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Chapter 5: Holding Tight
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
As she drives home, Macdonald feels simultaneously fearful about the difficulty of the task in front of her and resentful of those who’ve warned her against it. Goshawks’ lightning-fast reflexes and overdriven nervous systems give them their high-strung reputation. But one of Macdonald’s antiquated guidebooks promises that a gently handled goshawk will be “kind to her keeper.” She remembers the breeder’s kind strength and slowly begins to understand the flash of love she felt watching him handle the frightened bird. She misses her father. She’s been looking for father figures everywhere—even on TV shows—and overidentifying with the lucky people they nurture. In that moment, she identified with the hawk, safe in the breeder’s paternal grasp.
In mapping herself onto the bird and her father onto the breeder, Macdonald describes one of the emotional impetuses to her project: escaping or erasing the grief and loss she feels in the wake of her father’s death. Of course, she suggests here—with the wisdom of hindsight—this is as impossible as turning herself physically into a goshawk. But readers should pay attention to the degree to which she allows herself to identify with the bird as the book proceeds. In another metaphorical vein, the guidebooks’ promise that the gently handled bird will be kind suggests the possibility that, properly handled, Macdonald will ultimately be able to tame her wild grief.
Themes
Later, at a highway service station, Macdonald frets over the silence emanating from the box. Irrationally, she worries her goshawk is dead, even though she knows it’s fine. Humans have been transporting captive hawks over much longer distances for centuries. She leans down to peer through an airhole in the box and the bird startles. Shining motes of dust and feathers fill her field of vision, like a universe full of stars.
Macdonald’s fear here says more about her than it does about the bird—in her raw grief over her father’s death her need to fix things in place, to hold and to keep the things that she loves, has gone into overdrive. The bird’s movement offers a pointed reminder that she can take care of herself, if necessary—in other words, Macdonald needs her more than she needs Macdonald.
Themes
T. H. White’s bird, Gos, traveled nearly 1,500 miles from a remote German forest to a small English village by foot, airplane, and train. In The Goshawk, he imagines this terrifying trip through the bird’s eyes. Macdonald thinks he likely imposed his own traumatized fears on the bird. After spending the earliest years of his life caught in the terror of his parents’ unhappy and violent marriage, he spent a brief idyll with his grandparents in England. But then he was sent to a boarding school where the cruel schoolmaster beat the students so brutally and so frequently that he must, White concluded, have derived sexual satisfaction from it.
Macdonald takes White to task for overly identifying with Gos, for reducing the wild animal to a vessel into which he can pour all his childhood trauma and pain. He does this in the hopes that taming the bird with kindness rather than cruelty will allow him to redeem his own painful past. And as Macdonald describes this pain in greater detail, the depth of White’s suffering comes into greater focus, helping to explain why he wanted so desperately to rewrite his history.
Themes
Macdonald imagines White sitting at the kitchen table of his cottage, waiting for his bird. He painted the rooms bright colors, invested in luxurious carpeting, turned one bedroom into a romantic bower. Yet he sleeps on a cot in another room. Decades later, carrying her bird into her own home, Macdonald remembers a line from The Sword in the Stone in which a falconer describes his goshawk as a prosthetic extension of his body. She feels the same. That night, she dreams of her father as a boy, playing in the bombed-out ruins of Shepherd’s Bush. He points at the sky and Macdonald looks up to see a plane; when she looks down, he is gone.
Macdonald imagines White relishing his freedom—but still being incapable of fully expressing himself even in private. This suggests lingering shame and a desire to punish himself, which readers should keep in mind as they read more about his experiences with Gos in subsequent chapters. Macdonald’s dreams indicate something she doesn’t yet fully realize consciously: that she wants her bird to help her rebuild her life from the wreckage left by her father’s death—to be the prosthetic attachment that makes her feel whole again. Shepherd’s Bush is a London suburb that suffered a lot of destruction during the Blitz of Britain in WWII.
Themes
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