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Chapter 9: The Rite of Passage
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
Macdonald imagines White at his kitchen table, drinking whiskey and recording his failures with Gos in his log. On this day, White punished Gos for bating by letting him dangle upside down from his jesses. He feels ashamed. And he suspects that he’s overfeeding the bird. But although he resolves to stop, to force Gos to come to him, within hours he’s resumed needily forcing food on the bird. In contrast, Macdonald thinks she’s doing a good job of training Mabel, especially when she opens the living room curtains to let in daylight, revealing herself fully, and the bird remains calm and unruffled.
Macdonald describes White as so desperate for love that he undermines himself in Gos’s training. And then, cruelly, he punishes the bird for his own failures. Yet, as Macdonald describes these terrible mistakes, she’s also showing readers how strongly she feels about Mabel. She might be doing a better job on the outside than White, but her memoir suggests that with hindsight she realizes that her motives and desires weren’t actually that different than his. She too needs to feel loved, needed, and trusted.
Themes
But then, Macdonald tries to hood Mabel so she can safely take her outside. When the bird resists, Macdonald feels like an abject failure. Still, she understands: Mabel wants to see the world. And the hood does represent cruelty and power. Macdonald remembers a story from the Third Crusade in which Saladin refused to return a captured hawk to the Spanish king despite an enormous ransom. She imagines Saladin laying claim to the bird by hooding it. She thinks about fetish hoods and the hooded prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib in the Iraq War. She tries to reassure Mabel—or herself—but she can’t.
Mabel doesn’t want the hood anymore: as she feels safe, she wants her world to get larger and larger. In contrast, Macdonald still wants to hide and run away from the pain of the world—things don’t feel safe for her yet. Tellingly, when the bird refuses the hood, she interprets this as a claim to autonomy, and she casts her need to hood the bird as an act of aggression and possession of not of torture. She’s beginning to ascribe human meanings to the bird’s actions.
Themes
When she finally gets the hood on Mabel, Macdonald can no longer face going outside. She calls her friends Stuart and Mandy to come over instead. After they admire the bird, Macdonald removes her hood, and Stuart is impressed that Mabel shows no fear of the dog he’s brought along. He encourages Macdonald to take Mabel outdoors and among people as soon as possible. All the guidebooks say the same thing, even 17th-century falconer Edmund Bert. She compromises by taking Mabel to a walled yard on her college campus. She feels exposed and wants to go back inside. But, capable of seeing more colors and detail than a human can possibly imagine, Mabel drinks in everything with childlike glee.
Mabel is ready to experience the wider world, but the reader she is, the more Macdonald withdraws into herself and the safety of her own home. Outside her home, she cannot fully control what happens to her or to Mabel, and what she wants most of all at this point in her life is to feel like she can hold onto the things she loves and keep them safe—and to isolate herself from humanity, because the love she felt for her father is what makes his loss so incredibly painful for her now.
Themes
