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Chapter 27: The New World
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 and Mabel are flying near her mother’s house while on a visit. Macdonald only has permission from one landowner, but, of course, hawks don’t consider property lines. Soon something on the other side of the boundary hedge catches Mabel’s attention. Holding Mabel’s jesses held tightly, Macdonald picks her way through the hedge.
Macdonald has learned her lesson about indulging wildness—whether it’s Mabel’s or her own—too much. Now holding the jesses represents a healthy self-control rather than a fearful clinging to things that might be lost.
Themes
Macdonald finds a long, breathtaking sweep of chalkland, the kind of vista that evokes a mythical, pagan, purely English England. At the bottom of a sweeping wheat field stands a herd of deer. There have been periodic vogues for the kind of nostalgia she briefly experiences, including between the wars in the 1930s and in the 1970s when she was young. Only as an adult does she realize how much harm these glorified national myths can do. After soaking in the scenery, Macdonald turns toward home. On their way, she and Mabel meet two of her mother’s neighbors. They chat with Macdonald about the deer herd and their feeling that sights like that allow them to access a golden era before “all these immigrants” arrived.
Stepping through the hedge magically transports Macdonald back in time, in much the same way that White wanted his falconry practice to carry him into a mythical past beyond the reach of his own traumas. But now Macdonald admits not just that such an escape from struggle isn’t just impossible—it’s also directly unhealthy. Time and circumstance carry individuals and societies forward. Trying to live in the past causes harm and takes people’s attention away from the good they could otherwise do in the present and in the future through building the communities they have.
Themes
In the moment, Macdonald doesn’t know what to say, even though she’s keenly aware that the mythical “Old England” never existed. And almost all its fauna were immigrants of sorts at one point, too: rabbits came from Italy with the Romans, pheasants from Asia Minor, squirrels from North America. And this kind of nostalgia hurts both people and ecosystems. But even as she judges those who believe in Old England, Macdonald concedes that she herself wants to follow Mabel into her own mythical past, a place untouched by her present grief.
The landscape before Macdonald speaks to ceaseless change. And it raises questions about the distinction between wild and civilized spaces and creatures. Given the ways that human beings travel around and impact the planet, there’s very little about even the natural world they haven’t touched. And seeing how commitment to these mythical ideas about purity hurts people on a social level allows Macdonald to see how she’s been hurting herself by trying to recapture her own past.
Themes
Later that day, Macdonald pages through her father’s old plane-spotting diaries. She sees that they, too, like foundational myths, are a way to try to impose order on an often confusing and frightening world. But as she replaces the book, she gets a reminder of what really matters. A square of cardboard falls from the shelf. It bears a key and five words: “Key to flat. Love, Dad.” It’s the replacement for another key he’d given her that she’d lost. She has no idea why it’s here, but holding it in her hands, she can feel her father’s love.
In place of all the seductive but ultimately empty foundational myths, Macdonald realizes that the most important thing is love. The key—whose presence on the bookshelf remains an inscrutable mystery—reminds Macdonald of the ties of love and affection that still hold her father’s memory to her. She sees now that even though his death has changed her life irrevocably, it hasn’t cut the ties of love that connect her to him. She can still hold tight to those
Themes
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