming strolls starting on the day he arrived. Thus, he inadvertently recreated the terror and confusion of his own painful education for the bird. Macdonald also knows White was participating in an English craze for long walks in the 1930s. Seeking to heal from World War I, and, trying to draw strength to face the increasingly inevitable World War II, many people took to the countryside to renew their connection with the land.
It’s a sign of how far Macdonald’s grief has carried her into her own world—and out of her old life—that everyday city sights strike her as so deeply unusual. Again, she contrasts her training with White’s in part to emphasize her greater skill. But it’s clear from Macdonald’s reactions that even enlightened training involves some discomfort. She expects her bird to survive, and this should (but doesn’t in the moment) remind her that she, too, will eventually come out on the other side of her own pain. The walking craze shows that anyone and everyone can gain strength and solace from nature.
Themes
Macdonald imagines White walking Gos to the ruins of a medieval chapel. He feels a powerful sense of connection with the ancestors buried beneath his feet, a kinship mediated by the tamed hawk, a creature that even medieval peasants would have instantly understood. This episode was always Macdonald’s favorite in The Goshawk, and when she re-reads it now, she imagines White willing the “whole mess of the twentieth century” to slip away so he can conjure up a past in which he might have been loved.
Although White feels disconnected from the people around him in his own era, he intuitively knows that he needs connection, so he makes it—in an imaginary form—with the dead. Likewise, although Macdonald is, in the present, avoiding contact with other people, she feels a sense of connection to White himself through their shared enterprise of goshawk training.
Themes
Macdonald identifies with White’s nostalgia. She thinks about the spotting scope she’d borrowed from her father and had failed to return before his death. Now she can’t return it. She remembers the moment when she truly realized that he was gone. It was just after she’d gotten off the train with her mother and brother to look for her father’s car. When the realization hit her, she began to wail on the train platform. Other things are too painful to remember, like the last picture her father ever took (which he seems to have snapped as he collapsed), which Macdonald looked at only once.
White and Macdonald both experience powerful feelings of nostalgia—sentimental longing for past happiness. White longs for what he imagines as a simpler, less confusing time. Macdonald’s nostalgia is more personal: she misses her father. But, like White, she can’t turn back time. Her father’s photographs capture moments in time, preserving them. But they’re not always good moments, as his last snapshot proves.
Themes
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