H Is For Hawk

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2014

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-9

Chapters 10-17

Chapters 18-23

Chapters 24-Postscript

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

The Misinterpretation of Nature

It is a truism among falconers that a trainer must never sentimentalize a bird of prey. Predators such as hawks are awe-inspiring in their killing efficiency, and as such, hawks in the wild are solitary animals. They stay close to their trainers not out of affection or empathy, but solely because the trainer becomes an easy source of food; trainers who come to view their hawks as affectionate pets are unprofessional. However, this opens the way for a different sort of misinterpretation of the hawk’s purpose. Just as hawks are not affectionate, neither are they representative of a universal brutality running through the course of the natural world. Too many falconers fall into the allure of becoming hawklike themselves, and of using hawks to make their own emotional worlds spare and efficient.

During a crucial moment in the narrative, the director of the British Falconers Club shows MacDonald a secret. It is a taxidermized hawk, presented by Herman Gӧring (director of the Nazi Luftwaffe) to another falconer as a gift. Both MacDonald and her colleague react in horror to the gift, but its attachment to Nazism resonates with the task of falconry. Falconers from T.H. White to MacDonald herself have given over to the feeling that falconry can make a clean break from muddied human emotions to spare ruthlessness. Every falconer must master the brutality of their bird of prey, which places the falconer in an authoritarian role.

It is not a coincidence that White’s story intersects in time with Gӧring’s: both men sought out falconry as a means of reigning in human disorder though for different reasons. MacDonald sees that her own world became poorer as it became more efficiently dedicated to falconry and a conception of her hawk as an emotionless killing machine. Analogizing the behavior of wild creatures to human behavior is not only incorrect from a biological point of view, but it will also create a personal crisis for anyone attempting organize their life or politics around such an animal. “Goshawks are things of death and gore,” says MacDonald, “but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all” (29).

An Emotional Journey Through Greif

Hawks are one with their surroundings, able to see into distances of which humans can only dream. Their bodies are honed for the singular purpose of hunting. By contrast, humans may seem disorganized and slow-moving, unfit for the natural world. Through her writing, MacDonald proposes an alternate thesis. Just as hawks are fit for hunting, she writes, so it seems that the human race is fit for creative metaphor. It is how they grow and learn.

Soon after her father’s death, MacDonald recalls about him that “putting a lens between himself and the world […] shielded him from other things he had to photograph: awful things” (70). The loss of her father seems equally awful to her, like an unimaginable trauma from which she must protect herself. Just as her father used the lens to distance himself from emotional danger, so does MacDonald use the hawk as a stand-in for her heart, sending it out to hunt and feeling anxiety over it when it doesn’t return. During this process, she shuns human company, but finds that in so doing, the quality of her life declines. She turns down work and moves into an unfamiliar house. She finds herself inexplicably and uncontrollably angry and even slight phenomena, such as the removal of a bird sticker from a bank window. This loss of control leads her to transfer all of her control and determination into Mabel. Rather than make her a better falconer, however, this emotional fragility leads her to make mistakes in her training.

“Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks” (218), MacDonald says, late into her journey. As she allows more people into her life, she is better able to see different approaches to falconry. Instead of a grudging duty, falconry becomes a joy. In this way, memories of her father stop being about loss and become a summation of the things gained by the impact of his life on those around him. By the time she must do the necessary work of leaving her hawk to molt, she is ready for it.

The Anxiety of Influence

Throughout H Is for Hawk, MacDonald describes not only her own experience with falconry, but also T.H. White’s fumbling experience with the same. Yet she sees the value of his work as an acknowledged literary masterpiece, one which transforms failure and loss into a connection with history and self. While acknowledging White’s contribution to the literature of falconry, MacDonald hopes to make her own mark on the genre. To do so, she must wrestle with the meaning and import of White’s work while improving upon it for her own purposes.

This is the anxiety of influence, a term literary critic Harold Bloom coined to describe the struggle of the author to reconcile themselves to writing in the shadow of older or deceased authors. In doing so, they must balance what is useful about those authors’ works to what promise in them remains unfulfilled (at least, in terms of the younger author’s purposes). Such work can be daunting; often, the older writer will have a great reputation far surpassing that of the younger author. If the younger author has not mastered the lessons of the older author’s work, they face criticism, ridicule, or obscurity for presenting their own similar work. Yet, Bloom says, such risk-taking is the basis of very great work of literature.

MacDonald finds White lacking as a falconer but admires his ability with metaphor. At the same time, Meadows has a rich social and psychological vocabulary White never had access to in the 1930’s when he wrote The Goshawk. As such, she can contextualize his anxiety about his relationship to his parents and his personal identity in a way White could not. She retells his tale through the lens of the increasing cultural acceptance of LGBTQ individuals and can mourn the loss of loving relationships White might have had in his lifetime. At the same time, she is able to contextualize her own loss through White’s personal, literary, and historical lens, interrogating her own unwillingness to accept the company and love of other people. Rather than being a mere influence on her work, White becomes her collaborator.