43 pages • 1 hour read
Helen MacdonaldA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
In one scene in H Is for Hawk, MacDonald describes feeling disgust when the director of the British Falconry Club displays a taxidermized hawk that was a present to the club in 1937 from Herman Gӧring, the head of the Nazi Luftwaffe, as thanks to the British government, which was focused at that time on Nazi appeasement. MacDonald sees the taxidermized hawk as a symbol for Nazi ruthlessness. In this way, the dead hawk stands in for the living hawk, becoming a showcase for the personality of its observer. We can easily see this error when equating the hawk to such a repellant character as Gӧring, but MacDonald warns us that we are all capable of putting ourselves in front of nature in this way. It is this attitude that is a wellspring for the environmental damage that will eventually subsume us and make all of our lives irrevocably worse. Recognizing the special relationship nature has to itself outside of human interpretation is the key to preserving it.
The wonder of flight is a motif that shapes both MacDonald’s and her father’s emotional journeys. MacDonald’s father spent part of his youth entranced by identifying planes in the post-World-War-II era. With a keen eye he would one day use to document the news in photography, young Alisdair would keep a notebook of the planes he saw overhead. This activity was akin to the documenting of danger assessment that was done in Britain immediately following World War II. Yet it was also a form of documenting that allowed Alisdair to escape from his war-torn present world into the limitless sky. MacDonald, too, used her wonder of the goshawks’ flight to escape her emotional pain and feel a freedom she could not in her daily life. In this way, flight becomes a metaphor not just of unimpeded freedom, but of a meaningful future in which life is a joyful activity and choices are bountiful and worthwhile. As MacDonald’s emotional state improves, she allows Mabel (and herself) to fly more freely.
In the memoir, the silence and solitude of the landscape in which hawks hunt symbolizes the emotional distance that MacDonald wants to maintain from the world. Immediately following her father’s death, MacDonald retreats from society, taking refuge in the natural landscape of the hawk. In that silent, antisocial environment, MacDonald imagines that she will not have to answer questions or communicate emotions she is still processing. Nevertheless, she is not able to escape from the world entirely and finds reminders of British history everywhere within the landscape.
Contrary to MacDonald’s first impressions, the land is not apolitical. Falconry was once common practice before most of England’s land was privatized and transferred to wealthy lords in the early modern period. In order to train her falcon, MacDonald must gain the permission of a wealthy landholder, who occasionally insists on falconry presentations. In the meantime, she struggles to maintain an indoor residence in which to rest her hawk, depending on a friend’s need for a house sitter. Everywhere MacDonald looks within the landscape, she can see modern industrial encroachment, but as a scholar, she can also see elements of prehistory. Though she can imagine the chalk flats near Cambridge through the eyes of pre-historic British falconers, she cannot fully embody their perspective. Because of the politicized history of land ownership in Britain, even in the wilderness, she is never really alone.
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