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Chapter 28: Winter Histories
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
The signs of approaching spring fill Macdonald with dread because soon she will have to send Mabel to an aviary to molt. Unwilling to face the impending separation, she flies Mabel more than she should. One day, Mabel flies off and leads her on yet another wild-goose chase ending in a carefully maintained tract of forest where gamekeepers are raising pheasants for the fall and winter hunting season. Mabel poaches two of the birds before Macdonald can get to her. Ashamed and scared, Macdonald hurries back to her car. As she field-dresses one of the pheasants, she slices her own thumb. Luckily, Mandy is home, and when Macdonald unexpectedly knocks on her door, she offers bandages, cigarettes, and sympathy.
Although Macdonald has come a long way toward facing and processing her grief, it’s not a surprise that she’s struggled to face her impending separation from Mabel. She cuts herself because she’s lost control, but this also symbolically suggests the ways in which her inability to control and tame her own wild grief have caused her excess pain and suffering. Notably, this is the first time that Macdonald has responded to a problem flying Mabel by turning to someone in her community. The bonds of friendship that link Macdonald to the human world grow stronger as she prepares to separate from Mabel.
Themes
In 1949, a publisher visiting T. H. White found the manuscript of The Goshawk, which he encouraged White to publish. Macdonald finds her copy as she unpacks books into the new house she’s rented in the city. She turns to the last page, where White lists the personae he ascribed to Gos. It makes her sad because she sees him trying to make Gos explicable by reducing him to human terms. Months with Mabel have taught her that this is impossible. She vows she will never tokenize Mabel in this way. The bird is important to her, even if they can never fully understand each other. She looks at her hands, thinking of the scars that Mabel has made, and the other, invisible, ones that she’s healed.
Macdonald sees in White’s list of personae for Gos his last attempt to assert control over the bird. Rather than respecting the bird’s wildness and essential unknowability, White insists on fixing the bird in his own, limited, human understanding by way of analogy to human history. Macdonald sees that, although he thought he wanted to possess some of Gos’s wildness, he ended up reducing the bird to fit in the confines of his human perspective. And although she knows that she’s done this to a point with Mabel, too, she resolves to let the bird stay wild and free in her essential birdness. Their lives touch, but tangentially and ephemerally, and now, finally, she’s coming to peace with that fragility.
Themes
