Falcon and Jesses: A Symbol of Confinement in By Any Other Name

What Are Falcon and Jesses? The Literal Foundation

In Chapter 7 of By Any Other Name, Jodi Picoult introduces a tangible, carefully observed piece of Elizabethan falconry. Emilia, newly installed as Lord Hunsdon’s mistress at Somerset House, wanders to the mews and encounters the falconer John with a bird of prey. The physical details ground the symbol: a female falcon sits on John’s gloved fist, a silk hood covering her head and a tiny bell fastened to one leg. Silken jesses—thin leather straps—are threaded through the falconer’s fingers and wound around his wrist, securing the bird. The hood keeps her blind “till the game comes”; the jesses prevent her from flying free. The falcon herself is a survivor, “healin’,” her wing mended through imping—John explains he “put an iron needle in the new quill…and stick the other end into the broken quill, and you bind it up”—using a feather from another bird. All these details are precise and functional, but Picoult immediately layers them with figurative weight.

Where the Symbol Recurs and How It Is Framed

The falcon and jesses appear most vividly in the mews scene, but the image radiates outward. After watching the bird hunt, seize a woodcock, and be rewarded with only “the head of her quarry,” Emilia quietly touches the falcon’s wing and whispers praise. That night, she pulls out her writing box and produces a passage that will later surface in The Taming of the Shrew (listed among the Shakespearean easter eggs in the novel’s appendix):

My falcon now is sharp and passing empty
And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged,
For then she never looks upon her lure.
Another way I have to man my haggard…
That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites
That bate and beat and will not be obedient.

The words are attributed to Petruchio in the play, but here they emerge from Emilia’s hand, born of what she witnessed that morning. The falcon symbol does not stay on the page; a few days later, when Hunsdon invites her out in public, Emilia thinks “of the falcon, devouring the head of its catch without knowing that, in another life, she might have had the entire meal.” The recurrence traces a deliberate arc from observation, to creative expression, to self-recognition.

Evolution of Meaning: From Broken Bird to Captive Woman

The symbol moves through three overlapping stages. Initially, the falcon is a pitiable, injured creature, hooded and leashed. Emilia’s first question is compassionate: “Why must she be kept in the dark?” The falconer’s answer—it’s routine until game appears—begins to hint at the logic of control.

The meaning sharpens after the hunt. Emilia asks what would happen if the imping failed, if the bird could never hunt again. John replies, “Well, no use keepin’ a girl that can’t serve her purpose, is there?” The sentence is casual but brutal; it collapses the distance between falcon and woman. The bird’s value is purely instrumental, and a female who cannot perform her allotted function is disposable. Emilia absorbs this without comment, but that night’s poem—the “sharp and passing empty” falcon trained to “know her keeper’s call”—makes the parallel explicit. The jesses are no longer neutral leather straps; they represent the grip of male authority that starves a woman of agency until she stoops obediently.

The final turn comes with the image of the meal. The falcon that successfully hunts is rewarded with only the head, while the rest is taken by the falconer. Emilia recognizes the arrangement as her own: the luxurious gowns, the fine room, the public outings—all forms of the “head of the quarry” that obscure the larger freedom she has traded away. The hood, which she once saw as protective, now reads like a deliberate blindness. The mended wing, a patchwork of another bird’s feather, becomes a metaphor for how women’s talents are harnessed and repurposed within constraints set by men.

Character and Theme Connections

Emilia Bassano is the obvious human face of the falcon. She is “fierce but tamed,” as the page’s context suggests—a poet and a sharp observer consigned to the role of a courtesan. Lord Hunsdon functions as the falconer, holding the jesses: he can kiss her forehead chastely for a month, then dress her in pearl-encrusted velvet as if she were an accessory, all while remaining the one who opens the door to the world or closes it. The hood mirrors the way Emilia’s words must be hidden, her poetry slipped behind her back, her authorship camouflaged.

The falcon symbol also threads into the novel’s thematic architecture. The theme of female erasure and pseudonymous authorship is anticipated in the hood that keeps the bird invisible until a performance is required. The commodification of women takes literal shape in the jesses that turn a living creature into a possession, and in the blunt economy of use and disposal. Even the imping—mending a broken wing with a feather from another bird—echoes how works attributed to Shakespeare may incorporate the real voices of silenced women, as the novel’s Shakespeare authorship question posits. The falcon’s reward, a fraction of what her labor produces, speaks to the gender bias in the arts that Melina Green confronts in the contemporary storyline. And the act of hunting at all, of being freed only under strict control, enacts the paradox of art as resistance and legacy: Emilia writes precisely because she is caged, yet the writing itself becomes a bid for something beyond the hood.

The metaphor also resonates across the dual timelines. While the contemporary Melina does not handle a falcon, the pressures that tether her—the need to hide behind a male pseudonym, the producers who dismiss women playwrights, the industry that demands she serve a purpose—are the bequest of the same leash. The falcon endures as a reminder that emancipation is rarely instantaneous.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the imping procedure—repairing the falcon’s wing with a needle and another bird’s feather—function as a metaphor for Emilia’s creative life?
Imping allows the falcon to fly again, but with borrowed material that is not her own. Similarly, Emilia’s poetry and playwriting must pass through the filter of male names and institutions to reach an audience; her words are “mended” into a tradition that denies her ownership. The needle piercing the quill suggests both the pain and the necessary violence of inserting a woman’s voice into a male-dominated body of work.

2. John the falconer states, “Well, no use keepin’ a girl that can’t serve her purpose, is there?” In what ways does Lord Hunsdon’s treatment of Emilia reflect this principle?
Hunsdon initially displays no romantic interest, and Emilia fears she is failing Isabella’s lessons; she worries she is not serving her intended purpose. Once she does engage—by kissing his cheek, by playing court intelligence—Hunsdon’s affection grows. The novel implies that his attention is contingent on her performance of the role he assigned, and that a courtesan who did not entertain, flatter, or appear publicly as his complement would be as disposable as a falcon that could no longer hunt.

3. Why does Picoult have Emilia write the lines that would become Petruchio’s “my falcon” speech, rather than simply applying the symbol to her privately?
By placing the text in Emilia’s hand, the novel suggests that the very plays that shape the cultural imagination about taming headstrong women might have been authored by a woman who knew that dynamic intimately. The act of writing becomes an act of covert self-portraiture; Emilia is both the tamer and the tamed, inhabiting the voice that would later be used to justify female subordination. The stolen credit mirrors the stolen meal—only the “head” of her work survives under another name.

4. At the end of the mews scene, Emilia thinks of the falcon “devouring the head of its catch without knowing that, in another life, she might have had the entire meal.” How does this line connect to the broader theme of women’s constrained horizons?
The head represents only a fraction of what the falcon’s labor produced, just as the material comforts Hunsdon provides are a fraction of the autonomy Emilia might have in a different social order. The phrase “another life” acknowledges that her limitations are not natural but imposed. This connects to the contemporary storyline, where Melina Green enjoys more visible opportunities than her ancestor but still risks having her full artistic meal reduced to a token acceptance if she does not play by the rules of a male-coded industry.