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Chapter 7: Invisibility
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
In contrast to Macdonald’s bird, when T. H. White’s bird, Gos, arrived, he was already familiar with humans and willing to come to them for food. If he had known what he was doing, his bird could have been trained within a week. But birds are controlled by their stomachs, and discipline depends on keeping them a little hungry. Desperate for the bird to like him, White stuffed his bird silly and felt hurt when the satisfied animal ignored him.
Despite having an advantage over Macdonald, White squanders it through his ignorance, his overwhelming need to be loved, and his desire to show himself to be a benevolent master (unlike his parents and teachers). Crucially, because their wild nature makes them self-sufficient, the taming of a hawk always involves a measure of cruelty. Controlling food allows the falconer to create an artificial need for him- or herself in the bird.
Themes
Macdonald knows that when White began to train Gos, his life had changed less drastically than he might have wished. His cottage was on the grounds of the Stowe estate, just like the school he’d just abandoned. And he hadn’t stopped being a teacher, even if his new pupil was a bird. She suspects that as he trained the hawk, White wanted to re-do his own past, casting himself as the loving and empathetic mentor he himself never had.
Like herself, Macdonald sees White desperately trying to escape from circumstances he cannot control. Neither of them, this chapter suggests, can do that in a meaningful way. She also psychoanalyzes White, offering readers her interpretation of what she thinks he hoped his experience of training Gos would do—allow him to rewind time and find redemption.
Themes
White was guided in these attempts by three books: Blaine’s Falconry, published in 1936; Gerald Lascelles’ Coursing and Falconry, published in 1892; and a 1619 tome called An Approved Treatise of Hawkes and Hawking, written by Edmund Bert, Gentleman. White consulted Bert’s book the most, seduced (at least so Macdonald thinks) by Bert’s “accomplished, cantankerous […] bracing wit” and his complete confidence in his mastery of his birds. Longing to emulate Bert, White decided to man Gos the “old-fashioned” way, by depriving it of sleep. This method was, in his mind, devoid of “visible cruelty.” And it gave him his own rite of passage.
White’s desire to flee from pain and trauma also became, in Macdonald’s eyes, an attempt to flee from the uncertainty and pain of the modern era. That’s why, in her view, he mostly ignores his most up-to-date falconry manuals and prefers Bert’s guide. White’s attempts to inhabit the world of Bert’s guide captures his sense of alienation, but it also allows him to sidestep its actual causes. He can tell himself that he feels out of place because he belongs to a different era, not because his society judges his sexuality. And, by turning manning into a trial for both bird and falconer, White gives himself the chance to prove his own worthiness to be Gos’s master.
Themes
White’s attempts to tame Gos strike Macdonald as a tragedy according to the literary definition she learned at university: a tragedy is the story of a person whose character flaws or moral failings lead to their doom. There’s also something Freudian about it—and maybe about falconry in general. Freud’s idea of transference seems particularly applicable to 19th-century falconry guidebooks. Macdonald sees their authors projecting onto their hawks the masculine qualities they thought modern life threatened, then training their hawks as if mastering the animals allowed them to “repossess” (“introject” in Freudian terms) those traits. In training Gos, Macdonald thinks White wanted to “civilise the perversity and unruliness within himself,” something he’d been unable to accomplish through his efforts to play the heterosexual gentleman. She imagines him in the barn as if in a Rembrandt painting, testing his resolve and his patience, determined to withstand the ordeal.
Trained in English, Macdonald takes a step back from her general retelling of White’s story to offer some pointed analysis. In her view, White (and other falconers from previous eras) projects his own needs and unfulfilled wishes onto their birds and then try to possess these things through the process of taming the animal. She’s very comfortable imagining White’s reasons, and readers should note how his reasons do (and don’t) align with Macdonald’s own. Her sexuality doesn’t come into play in this book in a meaningful way, for example. But, like White, she faces an unruly, wild force in herself—grief—that she would very much like to tame.
Themes
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