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Chapter 3: Small Worlds
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 T. H. White on a March morning in 1936. He’s scribbling madly in a journal. He’s ready to run away from his life as a schoolteacher at an upper-crust boys’ school, desperate to escape his sadness and confusion, and to outrun or be cured of his “sadistic homosexuality.” White, Macdonald explains, was a complicated figure. His students worshipped and feared him: he flew planes, kept snakes in his rooms, and published racy novels under a pseudonym. But he also utilized a kind of emotional cruelty far worse than the corporal punishment with which the other teachers enforced discipline.
Macdonald introduces T. H. White and his experiences with Gos as a foil to her own with Mabel. In some ways their experiences are similar—both adopt their hawks during a period of personal upheaval, and both are lonely figures. But, while Macdonald’s grief centers around the loss of her father, White’s discontent arose from more complicated sources. Societal judgments about his sexuality and the emotional cruelty he’s capable of mean severely compromise his ability to find love and trust among people.
Themes
Despite the brio and bravado of his actions, White was driven, Macdonald says, by fear. His parents’ unhappy and violent marriage marked his early years. He was gay and a sexual sadist at a time when both were considered severe forms of mental illness. Her biography has been happier, but Macdonald recognizes that she, like White, wants her hawk to connect her with nature’s savage, untamable wildness. They both embark on the project at moments of stress. For White, this had to do with his sexuality, his inability to imagine a “human love returned” in his society. He tried to fill that gap with animals, although he abhorred the idea of “pets” because it implied dependence and neediness. He liked to keep mostly wild animals because he admired their independence. And he wanted to possess, by proxy, some of the pure ferocity of hunting animals, a violence untainted by cruelty.
White’s unhappy biography suggests the importance of love and trust to freedom. His parents didn’t love him, and he certainly couldn’t trust them, so he felt trapped in his childhood. As an adult, then, he becomes borderline obsessed with the freedom possessed by wild animals. On the one hand, he wants to possess some of their freedom and ease for himself. On the other, convincing a wild and free animal to stay with him seems like a way to prove to himself that—all human evidence to the contrary—he was lovable. And, as she says here, Macdonald can see how her desire to hold something wild close to her life mirrors his, even if hers comes from different sources.
Themes
Ultimately, Macdonald says, White couldn’t pretend to fit in any longer. He quit his job at the school and moved into a small cottage in the woods. It was the 1930s, a decade poised between the two World Wars. Feeling like civilization had failed, White decided to turn his back on it. When he uncovered an anecdote about how quickly trained goshawks revert to a feral state, he realized that he’d found the perfect creature. Taming one would represent controlling his own nature; sharing a life with one might allow him to express his own innate ferocity. He wrote to Germany to purchase a goshawk.
One other similarity between White and Macdonald is that they both live in times of vast social upheaval. For Macdonald, this includes climate change, human-driven habitat loss for wild animal populations, and the ongoing Iraq War. For White, it’s living in the shadow between World War I—the so-called “Great War” and “War to End Wars”—and World War II. With such overwhelming and unsolvable complex problems looming, Macdonald understands why White might turn to a wild creature, both as an escape, and as a way to prove that humanity could still tap into its better nature.
Themes
