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Chapter 25: Magical Places
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
This is the first time Macdonald has taken Mabel outside in nearly a week. Mabel is very fat and very discontented, and, on some level, Macdonald knows she shouldn’t fly her today. Sure enough, Mabel quickly flies out of sight. Macdonald’s initial trustful calm quickly turns to panic, and she reaches for the radio tag receiver. Eventually, she finds Mabel expectantly staring intently at a thorny patch of brush into which she’s chased a pheasant. Macdonald can’t flush it out; the underbrush is too thick, and besides, they’re on private property. After a few tense moments, Mabel calms down enough to fly back to Macdonald’s hand and go home.
Macdonald continues to lose control over Mabel, just as her grief overpowered her in the early weeks after her father’s death. But time smooths away the rough edges of grief, and now—months later, and with the help of antidepressants—Macdonald is starting to come out on the other side. The last time Mabel flew off, Macdonald felt compelled to follow the bird and, for want of paying attention, they poached an animal. Now, she has better control over herself and Mabel, showing that truly is on the path to mastering her once-wild grief.
Themes
The Goshawk isn’t just about White’s bird. It’s also about “history, and sexuality, and childhood, […] and war, and teaching and learning” and more. These are also the themes of The Once and Future King. Macdonald sees the two books as connected. Early in The Sword in the Stone, the Wart and his friend Kay lose Colonel Cully while hunting in the forest. Kay goes home but the Wart stays behind. In the morning, he discovers a mysterious cottage and Merlyn. Macdonald suspects that White wished to be Merlyn, a man who was born in the future and had to live his life backward toward a past in which he was valued. Poignantly, then, Merlyn becomes a way for White to redeem his losses and failures.
Similarly, while training Gos didn’t magically allow White to excise his own unwanted desires or control his own wild nature, it did teach him important lessons. White’s casting himself as Merlyn is, in Macdonald’s view, a hopeful thing to do: it suggests White’s conviction that (his recent failures notwithstanding) he has the freedom to be the better version of himself that he wants to be. And it allows him yet again to step into a role that he played very well indeed, that of the teacher, preparing his charges for the day they would become independent.
Themes
