- 1 This article forms part of the author’s research activity as a member of the Employment, Digital So (...)
1In an article entitled ‘Tales of Femininity and Sexuality: Competing Discourses and the Negotiation of Feminisms Today’, Emma Young addresses the recent controversy on the discourses of women’s choice and agency generated by the different significance granted to them by two current feminist trends, which she differentiates by hyphenating the word ‘post(-)feminism’: ‘the postfeminist approach to gender and sexuality which alights itself with postmodern and poststructuralist thinking’; and those critics representing ‘the post-feminist tendencies more commonly affiliated with backlash theories and notions of women’s sexual liberation’ (85; original emphasis). According to Young, the centrality of these tropes in both strikingly opposed critical approaches shows that autonomy and choice are key descriptors for ‘the contemporary ideals of femininity’ (Budgeon, qtd. in Young 85), or, as Rosalind Gill puts it, that in the twenty-first century, ‘women are required to work on and transform the self, to regulate every aspect of their conduct, and to present all their actions as freely chosen’ (quoted in Young 85). Young then argues that there is a significant number of British women short-story writers currently attempting to ‘negotiate the competing discourses of contemporary feminisms through their exploration of women’s femininity and sexuality’ (85); and that, by so doing, they are engaging in a ‘politics of choice and agency’ most frequently made ‘manifest on the female body’ (85). Young substantiates this assertion by analysing short stories written by Kate Atkinson, Helen Simpson, Michèle Roberts, Kalbinder Kaur and Sarah Hall. In the case of Hall, she chooses ‘The Agency’ (2011), a short story about the importance of women’s sexual gratification. A female friend, Anthea, hands Hannah, the protagonist, a card for an Agency where she can fulfil all her sexual preferences by simply writing them down on the admission form. Thus, the short story seems to assert that ‘women are agents of their sexual lives’ (Young 99). However, the fact that the Agency ‘is run by a man (Alistair) complicates this initial sense of escape from heteropatriarchal norms’ (Young 99) and, what is more, Hannah’s sexual choices are ‘predetermined by the options on the form’ (Young 99). Therefore, Young concludes, ‘even a seemingly empowered woman who is acting with agency is still unable to make autonomous choices’ (99). She finds similar effects of ambiguity in the short stories of the other women writers she analyses. Put together, they point to what Young, drawing on Rosalind Gill, describes as a common attempt ‘to complicate, rather than remain complicit with post-feminist and neoliberal discourses in which individuals are ‘entrepreneurial actors who are rational, calculating and self-regulating’ (Gill 2008: 436)’ (Young 101). This warning is applicable to Mrs Fox (2013). Although it is usually situated ‘in the era of the posthuman’ (Lönngren 494), or related to ‘posthuman feminism’ (Walezak 284), some critics see Mrs Fox as a simple rewriting of its main hypotext, David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922). Thus, while Ann-Sophie Lönngren interprets positively the fact that, after their transformation, both husbands ‘continue to regard the vixens as their wives’ (490) and ‘try as best as they can [to have] the same kind of mental and physical contact with them as before’ (487), Elke D’hoker argues that both stories ‘invite being read as parables of a love that is tested yet endures’ (58), so that:
although ‘Mrs Fox’ is considerably more contemporary than Lady into Fox in its celebration of the female body and sexuality, it still carries echoes of traditional patriarchal attitudes and continues to insist on a human distinctiveness that may well be superior to animal existence. (63)
2The question these interpretations beg is, why should Hall refer to the classical topos of human-into-animal transformation through a wealth of intertextual allusions to Garnett’s Lady into Fox, if her aim were to reinforce the normalised patriarchal ideology sustaining it? Émilie Walezak offers an excellent answer to this question when she argues that, when reading Hall, we must remember both ‘[Angela] Carter’s claim to “putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the bottle to explode”’ (‘Notes’ 46), and ‘[Rosi] Braidotti’s reappraisal of [Luce] Irigaray explaining that “[t]he quest for alternative representations of female subjectivity requires the mimetic repetition and the reabsorption of the established forms of representation” (304)’ (Walezak 287). Taking these reflexions as a point of departure, the article will attempt to demonstrate that, for all the similarities to Lady into Fox, Mrs Fox sustains a clear antipatriarchal political stance.
3Mrs Fox was first published as the winner of the BBC National Short Story Award in 2013. It was reprinted as the initial short story in Madame Zero in 2017 and as a single novella in 2019. As the title suggests, Hall’s novella tells the story of the transformation of a young woman into a fox during a walk with her astonished husband. It, therefore, remobilises the ancient topos of transmogrification or change into a different form or appearance, especially into a fantastic or grotesque one. In the Faber review, Melanie Ebdon describes Mrs Fox as ‘a magical short story . . . based on the short novel by David Garnett Lady into Fox (1922), published just seven years after Kafka’s famous story of human-to-animal transformation, Metamorphosis’ (n.p.). The writer herself has admitted that Mrs Fox is ‘loosely based’ on Garnett’s short novel, and that ‘[her] version is an homage to what sounds like a very brave and odd piece of fiction indeed’ (Bury n.p.). Certainly, the thematic similarities of both fictions are remarkable. In both stories, the transformation of their wives takes the husbands by surprise. Both protest that they are so much in love with them that they must keep the foxes at home and devote themselves to their care, even at the cost of isolating themselves from the rest of the world. And they never lose hope that the metamorphosis can be reversed. However, in both cases, their expectations are defeated as, although their transformed wives initially respond to their entreaties with docility and affection, they are more and more unable to resist the call of wild nature. The two stories also share formal similarities. They are both told by an external narrator from the perspective of the shocked husband, but with an important difference. Garnett’s narrator identifies himself as ‘David Garnett’ (42), tells the story retrospectively, mainly through indirect speech, and is constantly making authorial comments and half-humouredly sympathising with the husband. By contrast, Hall’s anonymous external narrator reports the odd events in the present as they are taking place, mostly by recoding the husband’s stream of thoughts, and does not make any authorial comments. Where the two stories differ most is in the symbolism underlying each wife’s metamorphosis.
4Lönngren situates Lady into Fox and Mrs Fox within the world-wide tradition of human-to-animal transformation that, in Western culture, goes back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But instead of delving into this tradition, she assumes that ‘Sophia’s transformation [in Mrs Fox] could be understood as a metaphor for the physical and psychological changes that come with pregnancy and first-time motherhood’ (58). Similarly, Ana Raquel Fernandes, after stating that Hall’s animal short stories in general form ‘part of the animal narrative tradition, growing closer to Franz Kafka’s animal stories, as well as to twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature’ (161), cancels out this line of inquiry simply by quoting Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s remark that ‘Kafka’s animals never refer to a mythology or an archetypes’ (161). However, as argued above, in order to assess properly Hall’s use of the ages-long topos of human-to-animal transformation, we must remember that Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a compilation of hundreds of myths drawing heavily on Greek/Hellenistic metamorphosis traditions, and that, before they reached Kafka and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, they evolved into classical tales of transformation, such as Aesop’s Fables or medieval Bestiaries. In these tales humans do not metamorphose into animals. Rather, animals are given human traits with a limited and repeated symbolism. Thus, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the fox appears in many fables all over Europe with many names—Reynard, Renard, Renart, Reinard, Reinecke, Reinhardus and many other phonetic variations on the same name—but with only one distinctive trait, its cunning. Similarly, in later folk tales, the role of the fox is to outsmart its opponents and get its own way. Its capacity to deceive other animals points to the fox as the archetype of the universal trickster (Amer 10). However, as the term ‘foxy’ suggests, the fox can also connote beauty and seductiveness. The focal point of this symbolism is usually the red-haired female fox or vixen. This figure represents a mix of innocence and sexual energy that many people find alluring. The double, contradictory symbolism of the red-haired vixen as cunning yet alluring, shockingly wilful yet sexually irresistible, responds to the traditional symbolisation of women in patriarchal cultures (see Onega). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar exemplify this duplicitous symbolisation through the metaphor of the ‘charm’ attributed to women as meaning that women are both ‘charming’ and ‘charmers’ (34). As they forcibly argue, the first acceptation of the trope is associated with submissiveness and the second with agency: ‘for every glowing portrait of submissive women enshrined in domesticity, there exists an equally important negative image that embodies the sacrilegious fiendishness of what William Blake called the “Female Will”’ (Gilbert and Gubar 28).
5This second acceptation of the trope informs the metamorphosis of Mrs Tebrick in Garnett’s Lady into Fox. Although Lönngren claims that in Garnett’s novel (and also in Mrs Fox), Silvia, the wife, ‘is depicted as much-loved and highly valued by her husband’ (486), in fact Mr Tebrick overtly interprets her metamorphosis as an act of sexual betrayal:
For he asked himself also: ‘Was he not jealous?’ And looking into his heart he found that he was indeed jealous, yes, and angry too, that now he must share his vixen with wild foxes. (Garnett 70)
6Mr Tebrick’s decision to lock the vixen at home and, ignoring her bodily transformation, make her wear female clothes and maintain their common habits of eating, reading, playing cards and sleeping together, all point to the allegorical nature of the tale, or more accurately, to what Timothy Baker describes as ‘an allegory of patriarchal control’ (82). Indeed, the actions Mr Tebrick undertakes in total secrecy are prompted by social shame and his conceptualisation of marital love as possessiveness. While he tries to find all kinds of justifications for his attempts to keep the vixen at home and treat her as his wife, Mr Tebrick dreams of the time when she will return to him in human shape, sobbing and repentant, and he will pardon her crime and promise to take care of her cubs as if they were his own (Garnett 79–80). At first, Mrs Tebrick seems to share her husband’s values and expectations. After her transmogrification, she is described as feeling ashamed of her nakedness. She tries to wear her human clothes and behave with the daintiness of the lady she used to be. However, this dutiful and docile wife’s behaviour does not last for long. When her husband realises that he cannot control her animal instincts any longer, he asks Mrs Cork, her old Nanny, to stay at the house and teach her again to behave as a lady (Garnett 37–38). His decision is interpreted by the authorial narrator as the product of sheer madness as, by ignoring the stark separation of human beings and animals predicated by humanism, Mr Tebrick is running the risk of provoking his own animalisation. The narrator’s fear is expressed in the detailed description of his behaviour: ‘what was most strange of all, he had got a way of going doubled up, often almost on all fours with his hands touching the ground every now and then, particularly when he went uphill’ (Garnett 86–87). The humanist ideology endorsed by the authorial narrator and the male character is reinforced by the novel’s end, with the vixen slaughtered by the huntsmen’s hounds and the narrator reassuring the readers that Mr Tebrick ‘recovered his reason and lived to a great age’ (Garnett 91). Timothy Baker finds this ending ‘both tragic . . . and deeply comic as both husband and narrator express their confusion over Silvia’s new form’ (82). However, from a feminist perspective, the moral sustained by this allegorical ‘happy ending’ is rather disturbing, as the slaughter of the wild woman by male huntsmen puts an end to her rebellious attempt at agency and the ensuing danger that she might impose her will on her husband.
7One decade after the publication of Garnett’s Lady into Fox, Sylvia Townsend Warner offered a liberating alternative to the normative death by hunting of the wild vixen/wilful woman in her lesbian fiction Summer Will Show (1936). The protagonist, Sophia Willoughby, launches a rebellion against both heterosexuality and the class system through multiple allusions to the fox as the symbol of the sexual and social freedom she aspires to achieve (Watchman 108). As Gay Watchman notes, Sophia’s social and sexual liberation starts with her decision to go hunting: ‘The fox in Summer Will Show sneaks away from the hounds just as Sophia will free herself of the deadly constrictions of her life as an upper-class Victorian woman’ (106). According to Watchman, although her main target of attack was ‘to challenge the blatant lesbophobia of D.H. Lawrence’s novella, The Fox (1922)’ (109), Warner wrote this hunting scene ‘specifically as a satirical allusion . . . to that very different fox/hunt in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness [1928]’ (106), in which the fox is inevitably killed (108). What is more, Warner ‘had certainly read David Garnett’s whimsically misogynist fantasy, Lady Into Fox (1922)’, and she was also probably familiar with Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth (1917), ‘Garnett’s source for his lady/fox’s death scene’ (Watchman 109).
8Besides this death scene, readers can find a clear intertextual echo of Gone to Earth in Garnett’s Lady into Fox when the authorial narrator comments that Mrs Tebrick’s family, the Foxes, had ‘a half tamed fox once upon a time chained up at Tangley Hall’ (Garnett 3). While the authorial narrator’s intention may be to attribute Mrs Tebrick’s metamorphosis/disreputable behaviour to some intrinsic family feature, some form of wilderness in the family that her strict education as a lady could not erase, what it in fact conveys to readers is Garnett’s misogynistic misinterpretation of the woman-fox relationship depicted in Gone to Earth. Webb’s protagonist, Hazel Woodus, had adopted a motherless fox cub, Foxy, whom she considers her primitive self. Like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, she detests the cruelty of humans with animals and harbours anti-Darwinian feelings against the domination of the strong over the weak. Made to choose between two men that she finds fascinating, Edward Marston, the gentle country minister, and John Reddin, the hard-living, fox-hunting squire, she eventually decides to reject both:
She wanted neither. Her passion, no less intense, was for freedom, for the wood-track, for green places where soft feet scudded and eager eyes peered out and adventurous lives were lived up in the tree-tops, down in the moss . . . Whether or not in years to come she would find room in her heart for human passion, she had no room for it now. She had only room for the little creatures she befriended and for her eager, quickly growing self. For, like her mother, she had the egoism that is more selfless than most people’s altruism—the divine egoism that is genius. (Webb 91)
- 2 Interestingly, this radical separation of the human from the non-human animals is unconsciously per (...)
9As her reported speech makes clear, Hazel’s love of wildlife and her empathic concern for the vulnerable and the unfit are prompted by her perception that she shares with the untamed animals a common passion for freedom. Significantly, she describes this passion in paradoxical terms, as a selfless egotism inherited from her mother, endowed with the divine creative power of the genius. Her attachment to Foxy and wildlife in general gainsays the nineteenth-century interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution fostered by social Darwinism that would soon develop into the militant colonial, imperialist and capitalist rhetoric of the survival of the fittest, even though, in fact, as Rossini recalls, ‘The Origin of Species clearly argues that identities and differences emerge exclusively through mutation and interconnectivity between different life forms, and not through competition between individuals and species’ (253). At the same time, Hazel’s description of her passion for nature as a form of selfless egotism inherited from her mother, disrupts the discursive system of Cartesian humanism that relegates woman to the role of other in the man/woman binary opposition and undermines the exclusionary definition of ‘Man’ as the ideal of bodily perfection with a unique set of mental, discursive and spiritual values.2 Set against Garnett’s (and Lawrence’s) misogynistic representations of female agency and freedom, Mary Webb’s conflation of wildlife with female agency and free will points to Gone to Earth as an unwitty forerunner of contemporary ecofeminist and critical posthumanist fiction. As such, it constitutes a less overt but equally significant hypotext of Hall’s Mrs Fox, as the protagonist’s metamorphosis is overtly associated with her increasing recklessness about the systematic destruction of the forests by city developers near the family home.
10The antagonistic interpretations given to the topos of woman-to-fox transformation by David Garnett and D.H. Lawrence, on the one hand, and by Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mary Webb, on the other, suggest an ideological divide between early twentieth-century male and female British writers. Therefore, by admitting that Mrs Fox is loosely indebted to Garnett’s Lady into Fox, Sarah Hall is doing more than acknowledging a particular hypotext: she is situating her novella against a long, ideologically charged and complex literary tradition that readers must bear in mind when determining the moral it conveys.
11As we have seen, the duplicitous symbolisation of vixen in heteropatriarchal societies as cunning and treacherous underlies Garnett’s representation of his female protagonist. The transformation of Mrs Tebrick into a fox is presented by the authorial narrator as the result of an intrinsic wildness running in her ancient family—her maiden name was Fox (Garnett 2)—that not even the best education could mitigate. In Hall’s novella, the husband’s attribution of this symbolisation to his transformed wife is also present, though less overt, as the narrator does not make authorial comments. In his analysis of Mrs Fox, Timothy Baker states that ‘Hall makes no acknowledgement of Garnett’s text in any of the three published versions of the story’, and that ‘here the husband is unnamed’ (84). However, at the end of the novella, Mrs Fox is identified as ‘Sophia Garnett’ (Hall 2019, 34), so we must assume that her husband’s family name is Garnett. This association is simultaneously complicated by the fact that Mrs Fox’s given name is Sophia (Hall 2019, 13), not Silvia (Garnett 1922, 2), which may be interpreted as a veiled allusion to Sophia Willoughby, the protagonist of Warner’s Summer Will Show (1936). After witnessing her change into a fox, the first thing that comes to the mind of Sophia Garnett’s husband is the well-worn human-to-animal literary topos: ‘Transmogrification. Fables’ (Hall 2019, 20). Then, he embarks on a search for medical and literary descriptions of the puzzling phenomenon:
He returns home with medical texts and a slender yellow volume from the twenties. There is little correlation to myth. He is no thwarted lover. Most upsetting is the repetition of an aspect: an act of will. (Hall 2019, 21; emphases added)
- 3 For a nuanced definition of critical posthumanism and new materialism and their connections, see Ca (...)
12These thoughts constitute the core around which the novella develops. The little yellow volume from the twenties is presumably David Garnett’s Lady into Fox, as Baker suggests (87). And although, unlike Mr Tebrick, Sophia’s husband is convinced that his wife has not been unfaithful to him, he shares his worry that his wife’s metamorphosis might have been caused by an act of free will. Unable to accept this possibility, he prefers to think that she is mad (Hall 2019, 20). He goes to the library and ‘researches the world of madness’ (20). Then, having to decide if it is ‘he or she who is lost’ (20), he reassures himself that he ‘can avail himself of understanding, reason, definition’ (20). His conception of subjectivity responds to the humanist self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female dialectic in which Man provides the image of a human subject endowed with consciousness, universal rationality and self-regulating ethical behaviour, and woman is defined as its negative and specular counterpart. His handling of the situation echoes that of Mr Tebrick and, we may add, of Victorian and early twentieth-century British society at large, confronted with female hysteria. At the same time, the fact that his wife’s given name is Sophia (‘wisdom’) cautions readers that her act of free will might be wiser and more liberating than her husband is ready to admit. The question that remains to be answered is whether Hall’s novella is simply an extraordinarily succinct and beautiful rewriting of the woman-to-fox heteropatriarchal topos, or is to be set, instead, alongside the counter-discursive line initiated by Mary Webb in Gone to Earth and continued by Angela Carter and later short-story writers as an example of the postfeminist politics of choice and agency theorised by Young, in this case, through the representation of the female body from the combined perspectives of new materialist and critical posthumanism.3
13In Willful Subjects (2014), Sara Ahmed quotes Friedrich Nietzsche’s contention, in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), that free will is essential for the definition of the subject and that it ‘has been invented [by theologians] for the purpose of punishment, that is, of finding guilty (64)’ (Ahmed 7). As Ahmed observes, ‘[n]ot only does the will allow actions to be referred back to a subject, but it is through the will that the subject is unified as an entity’ (7). Therefore,
after Nietzsche, we might need to track how this subject is held to account by being given a will. It is this model of the will that allows a philosophical idea to be translated into a social or cultural diagnostics. The will is transformed in contemporary culture into ‘willpower’, into something that a responsible and moral subject must develop or strengthen. And when social problems are narrated as problems of will, they become a consequence of the failure of individuals to will themselves out of situations in which they find themselves. (Ahmed 7)
14From the humanist perspective denounced by Nietzsche, which runs from St Augustine to René Descartes, John Locke and, we may add, William Blake, the will is defined pejoratively as what can lead subjects away from the good life: ‘to leave the path of happiness is to be willing wrong, or going the wrong way’ (Ahmed 8). This association of free will with error and evil, which underlies, as we have seen, the interpretation of Mrs Tebrick’s metamorphosis by her husband, her Nanny and even the authorial narrator in Garnett’s Lady into Fox, may be said to inform heteropatriarchal representations of the lady-to-fox topos in general as well as lesbophobic ones like Lawrence’s The Fox.
15However, the free will can be interpreted not only as an exclusive faculty of the human subject separated from the world, but also, as Ahmed argues, drawing on Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), as the capacity of matter itself to ‘swerve’ or deviate from its straight trajectory when the atoms are travelling down through empty space, ‘so as to originate new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect’ (Ahmed 10). From this new materialist perspective, free will acquires a positive charge, as it becomes ‘the capacity or potential to enact a ‘no’, the potential not to be determined from without, by an external force’ (Ahmed 10); or, as Teresa Brennan puts it, ‘the ability not to go with the flow’ (2004, 56)’ (quoted in Ahmed 10). The capacity of the free will to open up infinite possibilities, which Ahmed develops into a theory of queer subjectivity, can be easily applied to Sophia Willoughby’s double rebellion against compulsory heterosexuality and the class system in Summer Will Show. But it is more difficult to establish in the case of her namesake in Hall’s novella, not only because Sophia Garnett is heterosexual and belongs in a comfortable professional class, but also and most importantly because the vision readers have of her is filtered through the perspective of her husband, who is less reliable than he appears at first sight. Although he discards the possibility that Sophia’s metamorphosis might be the bodily manifestation of an act of sexual betrayal, he is unable to realise, when she starts throwing up in the mornings, that her body is changing because she is pregnant. Instead, he thinks that she has got the flu, or worse, that she will soon waste with cancer (Hall 2019, 9). His self-centredness and lack of attentive care is made manifest when he ponders on the dreadful effect Sophia’s imagined disease will have on him, for he thinks of her as a treasured possession and imagines how ‘dire’ it will be to outlive her and how ‘wounded’ he will be by the memory of her loss (Hall 2019, 9). Although his forebodings are contradicted by the sight of Sophia’s energetic and healthy body, he does not dare to ask her what is wrong with her (Hall 2019, 9). What is more, the same lack of attention and self-absorbing egocentrism inform his conception of love. At the beginning of the novella, when Sophia arrives home after work, he thinks, while bending to kiss her: ‘Such simple pleasure; she is his to kiss’ (Hall 2019, 2; emphasis added); and when, after her transformation, she takes him to the forest and shows him her cubs, he knows that they ‘are, they must be, his’ (Hall 2019, 31; emphasis added). The importance he gives to ‘his’ ownership of wife and cubs echoes the marital possessiveness of Mr Tebrick. For all the differences of time, place and education, the two husbands concur that women’s docility and the sex drive are key components of social control. In agreement with this, the relationship imposed on Sophia by her husband is exclusively sexual and even sexist, with no tinge of loving care or affect. He makes a point of having sex every night, and during the act, ‘[h]e is strung between immense climactic pleasure and delay’. But ‘[w]hen he cannot hold back any longer’ and realises that ‘[s]he does not come’, he dismisses the disturbing thought that he may have failed to satisfy his wife by reassuring himself that ‘she is ardent’ (Hall 2019, 6–7). The passion he feels for her is strictly corporeal. He believes that the trick for good sex is to remain detached (Hall 2019, 2), and enjoys watching her move and touching her naked body. While Sophia was still a woman, he described her bodily odour as ‘a scent of corrupted rose’ (Hall 2019, 1) and, after she became a fox, as the perfume of ‘a dirty rose’ (Hall 2019, 13), both evocations of the dishonest facet of woman in the lily/rose Victorian archetype, which enhance the sexist character of his relation to his wife. This would explain why what makes him adore her is her detachment, the fact that ‘she makes no romantic claims, does not require reassurance’ (Hall 2019, 3). His self-centredness and lack of affect and attention become blatant when he admits that her withholding may have to do with some traumatic event during her childhood (Hall 2019, 3). The narrator summarises the difference between his satisfaction with their married life and her sense of lack in neat metaphoric terms: after having sex, he falls into a ‘blissful, dreamless’ sleep (Hall 2019, 2), while she dreams ‘of forests, dark corridors and burrows, roots and earth’ (Hall 2019, 4). While from the Freudian perspective endorsed by patriarchal humanism, readers could interpret Sophia’s recurrent dream of escaping to the forests as a perverse desire to blur the boundaries between domesticity and wildlife and between normative heterosexuality and bestiality, from a new materialist perspective it would become a wish-fulfilment dream expressing Sophia’s vibrant corporal matter enacting a ‘no’ to her married life and expressing its capacity to swerve from the straight trajectory devised for her by her possessive and inattentive husband. From this perspective, Sophia’s metamorphosis would respond to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming animal’, that is, the sudden incitement of our organs to escape from the constraining social norms and function like animals:
Sexuality proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of the man and the becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles. There is no need for bestialism in this. . . . Becomings-animal are basically of another power, since their reality resides not in an animal one imitates or to which one corresponds but in themselves, in that which suddenly sweeps us up and makes us become—a proximity, an indiscernibility that extracts a shared element from the animal far more effectively than any domestication, utilization, or imitation could: ‘the Beast’. (Deleuze and Guattari 278–279; original emphasis)
- 4 This part of the story has a clear autobiographical component. To Vanessa Thorpe’s remark that ‘her (...)
16This notion of becoming animal as a sudden bodily incitement underlies Sophia’s transmogrification. The couple lives in one of the modern houses, newly built ‘along the edgeland, in the lesser countryside—what once was heath’ (Hall 2019, 4). Her change takes place on an autumn evening as she is walking with her husband along the path separating the surviving forest trees at the edge of the heath from the newly planted, tiny trees on the urban side and the bulldozers that are extending the road system towards the city (Hall 2019, 8–9). Her transformation is triggered by the sudden impulse to hunt a jay as it flaps across the thicket and lands on the ground. She starts running towards it, first on two legs, then on four, losing her shoes and clothes and becoming smaller and smaller as she runs, until her red hair metamorphoses into red fur, and her body loosens, shedding all vestiges of humanity (Hall 2019, 11). While her husband is anguished not only about the possibility of dogs scenting and hunting her, as was Mr Tebrick, but also about the developers’ machinery making her habitat disappear (Hall 2019, 25), Sophia is perfectly at home in the wilderness. Her adaptation to the environment brings to mind Stacy Alaimo’s notion of ‘trans-corporeality’: the ‘recognition that one’s bodily substance is vitally connected to the broader environment’ (Hall 2019, 63). In winter, she gives birth to her four cubs in the thick of the forest and takes care of them alone, without the help of a male fox.4 Then she reappears in early spring (Hall 2019, 28), thinner and her belly swollen (30), to show him her den. When he looks at the ‘brilliant creature’ waiting for him to follow her to the forest, the husband is struck by her lack of fear: ‘No. She turns fully and hoists the tail around beside her like a flaming sceptre’ (Hall 2019, 12). The phallic connotations of her flaming tail are clear, sending to her worried husband the disturbing message that she is now a ‘phallic mother’, the powerful and wilful castrating mother of primitive male fears (Campbell 73). Unable to process the ‘shock’ of her powerful poise and self-assurance, he again resorts to denial, convincing himself that his wife is behaving ‘as a dog would, returning to its master’ (Hall 2019, 12). This reassuring thought is gainsaid, however, by his own realisation that, after her metamorphosis, Sophia seems to have recovered her health, as if ‘only now, after her walk and purging of the disease of being human, she is ready for breakfast’ (15; emphasis added).
17From a new materialist perspective, Sophia’s becoming animal may be interpreted as a swerve of her vibrant corporal matter away from submissive domesticity and sexual objectification and towards the fulfilment of an intimate interconnection with the environment that is crucial for the configuration of her subjectivity (Alaimo 20). From a more general posthumanist perspective, her metamorphosis becomes a plea against the definition of bios—‘the form or way of living particular to an individual or a group’—as categorically distinct from zoē, ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)’ (Agamben 1). Both perspectives share a common postfeminist agenda as they seek to deconstruct the humanist man/woman oppositional binary and the notion of species supremacy enhanced by social Darwinism, colonialism, imperialism and the reckless profit-making ideology of capitalism that will reach a climax in the fourth industrial revolution. By denying the separation of man and woman, bios and zoē, organic and inorganic matter, and affirming instead the inextricable connectedness, interdependence and mutability of all forms of vibrant matter, Sarah Hall is asking readers to rethink the ages-long nature/culture oppositional binary from a liberating and fulfilling, imaginative perspective. While at the end of Garnett’s Lady into Fox, Mr Tebrick is left recovering his senses after the slaughter of his wilful wife, Hall leaves Sophia’s husband longing for her return. He is still sexually attracted to her body, as he imagines her ‘stepping across the room, bare, and damp from the shower’ (Hall 2019, 36); and he continues to see her metamorphosis as an act of free will that he is ready to ‘forgive’. But he also admits that it is the loss of ‘the fox, in her blaze, her magnificence’ that he would find ‘unendurable’ for, ‘how could life mean anything without his unbelonging wife?’ (Hall 2019, 36). This contradictory pull between his desire to recover his sexy and docile wife and accept the more disturbing free and agential version of her shows the husband’s subjecthood still caught in the duplicitous patriarchal symbolisation of women as charming and charmers, fascinating yet cunning and castrating, making readers wonder whether he will ever realise the life-enhancing value of the family model Sophia is asking him to share with her, and learn at last to distinguish between true love and submission, attentive care and possessiveness.
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