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Chapter 12: Outlaws
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
Macdonald imagines White “calling-off” Gos, training him to return at a signal to the falconer’s hand. He’s impatient and starts the training at too great a distance for Gos to understand what White wants him to do. Angrily, he tugs on the “creance,” or leash, dragging Gos from his perch. When the confused animal finally starts to hop toward him, White turns and runs, and Gos chases him.
In the first phase of training, the falconer must earn the bird’s trust. In the second, the bird must show the falconer that it will return when it is called. Until that emotional line of trust is well-established, the falconer keeps the bird on a physical tether, lest its wild nature take over and lead it to escape. White fails, in Macdonald’s opinion, because he’s too anxious for the emotional bond to trust the training process.
Themes
Macdonald judges that it’s time for Mabel to begin calling-off training. They go to an empty field on college grounds, beneath the building that contains Macdonald’s office. Earlier in the day, she declined a job offer from a German university. As she looks at the building, she experiences a sudden wave of vertigo, as if reality has just shifted. She feels like Alice tumbling through the rabbit hole into Wonderland and clutching at items as she falls. These moments of disorientation have been happening to her with increasing frequency. She fights them off by concentrating on Mabel’s training.
The calling-off training prepares Mabel to fly free, but at the moment, it’s Macdonald who feels like she’s off the leash. Juxtaposing her vertiginous sense of free fall with the safe and limited boundaries imposed on Mabel suggests Macdonald’s wish to change places with the bird, to have a wise and beneficent trainer showing her what she should do or how she should behave in a suddenly confusing world. In other words, it functions as another version of her longing for a parental figure, for her father.
Themes
Macdonald places Mabel on a rail, plays out some creance, and walks a few paces away before turning and holding out some chicken. Mabel flies to Macdonald’s outstretched hand without hesitation every time; on the third attempt, she is airborne before Macdonald has even turned around to face her. Macdonald is so enormously pleased and happy on the walk home that she can’t understand why, just a little while later, she finds herself in tears.
The book suggests several reasons why Macdonald might be crying but doesn’t specify one—it’s possible that her tears express loneliness and grief as she gives her bird the kind of guidance and protection she no longer receives from her father. Her tears could also point toward her unspoken fear that when she lets Mabel off the physical line, the emotional connection of trust won’t be enough to keep the bird coming back to her.
Themes
The whole point of calling-off is the bird’s instant response. Waiting and calling over and over, as White did, is counterproductive. His second attempt went better, and after a ten-minute stand-off Gos began to fly toward him. But White, still smarting from a recent encounter with Gos’s sharp talons, ducked. This confused the bird. White tried again, this time standing his ground but unable to not flinch. On the third attempt, he successfully held himself to be still as Gos flew straight toward him, landing on his shoulder. Feeling like he’d proved his manhood, he celebrated by drinking himself into a stupor.
Because calling-off replaces the physical tether of the creance with the emotional tie of trust between animal and human, it’s especially damaging when White flinches away, demonstrating his inability to trust Gos. In part, this arises from recent injuries he’s sustained from the bird. But what Macdonald has shared about White’s life suggests that his fear and mistrust run deeper. The degree to which taming Gos represents healing some of his own trauma becomes even clearer in this moment.
Themes
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Fifteen days after Mabel’s arrival, Macdonald puts on makeup and presentable clothes and walks the bird over to the home of the Master of her college at the invitation of the Master’s wife. Sitting in their beautiful garden, she reflects on how unlikely it was that she—the daughter of working-class parents and the product of a public-school education—ever landed at an elite university. Her father used to tease her that her academic job must provide cover for being a spy. The world of espionage was more explicable to him than the academic world. Macdonald again feels profoundly out of place. Soon, she won’t belong here anymore—her appointment is almost up. She wonders who she is, now, if she’s just “the hawk woman.”
Macdonald takes herself to the college Master’s house in much the same way she takes Mabel places, as a sort of curiosity rather than as a full participant. Her father’s teasing and her sense of being Alice falling into Wonderland both suggest a profound feeling of being an outsider even when she belonged, superficially at least, to the college community. And in addition to her personal feeling of being called to wilder things than Cambridge, there is a whiff of class divisions—a sense that she doesn’t belong because she doesn’t come from the right kind of people.
Themes
Macdonald believes that everyone must eventually reckon with the lives they’ve lost or destroyed. She sees White doing this in an unpublished, satirical novel he wrote in the late 1930s, You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down. Its fearful, posturing protagonist, Dr Prisonface, sounds a lot like White himself. Prisonface suffers a series of personal and professional catastrophes until one dark night when he meets none other than Lucifer—the Devil—himself. Lucifer says that he, like Prisonface, was once a teacher. But he left the Golden Gates school because he couldn’t stand the other teachers. He tells Prisonface that he must still find the “talisman” he needs to escape suffering. Maybe it’s wisdom, or manhood, or love. In any case, he will only know when he finds it.
Macdonald finds yet another point of similarity between herself and White as academic interlopers—people who succeeded in school and became teachers even though they didn’t belong in that world. Dr Prisonface’s experience suggests the lengths to which some people—perhaps even White himself—are prepared to go to find love and freedom. And, importantly, how painful it is when love and freedom are denied. White’s protagonist finally finds what he’s looking for, but it’s associated with fallenness and evil—with the Devil himself. This in turn suggests both his deeply internalized self-loathing. But it also implicitly criticizes a society so close-minded and judgmental that it drives people out rather than welcoming them in.
Themes
