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Chapter 8: The Rembrandt Interior
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
Over subsequent days. Macdonald spends hours upon hours admiring her goshawk. She considers the hawk’s reptilian strangeness, but at moments it seems endearingly pet-like, too. She is always beautiful and perfect, shaped by eons of evolution for her predatory role. Squeaking noises, like those made by injured animals, elicit her powerful killing instinct. But she sleeps a lot, and this worries Macdonald, who has forgotten that the bird is still a baby and that babies sleep a lot. In a way, Macdonald is like a baby, too, trying to rebuild a life from the shambles of her grief that emulates the emotionally imperturbable hawk.
Obviously, Macdonald admires her newly acquired bird, particularly the way nature has shaped her to fit her niche in the world. But her intense focus on the bird also causes her to lose perspective, and her instinctive fear that there is something wrong with the bird—or with Macdonald herself—bears the marks of her recent trauma. Having just lost her father suddenly, the thing she fears most is another unexpected loss. Seeking strength and solace, she begins to model herself of the bird.
Themes
When Christina drops by with the Sunday newspapers and fresh coffee, this strikes Macdonald as an unwelcome intrusion. But soon, Macdonald, Christina, and Macdonald’s goshawk are sitting companionably in the living room watching TV. That’s when it happens, the thing for which Macdonald has spent days waiting in reverential silence: the bird notices and begins to eat the meat Macdonald grips in the leather glove under her talons.
Although Macdonald clearly thinks that White messed up by approaching manning Gos as a chivalric rite of passage, she betrays her own desire to invest training her bird with deeper meaning too. That’s why she’s annoyed rather than grateful that the bird becomes comfortable enough to drop her guard and eat at a mundane moment.
Themes
When Macdonald’s goshawk has become tame enough to be left unhooded, Macdonald trains her to accept food from the hand. She starts by tossing pieces of raw beef toward the perch, then by inching across the floor with the meat on her hand. The first time she approaches, the bird bates. But soon, she’s gobbling bites of steak from Macdonald’s gloved hand. It’s at this moment that the bird’s name comes to her: Mabel, from the Latin word amabilis (lovable). This suitably grandmotherly and unassuming name—hawking superstition holds that a bird’s ferocity is inversely proportional to the intensity of its name—charms her. She says it aloud. She says her own name. And she remembers that all the faceless people passing outside her window have names, too.
In the previous chapter, Macdonald described White’s needy obsession over making Gos love him and his consequent overfeeding. She contrasts her own (much more enlightened and correct) approach to training here. She makes Mabel come to her. Yet, the excitement Macdonald feels and her growing sense of distance from the human race to which she belongs hint that she, too, has overinvested Mabel’s training with personally meaning. What she needs from Mabel may be less obvious—or less obviously needy—than White. But she’s also using her bird as a prosthetic to replace something important she feels she’s lost.
Themes
