Wild Feelings: love and Violence in Human-Avian Relations

The article explores the relations formed between people and birds in The Goshawk (1951) by T.H. White, The Peregrine (1967) by J.A. Baker, and Kestrel for a Knave (1968) by Barry Hines. Each book describes passionate, affective human relationships with wild birds and illuminates the process of enlarging ways of being human through being with birds. This enlarging of the human self is enacted through practices of care and love, but also through an identification with and escape into the world of another creature. For the central protagonists in each book, being with wild birds is as much about embracing the more primitive and primal morality of an avian lifeworld as it is about loving feelings towards the birds. The protagonists in each of the books gives vent to their own wild feelings. These are expressions of intense, excessive, sometimes overwhelming emotion, sentiments transgressive of social norms and the human-animal divide.