1On its surface, The Fox is a narrative of queer failure: two women, Ellen March and Jill Banford, run an unproductive farm together. The arrival of Henry, a young soldier returning from Canada, who proposes to March and kills Banford, means that the women’s post-war lifestyle is abruptly ended, and their same-sex companionship exchanged in favour of a conventional marriage. Because of this plotline, we might choose to read the text as showing heterosexual coupledom trumping an experimental but sterile lesbian domesticity. What The Fox presents then, seemingly, is a putting to rights of war-induced wrongs, as March – who had been encouraged to become “the man about the place” whilst the male population had been decimated by conscription – instead takes on a housewifely, and not husbandly, role. There is an issue with this surface-level happily ever after, however: there is no home. The novella’s conclusion unsettles because although it ends with marriage, March and Henry’s shared life in a new home is untried, untested, and ultimately unknown. Lawrence leaves them on the dockside, waiting for their life to begin, with the suggestion that it may well end up a disappointment: “I can’t tell. I can’t tell what it will be like over there” (F 71), March laments. The novella cannot be read as a straightforward queer failure and heteronormative success, I argue, because of this absence of home. Instead, one queer relationship is exchanged for another, and both are besieged by ambivalence and inadequacies.
2My claim is that in this novella, Lawrence ties manhood to domesticity: the home confers and sustains an idealised masculinity. It is an identity that depends on the possession of a home, by which I understand a domestic space for the couple to share, and it is not exclusive to his male characters. March and Henry are both masculine, but March’s is legible both inside and out, making her more of a man – and a husband – than Henry, whose masculinity is proven only in the non-domestic spaces. I will firstly engage with the novella, dividing its narrative into two spaces: the domestic inside and the non-domestic, or wild, outside, and equating the first with Banford and the second with Henry, whilst March as a masculine woman is (initially, at least,) able to straddle both. Divorced from her domestic masculinity and instead contained within femininity as Henry’s wife by the novella’s conclusion, I posit that the marriage between March and Henry is doomed to failure as neither can fulfil the role of husband. I will then turn to the 1967 film adaptation, arguing that it presents a notion of manhood which is no longer marked by the male body but by other proofs of masculinity which balance the domestic and the non-domestic. In my analysis, I explore how the film’s visual strategies establish March as a serious rival for Paul, (as he is renamed from the text,) whose lack of domestic traits and corresponding reliance on maleness, or markers of maleness, instead of manhood means he cannot hope to usurp her role as husband.
3Queer readings of Lawrence have historically been underrepresented, even in criticism addressing The Fox which portrays a quasi-marriage between two women. Hugh Stevens describes the queerness of Lawrence’s work in the recent Edinburgh Companion to D.H. Lawrence and the Arts: “We might borrow a formulation from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and characterise [Lawrence’s] writing as ‘kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic’ (1993: 15), or kinda damned, kinda blessed, kinda kinky, kinda vanilla, kinda queer, kinda normal” (Stephens 122). This ambiguity is hardly a new concept to scholars of Lawrence, and indeed my own work which considers the queerness in his writing also hinges on the ambivalences that Stevens presents here. In light of this ambiguity, permeability, and changeability central to Lawrence’s work, I want to make it clear that I do not wish to set up a dichotomy between the queer domestic and a heterosexual lack of domesticity. In fact, I’d like to suggest that the Henry/March match is as equally queer as the relationship between Banford and March – “kinda queer kinda normal” is an appropriate way of navigating both relationships, as their balancing of masculinity, femininity, manhood, and womanhood will show.
4Lawrence’s relationship to domesticity in his own life might be described as “kinda queer kinda normal” as his pleasure in home-making illustrates a defiance of heteronormative gender roles in the early decades of the twentieth century. In his marriage with Frieda, Lawrence took on the majority of domestic tasks, enjoying washing-up, cooking, and mending; during a brief Christmas time visit in 1916, for example, Vere Collins described how “[w]hile with us he cooked an omelette; furbished a hat of his wife; examined a Dutch cupboard my wife had recently bought, and said what its period was; came out into the garden and gave me hints on transplanting cabbages” (Nehls i 470). Unlike Woolf, who needed a room of her own in which to write, Lawrence was able to draft in the central hub of the home, surrounded by noise and people. The first version of The Fox was finished in December 1918, inspired by cousins Cecily Lambert and Violet Monk in Hermitage village where the Lawrences lived on-and-off between 1917 and 1919. This was a period in time where Lawrence was adamant he needed to escape Europe, and had intentions of travelling to America to discover a new place where he could settle. “How many times have I packed our miserable boxes! and when will they ever come to rest” he lamented in April 1919 (L iii 351). The story was then redrafted in Taormina in November 1921 – given “a long tail” (L iv 126) – during a period of immense productivity, Lawrence having received an invitation from Mabel Dodge Luhan to come and live in Taos. The Fox is then, perhaps, reflective of Lawrence’s own lived experience: showing a domestic partnership that does not conform to binary roles of male husband/female wife and their respective duties, and both written and reworked at a time when he was lacking in settled domestic space.
- 1 Strictly speaking, the “butch/femme” conception of same-sex relationships dates from the 1950s, but (...)
- 2 See Jen Manion’s Female Husbands: A Trans History (2020) which describes a dozen lives of people fr (...)
- 3 Inversion – a theory of homosexuality – was described by turn of the century sexologists as a man’s (...)
5The novella represents a refutation of these simplistic and binaristic conceptions of marriage, elicited perhaps in part by the upheaval of Lawrence’s sense of security and stability in a home. The same-sex relationship that he writes between the women corresponds to a butch-femme structure: March plays the masculine husband role to Banford’s housewife, and dresses in a male labourer’s clothing so that “she looked almost like some graceful, loose-balanced young man” (F 8).1 Lawrence is sure to highlight her womanhood, however, stating: “But her face was not a man’s face, ever” (F 8). March is not a female husband, in the same mould as several high profile media cases in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries where individuals born female passed as men, but she is always (and pointedly so, as can be seen above in Lawrence’s narrative,) a woman.2 In contrast with the theory of inversion popularised in the first decades of the 1900s by Havelock Ellis and Richard Krafft-Ebing, and showcased by Radclyffe Hall’s protagonist Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness (1929), March does not want to change her sex.3 What makes her body masculine is her confidence and ease in her outdoor clothing and her physical role on the farm – at no stage is she a man, but always a masculine woman. Banford performs a complementary role, as she keeps the home and lays on suppers. Although sharing their womanhood, the relationship between the women is constructed through their difference: they complement each other as masculine and feminine, and perform the respective duties of these gendered markers, but are nevertheless both women.
6What we see between Henry and March, unlike the complementarity of the women, is a sameness that leads to competition and erotic tension (at least on Henry’s part). To Banford, as a feminine woman, Henry is no threat: “she was no more afraid of him than if he were her own younger brother. He was such a boy” (F 16). To March, however, he is a rival, posing the questions “of a farm youth: acute, practical, a little mocking” (F 17), which she rebuts; “there won’t be any demand for women land-workers now the war’s over” he states, but March replies, “Oh, we’ll see. We shall hold on a bit longer yet” (F 17). This initial bout is followed up by an effort to disparage March not only as a physical labourer outside on the farm, but also as a husband within the bounds of the farmhouse: “There wants a man about the place” (F 17) he says. If she is not sufficiently a man, though, in Henry’s eyes, she is also not a woman. Banford holds no interest for him, but he is drawn to March in her men’s clothing; Lawrence tells us that “Her figure, like a graceful young man’s, piqued him” (F 23). And later when she puts on a dress, he reacts thus: “if she had suddenly grown a moustache he could not have been more surprised” (F 48). Her masculinity, which is equated to manhood in his imagining of her sprouting facial hair, is more real and visible to him than her womanhood – and it is this that allows him to desire her. There is no distinction drawn between masculinity and manhood in Henry’s mind: March can be both masculine and a man, whilst also a woman, as Henry’s wish to marry her attests.
- 4 Lesbianism was never criminalised in English law, unlike male homosexuality, meaning it represented (...)
7Both pairings, then, show the characteristic Lawrencian ambiguity – sameness and difference co-existing. The distinction to be highlighted between these relationships, therefore, is not masculine or feminine, same-sex or opposite-sex, but the domestic and the non-domestic, and how this shapes each queer relationship. To illustrate this dichotomy, I will explain the spatial configuration of the novel, which is divided between the domestic, human space inside the farmhouse, and the wild, animal outside of the farm’s land and its outbuildings. The inside space is headed by the bedroom upstairs that the two women share, and which is never described. The farmhouse possesses an unseen sexuality which denies the presence of men and the male gaze – even that of its author.4 On the other hand, the outside space, which encompasses the outbuildings of the farm and the land which surrounds them, accommodates animals both domesticated and wild. It is the fox’s domain and later becomes Henry’s; he, though attempting to traverse the line between wild and domesticated, is as equally incapable of domestication as the fox, as will be demonstrated later. The outside is a masculine realm of violence, power, and – strikingly similarly to the upstairs bedroom – mystery and secrecy in which the fox can hide. There is an ambiguity or invisibility in both spaces, perhaps pointing towards their queerness – they are spaces which resist comprehension.
8I will map the evolution of March’s identity through her location in these spaces, as she begins comprehensibly as a husband inside and outside, before becoming an emasculated figure outdoors upon Henry’s assertion of his superior wild masculinity. Their competition and his victory, in killing the fox, means that she undergoes a feminisation which begins outside, and then, once he persuades her to marry him, bleeds into the domestic indoor space. I begin then, with an evaluation of March as the husband to Banford’s wife, who fulfils a man’s role indoors and outdoors. Perhaps revelatory of an unconscious bias against homosexuality, critics have interpreted the relationship between March and Banford as a failure from the off. In my reading, I offer a more optimistic view supported by Lawrence’s text, which I understand as rejecting heteronormative values rather than lamenting their absence.
9Criticism of The Fox has lighted on the discomfort the women feel towards the farm animals’ birth-giving, understanding pregnancy as an essentialist female quality that intimidates them, since they are women not sexually active with men. Judith Ruderman has argued that: “Combined with her assumption of masculine duties on the farm, and her aversion to breeding animals, March’s personality traits reveal her overall ambivalence toward the female role” (Ruderman 82). March is indeed uneasy with birth-giving, but not because she is ill at ease with being female. I suggest it is rather that she baulks at heteronormative imperatives dictating the necessity of procreation, which translates into an unwillingness to employ animals’ bodies for this purpose. Lawrence describes how Banford and March uphold a different form of creativity, as a lesbian couple: the pair “disbelieved in living for work alone” (F 8) and instead want to read, paint, and do carpentry, showcasing alternative modes of production which do not hinge on the essential female body. It is, in light of their work ethic, a positive sterility, and one which indeed does not lend itself to futurity. Whilst marriage is vowed until death do us part, March’s description of her relationship with Banford is as “a life together” but one which she acknowledges that “if it can’t last forever, it is a life while it does last. And it might last as long as either of us lives. Who knows how long we’ve got to live?” (F 57). Showcased here is a refusal of what Lee Edelman has called reproductive futurism: the assumption that childrearing, and one’s own biological legacy, is humanity’s greatest goal. Having and protecting children is “a value so unquestioned” (Edelman 2), according to Edelman, because the imagined symbol of the Child represents the future and progress. That Lawrence chooses farm animals as the symbol of futurity here points to his satirical outlook. March and Banford’s failure to breed their cattle and chickens is not to be lamented, but acknowledged as an alternative set of priorities – representative, in fact, of an ethical standpoint close to Lawrence’s own, and therefore illustrative of solidarity with the women’s mode of creative productivity rather than a dismissal of sterility.
10March and Banford’s relationship is not imitative of heterosexual couplehood, but does, as I claimed earlier, correspond to a traditional butch-femme dynamic, which prioritises chivalry, etiquette, respect and complementarity between partners. In her seminal writing on butch identity, Gayle Rubin speaks to the flexibility of butchness:
There are at least as many ways to be butch as there are ways for men to be masculine; actually, there are more ways to be butch, because when women appropriate masculine styles the element of travesty produces new significance and meaning. Butches adopt and transmute the many available codes of masculinity (Rubin 474).
11Readers are told that March does four fifths of the work, and we can see her particular gentlemanly care on market day when Banford, coming laden from the car with parcels, receives help from March while Henry watches, motionless: “Striding downhill at a great pace, and even running a few steps now and then, in her great solicitude and desire to come to the rescue of the little Banford […] And March strode up and took all the parcels except a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums” (F 45). Her masculinity is predicated on caregiving and solicitude, in contrast with Henry’s hunterly, competitive, and self-serving masculinity. Again, as with her appearance, March’s masculine behaviour confers manhood, as she “manfully” (F 46) climbs over the fence with the packages, while Henry slinks out of sight, juvenile and animal-like: “[o]n the other side of the edge the boy followed in the dusk, at some little distance” (F 47, my emphasis).
12In contrast with her marriage to Henry, where she is called upon to give up all responsibility and allow herself to be absorbed into her husband, as a passive non-loving being “to be submerged under the surface of love” (F 67), with Banford March exerts herself in love: “in her own small way, she had felt herself responsible for the well-being of the world. And this had been her great stimulant, this grand feeling that, in her own small sphere, she was responsible for the well-being of the world” (F 68). The domestic may be constraining, but it is also her motivation. March and Banford strive together to make each other happy although it is exhausting and impossible, as sameness competes with sameness. “If [Banford] had married a man it would have been just the same” (F 68), March thinks, highlighting how it is a trait of being a woman, and not unique to this same-sex relationship. Although seemingly opposite in their roles as provider and homemaker, butch and femme, they are still both women and love as women do: for the benefit of the other and in active terms trying to build a space – a home – together.
13We see similar tensions of striving and competition in March and Henry’s relationship. But instead of their sameness being down to a desire to provide within the home, it materialises in rivalry outside of domestic spaces. Henry’s realm is the outdoors, as can be gleaned from his challenging of March on her capabilities as a labourer. This form of non-domestic masculinity makes him less of a man and more of an animal, however, in contrast with March’s chivalric domestic masculinity. “You might as well be a beast yourself” (F 17) says March, to only work and not value the space of the home. Indeed, his presence in the farmhouse is that of an animal: he “sent a faint but distinct odour into the room, indefinable, but something like a wild creature” (F 18), which likewise begins to bring out the animalistic in March, who becomes “still and soft in her corner like a passive creature in its cave” (F 18). Just like Banford has her safe space upstairs in the house, Henry retreats outside when under threat: he can only ask March to marry him outside at the lumber pile, and when Banford dismisses the match he “stalk[s] out into the fields with the gun” (F 36) and regains March from the bedroom she shares with Banford by shooting the fox. March alone straddles the separate spaces, revelling in her ability to be comprehensible in both: “March seemed to flourish in this atmosphere. She seemed to sit between the two antagonists with a little wicked smile on her face, enjoying herself” (F 36). The competition in this moment is between Banford and Henry, who seek to draw her exclusively into their respective spaces.
14The reason the relationship between March and Henry cannot flourish is that they are too similar: one must be sublimated to the other’s masculine power, and once Henry kills the fox, he is proven the victor and March is correlatively emasculated. Kingsley Widmer offered a blinkered view on the relationships in The Fox in 1962, informed by a reductive sexual binarism. “In Lawrence’s fictions,” he wrote, “homosexual relations defeat hope and love, perhaps because of a narcissism that lacks the creativeness of genuine polarity” (Widmer 59). This conceptualisation is of note, however, in that it applies more appropriately to the opposite-sex relationship. “Narcissism,” I suggest, is a potentially fruitful way of reading the connection between March and Henry, as they vie for the same dominant spot, Henry desiring her for the way she looks, acts, and possesses a wife and home. She is the man he wants to be. March and Banford, with their butch-femme relationship, present more of this “genuine polarity” Widmer pinpoints as necessary to a functional relationship than March and Henry. He is correct, however, in identifying the fox as “profoundly necessary to self-realization,” and a “totemic image” (Widmer 59), but it is one which he assigns exclusively to Henry, overlooking the kinship Lawrence also conjures between March and the fox.
15The characters’ battle with the fox represents the violent struggle to locate oneself in a hierarchy – a hierarchy in which the most masculine succeeds through domination of the other competitors. Henry, March, and the fox are all rivals because of their assertion of masculinity in the outdoor space of the farm: it is an anti-domestic queer space, where violence, masculinity, and eroticism are all tied up together. Henry is not only aligned with the fox by the narrative, but explicitly becomes this animal. This transformation occurs firstly in March’s mind; in a particularly significant moment Henry turns down the light, and his human body disappears to be replaced by “a quick brushing kiss,” (“brush” pointedly suggestive of the fox’s tail,) which elicits a “queer little cry” from March (F 33). The transformation then takes place in Henry’s own mind, when hunting the fox allows him to enter the consciousness of his target and “smell the hot, sickly, rich smell of live chickens on the cold air” (F 39).
16Henry is not the only one aligned with the fox, as March’s ongoing obsession with the fox reveals the animal as an aspirational symbol – one on which she can model her masculinity. Already proficient as a husband in the domestic space, the fox challenges March to defend her territory and prove herself outside of the home. Once it is killed by Henry, the fox’s dead body comes to represent the impossibility of straddling both the domestic and the wild and maintaining them equally. In death, the fox’s head “reminded [March] of a spoon or a spatula” (F 41), and this image of the domestic is juxtaposed impossibly with its “marvellous white teeth beneath […] to bite and bite the blood” (F 41). Here, we can read the dead fox as March – unable to be both a husband to Banford inside the house and defend her territory from Henry outside. In her dream, she imagines Banford in a coffin and places the fox-skin with her: “And so she folded the brush of the fox, and laid her darling Jill’s head on this, and she brought round the skin of the fox and laid it on the top of her body, so that it seemed to make a whole ruddy, fiery coverlet, and she cried and cried and woke to find the tears streaming down her face.” (F 40-41) March mourns herself in this dream: the loss of her relationship with Banford and the husbandly identity it allowed her to have.
17It may be an impossible marriage between March and Banford, legally as well as psychologically in terms of their “striving” together, but so too is the relationship between March and Henry – symbolised by Lawrence’s denying them a home. Ruderman suggests that: “Lawrence may have chosen the name Henry for his character because the name comes from the Teutonic meaning ‘ruler of an enclosure, or private property.’” (Ruderman 86) If so, it is an ironic name as Henry’s looked-for domesticity – the home which will allow him to be a man – is attainable only through March. Having been his grandfather’s farm, Henry asserts “it’s my own home, in a way” (F 19) in an attempt to enforce a patrilineal passing on of property, but he needs legitimacy in the domestic sphere for his manhood to count. He is on the outside looking in, only able to ask March to marry him outside at a remove from the home, and later on banished from the farmhouse by Banford when March is reinstated as her husband instead of Henry’s fiancée. Banford issues an ultimatum that would expel the pair from the home if they were to be married: “No Nellie, if you were to do such a thing as to marry him, you could never stop here. I couldn’t, I couldn’t live in the same house with him” (F 37), and after he announces their engagement Henry can sit only in the dining room because “Banford wouldn’t have him in her sitting-room anymore” (F 42). The domestic space is reserved for a husband, and Henry’s ambitions of becoming such are unconvincing. His hopes for a home are disregarded: when he asks “couldn’t she stay on here if she were married?” Banford replies, “this is no place for a married couple. There’s not enough work to keep a man going, for one thing […] You must have some idea what you are going to do, if you ask a woman to marry you. Unless it’s all a hoax” (F 43). Here, it is the heterosexual engagement and “married couple” which are positioned as a “hoax” while the undefined same-sex relationship is suited to and located within the desired farmhouse.
- 5 Linguistically, Henry “felt” himself “a man” when March appears in her dress (F 49), but the narrat (...)
18This conclusion to the novella makes it clear that it is the possession of a home which makes one a man. Uprooted from the earth and looking “away to the sea’s horizon, as if it were not real” (F 71) they wait for a boat to Canada where, Henry hopes, “he would have all his own life as a young man and a male, and she would have all her own life as a woman and a female. There would be no more of this awful straining” (F 70). The “straining” may refer to March’s effort to provide for Banford in her masculine role, but I think, too, it has been Henry’s straining to also perform the same masculine role – the hunter, the provider, and ultimately the husband – that March has been. The distinction made between being a man and being a male emphasises this disconnect. Henry is repeatedly the boy, the youth, and not the man, in Lawrence’s language, and although he possesses the wild masculinity of the fox, without domestic masculinity Henry lacks the appropriate tools to be a man.5
19The film adaptation of 1967 also supports my claim that the home makes one a man where competitive ploys to assert one’s masculinity cannot. In the following section, I analyse how focus can be moved away from the sexed body in this adaptation and instead alternative proofs of gender are foregrounded. Maleness does not signify manhood; instead, bodies are recoded and retooled in such a way that direct correspondence between sex and gender is disrupted. An example of this comes from C. Jacob Hale’s theorisation of sex without sexed bodies in BDSM culture. He describes how the genitals are renamed, or sexual activity is reoriented around other body parts, as a way of escaping restrictive or triggering heteronormative structures and understandings of sexuality. He writes how “Through leatherdyke SM practice, I was able to disrupt the dominant cultural meanings of my genitals and to reconfigure those meanings. There was already precedence for such deterritorialization and reterritorialization [in these queer communities]” (Hale 230). Sex being reconfigured in this way allows for change in one’s lived experience more generally, not only through explicit sexual contact. Hale’s use of “territorial” is also pertinent here, as it implies a sense of being at home (or not) within one’s own body, and thereby details strategies for taking possession of an unruly body and its contexts. Hale’s reorientation towards different body parts speaks to my interpretation of queer gender at work in The Fox: where March and Henry’s masculinities are signified by actions and symbols, reoriented in the queer space of the farm and its surroundings from their male and female bodies. The ability “to change our embodiments without changing our bodies” (Hale 230) may be a transcendent benefit in Hale’s experience, but in The Fox the effect is more ambiguous. In this queer space, March is freed from the patriarchal limitations imposed upon the female body while Henry, although male bodied, is no longer guaranteed his place atop the gendered hierarchy as a man.
20March, played by Anne Heywood, appears from the first scene as a strong, silent (and long-suffering) type to Sandy Dennis’s gushing and petulant little woman: a husband and wife trope in line with 1950s and 60s gender norms. She sports a cropped pageboy style haircut, in contrast with Banford’s bouncy blonde blowout, props her feet on the table, and boyishly scoffs muffins (in a euphemistically rife gesture) hot out of the oven. Banford then offers to rub her back, calling her “March” instead of her forename Ellen, while Banford herself is Jill. Rubin comments that butch is “a category of lesbian gender that is constituted through the deployment and manipulation of masculine gender codes and symbols” (Rubin 472), and her depiction of masculinity as a “lesbian gender” begins to separate masculinity from the male body, and underscores my reading of March as a butch husband.
21There are several scenes of self-reflection which allow the retooling of bodies, as the film follows March’s discovery of lesbian sexuality through her lesbian gender. This begins with an archetypal mirror scene where March looks at her reflection in a condensation-obscured mirror, firstly considering her face and then her naked breasts. The camera captures three different versions of her face and torso: a multiplicity reflecting the variety of selves and identities she can lay claim to as part of Rubin’s “lesbian gender.” In this scene, she moisturises her body, running her hands over her legs in a practical fashion before the intention shifts to a more intimate, erotic one. It becomes explicitly masturbatory, but in order for March to touch herself, she must turn off the light and move away from the mirror, putting her back to the camera’s lens. Here, arousal from looking at a female body is refused. To touch herself is not a voyeuristic pleasure, but the very opposite. The sight of her own body in the mirror is dismissed as a sexual object: she will not indulge in a pleasure which objectifies a woman’s body, only masturbating herself once her body is divorced from its perception as female by her masculinised gaze.
22The next day, March’s self-reflection continues. Outside trekking through the snow, she is fully dressed in masculine clothing which disguises her body, but coming upon a stream she stops to gaze into the water and examine the shifting, rippling image which looks back. Removing her hat, she tries to fix her hair almost coquettishly before unfastening her coat and bringing her hands up to cup her breasts. After the masturbatory scene of the night before, she comes to engage with her body afresh, wondering perhaps if its meaning alters through clothing or behaviour. The scene is abruptly interrupted by the fox, who has been watching her as she watches herself. This triggers a crisis for March, as her female body is made visible. Denied earlier in the dark of her bathroom, she is confronted with a set of eyes which represent a masculine gaze and make her perceivable as a woman. She suffers a blow to her subjecthood, signalled by dissonant chimes in the non-diegetic soundtrack, as her own masculine perspective, represented by the fox, encounters her female body. Her body must present a certain set of meanings which she had hitherto denied.
23It is erotic contact with Banford which heals March’s shattered sense of self, and restores Rubin’s “lesbian gender.” In comparison with the novella where physical intimacy between the pair is absent from the text, and their bedroom never seen but only overheard by Henry, the film presents a different interpretation of their relationship. Although initially non-sexual, an underlying erotic tension between the women develops into a realisation that their relationship has not been purely platonic, at which point the pair share a kiss. In several scenes before Paul’s arrival, sexual contact goes unresolved. The backrub that Banford offers downstairs must be satisfied upstairs through masturbation, the two scenes following each other directly. When the pair playfight in the snow, March ends up straddling Banford and feels a spike of arousal (signposted by a jarring musical refrain and reduced frame rate) as she suddenly sees her companion between her thighs in imitation of an orgasmic state: Banford is open-mouthed, closed-eyed, with her tongue flicking against her lips. It is only once Paul has claimed March as his fiancée and they have slept together that Banford makes explicit her love, in a scene mirroring the earlier one: Banford underneath March, mouth open and eyes heavily lidded. “What is there here for me, Jill?” asks March, with the reply, “yourself, something I could never take from you.” The love between women is differentiated from that between March and Henry, which demands the submission of one partner to another. Instead, sexual contact with Banford affirms March as a woman whilst not subjugating her: she remains “[her]self,” the subject of desire and not its object. With another woman, March can both be a woman, her sexed body acknowledged, and also a husband, her masculine power not given up.
24If the female body does not debar her from being a man or a husband, for Paul on the other hand, the retooling of bodies in the realm of The Fox means that being male does not confer manhood. He needs to therefore perform and prove that he is a man, by competing with March and overshadowing her. This is achieved through the use of the eyes, or gaze, and the gun as representative tools in the film. Both wield the gaze: looking but resisting being looked at, as illustrated by shot-reverse shots of the pair upon Paul’s entrance into the farmhouse. Here, the film presents complementary images of Paul and March, faces in darkness with a bar of light falling across their eyes, to show their mirrored roles and identities, and point towards their equally held masculine power. The shotgun (of which there is only one) swaps hands between March and Paul throughout, illustrating their interchangeable and competing masculinities. This gun functions as a prosthetic phallus, bestowing its holder with the power to enact violence and wield their superiority as protector of the farmhouse and its inhabitants. March and Paul are evenly empowered by the gun, his maleness not signifying any additional authority. In fact, Paul recognises March as his fellow hunter and protector in their struggle with the fox: “could your will put a bullet into his heart?” she asks, and he replies, “sure, and yours.” Semantically, it is unclear whether Paul means he could shoot the fox and March, or that March could shoot the fox as easily as he could, but the framing here points to the latter interpretation. The positioning of March and Paul in the shot makes them equals, both bathed in the orange glow from the fire, vital and hotblooded. Banford, in contrast, sits in the background under a cold, ineffectual blue cast by the lampshade, at a remove from the masculine excitement between the other two.
25These tools of masculinity are ultimately insufficient in the domestic space, however, as Banford is able to scotch Paul’s victory in asking March to marry him by refusing the farm as their spousal home. “I have to look around for a new partner,” she says, privileging a new anonymous woman as March’s replacement whilst denying Paul his looked-for position as husband. After this failed attempt to become “the man about the house,” Paul turns ineffectively to the gun to assert a position of power. Furiously polishing its tellingly deconstructed pieces while March says she will have to reconsider their relationship, he bursts out, “what does thinking have to do with it?” He is still an unthinking animal (the “beast” of the novella), motivated by emotion and instinct and unable to recognise the social and legal responsibilities of being a husband, rather than just a masculine or male being. Maleness, and its representative components employed by Paul, are inadequate signifiers of manhood in this queer realm; more important is behaviour and the balance of domestic and non-domestic. As in my reading of the novella, the home is the defining mark of the man; Paul’s wildness and standing in opposition to domesticity equates to a loss of manhood.
26There are several instances where Paul may be said to gain some legitimacy in the domestic space, but these are moments not earnt but granted by Banford. He momentarily takes on the husband’s role in the home in carving the bird at dinner, but this is clearly facilitated by Banford, whose positioning in the space of the kitchen and dining room distributes power to either Paul or March – the mark of domestic masculinity is approval from the figure of the wife. Competition for her approval is ever-present in the mirrored shots of March and Paul side by side at the table, their power waxing and waning by the movement of Banford through the room, standing by one or the other and handing over the carving knife. “You and your mixing bowl and muffin tin have conquered the animals,” March later says resentfully to Banford, implying a domestication of Paul as an animal rather than his achievement of a man’s role. Indeed, Paul is ultimately unable to consolidate sexual power in the house, and his sexuality is exercisable only outside, positioning him firmly as a beast and not a man with husbandly allowances. His authority extends to the bottom of the stairs, where he intimidates Banford with sexualised talk about her body, but, with her one hand firmly on the bannisters and the other delivering a slap across his face, Paul remains banished from the bedroom. The sexual encounter he instigates that evening with March must take place in the outbuildings upon a fur rug and with the skinned fox – symbolic of her emasculated submission – pinned to the door.
27At the denouement of the film, Paul finally appears victorious as he kills Banford with the felling of an immense tree in a not-so-subtle image of phallic power. But what he does here, I would argue, is that in destroying Banford he is also extinguishing March’s masculinity once and for all and making of her a woman and a wife, and no longer a rival with whom he can compete. Without her darling Jill, March is no husband, and with the loss of Banford comes the loss of the farm: “[March] belonged to him” we are told in the novella but still “[s]omething was missing” (F 67). The last shot of the film is the skinned fox: spreadeagled over the door of outbuilding where March and Paul slept together, a reminder of the moment at which she resigned her masculinity in favour of the submissive, feminine sexuality required to be married to Paul. The fox skin is quite an image: fangs prominent, water dripping from its fur into sharp icicles, and menace in its empty eye sockets. It is wildness extinguished, this masculinity no longer a part of March, and acts as a harbinger of failure: “it’ll be all right, I know you’ll be happy,” says Paul as he sells the furniture and gives Banford’s clothes away. “Will I?” March responds, looking back at the farmhouse which, even after Banford’s death, still cannot be inhabited by the married couple.
28Ford Madox Hueffer described his first impression of Lawrence upon meeting him in 1909:
[He was] leaning, as if panting, beside the door post […] I had had only the impression of the fox-coloured hair and moustache and the deep, wary, sardonic glance […] as if he might be going to devour me – or something that I possessed. And that was really his attitude of mind. He had come, like the fox, with his overflood of energy – his abounding vitality of passionate determination that seemed always too big for his frail body – to get something. (Ford 77).
29In this reminiscence, Ford is describing Lawrence’s determination to earn money from writing, but his likening to the fox leads me to consider it in terms of the fragility of gender identity. Lawrence-as-the-fox is intellectually powerful and has great strength of will, but he is also physically frail and mistrustful, cautious of being challenged or turned away. Here, too, we might understand the fox as representative of masculinity: outwardly strong but simultaneously in need of consolidation. Beside the door post, Lawrence hesitates on the threshold of the indoor space, his anxiety and his power to devour equally apparent. The novella The Fox similarly presents anxiety and discomfort around the navigation of spaces and the yearning for belonging and recognition, which I have interpreted through a queer lens. This text, and its adaptation, I have argued, illustrate a striving for manhood through the possession and inhabitation of a home, and understand that this complex gender identity is not exclusive to those born male. It is a narrative of queer failure, but this failure applies to both the relationship between March and Banford and the marriage of March and Henry; Lawrence’s novella is not dismissive of same-sex partnerships nor seeking to reinstate sexual and gendered norms, but is in fact deeply invested in questions of gender identity and its embodiment beyond the sexed body.