[In the following essay, Osborn offers a compositional history of “The Fox” and asserts that “as Lawrence uses an actual fable of the Aesopian kind to give form to elements borrowed from his own life, the result is a fiction rich in ambivalence about sexual roles and played out by characters luminous as mythic beings.”]

The point of recognition seems to be also a point of identification, where a hidden truth about something or somebody emerges into view.

—Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity

“There he is!” she cried involuntarily, as if terribly startled.

—D. H. Lawrence, “The Fox”

Though F. R. Leavis's evaluation of Lawrence's novella “The Fox” as “one of the supreme things among the major tales” (332) carries conviction, his identification of “youthful love” as the theme is so reductive as to mislead. Among the qualities making “The Fox” special are its oddly illuminating yet covert treatment of both gender and genre and the complex way these two elements are woven together. As Lawrence uses an actual fable of the Aesopian kind to give form to elements borrowed from his own life, the result is a fiction rich in ambivalence about sexual roles and played out by characters luminous as mythic beings.

The fable plot of the story is a variant on the tale of Chauntecleer and the Fox, with allusions that may further specify Chaucer's version, The Nun's Priest's Tale.¹ In the simple Aesopian beast fable, a fox tricks a rooster into closing his eyes and runs off with him in his jaws, but the clever rooster tricks the fox into speaking and thereby escapes into a tree. Chaucer elaborates the characters and setting and adds, among other things, a prophetic dream. Whether or not the evidence of the farm name and the dream (examined below) establishes a connection with Chaucer, Lawrence is clearly manipulating and complicating the basic Aesopian structure to work out something of personal importance to him. Once the generic and biographical associations are recognized, the fable reading must have an effect not only on our interpretation of the ambiguous ending of “The Fox” but also on how we regard the similar ambiguities about gender and power expressed by Lawrence in other stories of approximately the period in which “The Fox” was composed, 1918-1921.

It is useful, then, to set the story in the context of this period, a time when Lawrence dreams of leaving England, at least gets into the Celtic hinterlands of Cornwall, and experiences there a series of major rejection traumas.² The following edited account is based chiefly on Moore (Priest), Sagar (Calendar), and Letters; it includes reference to Lawrence's relevant works:

In November 1915 Lawrence writes to a friend, “I hope to be going away in about a fortnights time: to America … We have got passports” (Letter 1042). But in December, instead of going to America, he and his German wife Frieda move to Cornwall, where they rent a cottage in Higher Tregerthen near Zennor. In April 1916 their good friends John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield come to live close by, and Lawrence presses Murry for a Blutbruderschaft, which Murry rejects. Murry himself later suggests that Lawrence's wish for such a ritual was perhaps fulfilled in the “Gladatorial” chapter of Woman in Love, where Rupert Birkin, who represents Lawrence, wrestles with Gerald Crich, who represents Murry (Moore 331-32); Lawrence has killed him by the end of that novel, and there in the person of Birkin he laments his not-quite-perfected male friendship: “He should have loved me. I offered him.” Not long after this episode, the Murrys move away (or flee) to a cottage near Falmouth, and soon Lawrence becomes very close friends with a young man named William Henry Hocking, the source for the Cornish farmer John Thomas Buryan in Kangaroo: “John Thomas was a year or two older than Somers [the hero, a Lawrence figure], and at this time his dearest friend” (Chapter 12); but the intensity of the attachment gradually cools. In retrospect Lawrence's relationships with both Murry and Hocking are described in homoerotic terms, and long afterwards, in 1953, Frieda writes to Murry, “I think the homosexuality in him [Lawrence] was a short phase out of misery” (Moore 332).³

In the Cornish chapter of Kangaroo, in addition to the evocation of “John Thomas” Buryan, Lawrence includes a scene reenacting the physical examination—“and because they had handled his private parts, and looked into them, their eyes should burst and their hands should wither and their hearts should rot” (261)—which led to his being rejected for military service. This rejection was humiliating even though Lawrence did not wish to serve. On 5 February 1917 Lawrence writes to Catherine Carswell that he is again trying to get a passport to go to America, for in England he feels himself “awfully like a fox that is cornered by a pack of hounds … closing in …” (Letter 1369). This feeling is echoed in “The Fox” when Henry feels that “England was little and tight … constricted even in the dark, and that there were too many dogs in the night, making a noise like a fence of sound. … He felt the fox didn't have a chance” (146). On 12 October 1917 comes the final, perhaps greatest, rejection, when the Lawrences, suspected of spying for the Germans, are ordered to leave Cornwall within three days. Of this expulsion order Lawrence writes in a letter, “We are as innocent even of pacifist activities, let alone spying in any sort, as the rabbits of the field outside” (Letter 1463). This event is also fictionalized in the Cornish chapter of Kangaroo, which is appropriately titled “The Nightmare.”

So the Lawrences go first to London, dogged by detectives (“It is very hateful and humiliating and degrading” [Letter 1497]), and still longing to leave England. In two November letters, numbers 1473 and 1474, Lawrence writes that William Henry Hocking is going with them “to the east slope of the Andes,” but later it transpires that the Lawrences will not be allowed to leave England until the war is over. From London they go to live in Berkshire, where “The Fox” is set. On 23 November 1918 Lawrence records that he has written three short stories, two of them very good (Letter 1662). Presumably the two very good ones are “The Blind Man” and the original short version of “The Fox”; the third story is “Tickets Please,” at that time called “John Thomas.” In December Lawrence writes two letters to Katherine Mansfield; in Letter 1665 of 5 December (the famous Magna Mater letter to be referred to again) he mentions that “The Fox” is “not done,” and in Letter 1671 of 10 December he implies that it is now complete, “rather odd and amusing.” (This first manuscript version of the story is transcribed with facsimile and published in Moore, Miscellany 28-48.) The setting in time and place of “The Fox” corresponds to the date of these Mansfield letters; the main action occurs in November 1918 (119, 126), and the farm is in Berkshire with a view of “the round hills of the White Horse”.

(115)

If Lawrence was using Chaucer's tale as a framework to build on, as he used the relationships in the Wagnerian Sigfried story to expand the meaning of Women in Love (see Moore, Priest 339-40), he has to have known the tale before the end of 1918, because the basic beast-fable structure (including the dream) exists in this version. But even here Lawrence has inverted the fable's conclusion; he also reverses the traditional fable technique of making animals seem like people (as in Chaucer's tale) to create instead people who seem like animals, especially to the other people in the story. His main point-of-view character, March, vividly perceives Henry as a fox (121). This fable framework arouses certain expectations about genre that are then thwarted as much as they are fulfilled, even in the first published version of the story.

In November 1920 Hutchinson's Story Magazine published a slightly altered and shortened version of “The Fox,” which ends when “the fox” Henry asks March to marry him, and she accepts, drifting away into dream: “In March, the dream-consciousness now predominated. She lived in another world, the world of the fox.” In this story the fox successfully tricks his victim into closing her eyes on her own identity in the real world; the villain has won the contest of the fable. But a year later, on 16 November 1921, Lawrence writes that he has “put a long tail to “The Fox,” which was a bobbed short story. Now he careers with a strange and fiery brush” (Letter 2373); in this tale Henry-the-Fox both does and does not “win.” Brian Finney reports on the new text: “Lawrence used the original manuscript version … when revising and elongating it to about three times its original length. From the point in the story when March fails to agree to Henry's proposal of marriage onwards represents the new second part Lawrence added to his original story to convert it to the length of a novelette” (Finney 55). In a letter of 26 November 1921 to his publisher Seltzer, Lawrence describes “The Fox” and “The Captain's Doll,” two stories having much in common, as “so modern, so new: a new manner” (Letter 2379).

In this “new-mannered” story⁴ Lawrence enhances his characterization of animal-like people with further detail and carries the plot to a conclusion that much complicates the original fable inversion, for now Henry looks upon the two women of the story as his rightful hunter's prey. To the structure of fable associations thus established Lawrence lends further support with metaphorical descriptions.

But first of all, in both early and later versions, there is a real fox in the story. The two women, March and Banford, are trying to “make a living by poultry” (113) on Bailey Farm, “a little homestead … lying just one field removed from the edge of the wood” (115), a name and location that make one think of the farm “biside a grove, stondynge in a dale” in the tale that Chaucer's Nun's Priest tells at Harry Bailly's request (usually spelled “Bailey” in translation). On Lawrence's “Bailey Farm” the greatest problem (among many) is the “demon” fox who “carried off the hens under the very noses of March and Banford” (115). They hunt him, but the chief hunter is March, the “man” of the pair. Lawrence makes sure that we do not miss this gender relationship: March “would be the man about the place” (113), in her male farm-clothing she looks like “some graceful, loose-balanced young man” (114), and Lawrence continues to describe her as “manly” (117) and “manful” (153). Her androgeny reflects that of Lawrence himself, who has been described as “a woman in a man's skin” (Meyers 207; compare Mailer 113), though March's “face was not a man's face ever” (114). It is reductive to describe March simply as a lesbian, as many commentators do (Bergler employs a so-called “clinical” point-of-view; Moore, Miscellany 49-55). In fact, March's sexual preference is not even the point, since overt genital interest is notably lacking in this story. Lawrence seems more concerned to demonstrate that March's still fluid identity is expressed entirely in response to the demands and expectations of others. She is suspended in an intermediary androgeny corresponding to the “odd rapt state” (116) in which she is “divided in herself” (125) “as if asleep” (128).

Typical of Lawrence's numerous half-asleep female characters, March is in touch with her natural surroundings at a “deeper” level than her companion Banford. One day, only semi-conscious as always, she sees the fox and he her: “And he knew her. She was spellbound—she knew he knew her” (116). She does not fire her gun, and he runs off. “In strange mindlessness she walked hither and thither” (117). She becomes possessed: “She felt him invisibly master her spirit” (117). This attitude would seem to put March into a female, submissive role, yet at the same time Lawrence hints iconographically at a profoundly male point of view: The fox runs away and March finally raises the gun as she sees “his white buttocks twinkle”; later in her mind she sees him “glance over his shoulder at her, half inviting, half contemptuous and cunning” (117). The implications of this episode might be easily dismissed if it were not for the “obsessive quality” (Nixon 227) of Lawrence's attention to buttocks both in his fiction, for example the initiatory massage in The Plumed Serpent and the anal intercourse in Lady Chatterly's Lover, and in his paintings of nude males such as “Red Willow Trees,” which as Nixon observes “is more about buttocks than it is about trees” (227). After her encounter with the fox March obediently goes indoors at Banford's call, but “when she saw the dark crests of the pine trees against the blood-red sky, again her heart beat to the fox, the fox. She wanted to follow him, with her gun” (117).

When an actual man, Henry, comes to the farm, March's masculine tendencies gradually change. The change is a choice she must make for herself, it seems, because Banford's telling her to “put the gun down” when Henry first arrives (121) has little impact on her. Curiously, her change seems to have even more to do with Henry's shooting of the fox than with his proposal of marriage. For he finally does shoot the fox one night, and that night March has one of literature's most finely conceived dreams of release. The fox's death stimulates her dream of Banford, the woman to whom her present male role is in part a response,⁵ lying dead and in a coffin. In her dream March covers her friend's body, clad in a thin white night-dress, with the skin of the dead fox, which transforms the “horrible” coffin into a magnificent pyre worthy of her dead relationship: The fox-fur “seemed to make a whole ruddy, fiery coverlet, and she cried and cried” (148). Her former partner is thus effectively dead and out of the way, from the point of view of March's psyche, and on the next night we glimpse March sewing on a dress. On the following evening she appears wearing it with an effect curiously like transvestitism (156):

To [Henry's] amazement March was dressed in a dress of dull, green silk crape. His mouth came open in surprise. If she had suddenly grown a moustache he could not have been more surprised.

“Why,” he said, “do you wear a dress, then?”

March has restructured her identity in response to the role that Henry's male-animal presence makes available.

In this story, as in other fictions and poems, Lawrence typically provides authentic wildlife details of appearance and behavior to give his protagonists the characteristics of real animals, but particular to this story only is the way he adapts the allegorical fox fable to intensify gender interactions. Both the naturalistic description and the fable action are most obviously apparent in connection with the main male character, Henry. Lawrence makes the fox-Henry link specific on several occasions, as when he has March recognize Henry as the fox who had “possessed” her when she had encountered the real animal months before in the open; to her Henry even has “the odour of the fox” (125). Like the fox, Henry comes specifically to raid the hen house; that is, as an opportunist he hopes to obtain possession of Banford's chicken farm by marrying her friend March—as in fairy tales the poor young man weds the princess to gain her father's kingdom. But the analogy near the surface of his own consciousness is the fox raiding the hen house. When March confesses that she thinks of him as the fox, he replies with a “young” (that is, falsely innocent) laugh, “Perhaps you think I've come to steal your chickens or something” (139). One or another of Henry's fox-like attributes is mentioned frequently in passing, and when March thinks of him in his absence it is in these terms: “Only his face was fixed in her mind: the full, ruddy, unchanging cheeks, and the straight snout of a nose and the two eyes staring above. All she could remember was how he suddenly wrinkled his nose when he laughed, as a puppy does when he is playfully growling” (165). Henry and the fox are also linked by their phosphorescence. Both glitter and gleam and burn, which enhances their mutual demonic or godlike quality (see especially 126-27, 173); this brightness is further emphasized as Lawrence revises. He also makes Henry “foxlike from the outset, rather than—as in the first version—a man merely seen as a fox by a sexually repressed female” (Ruderman 69).

But only in the later version does Lawrence present fox-like Henry's courtship of March as an elaborate page-long metaphor in Henry's own mind: “He was a huntsman in spirit, not a farmer … he wanted to bring down March as his quarry” (131). Henry now hunts as a fox does, separating his prey from the flock (Banford), chasing and eventually cornering it, exhausting it by his merciless taunting pursuit, and then finally “killing” it, or at least attempting to. This is one of the more developed examples of many where Lawrence describes instinctive human actions in terms of animal behavior.⁶ If there were no more than this, he would merely be allegorizing Henry's actions as the title suggests, and as he does in the first version of the story.

When within the world of the fiction Henry also imagines March as an animal to be preyed upon, however, the analogy becomes structurally significant to the plot, even as the nature of the animal associated with March causes the story to diverge from the Aesopian fable where the fox is after a rooster. For rather than being a “hen-girl” as Ford Madox Ford suggests,⁷ March is consistently portrayed with rabbit characteristics, such as large eyes and a little pursed-up mouth “that looked shrewish” (137 and passim). On lapsing “into the odour of the fox … she was still and soft in her corner like a passive creature in its cave” (125). Henry gets the idea of marrying her when, after going hunting, he has “a dead rabbit hanging still in his hand” (130). He knows that he must not frighten her, for she is “suspicious as a hare” (131). Her name March makes us think of the March hare made famous by Lewis Carroll, but of course Carroll gets his name from the traditional term for a hare in heat. Others have noticed this name-association; Michael L. Ross dismisses the March/hare identity as “frequent punning references” (234). There is no doubt that March is in heat, yet she is also terrified of Henry, and when he manipulates her into promising herself to him, “her voice suddenly rose into a shrill cry” like that of a trapped rabbit (141).⁸ March is frequently frozen in her tracks by Henry, mesmerized like a rabbit by a fox. But at the end of the story, though Henry “had won her, he had not yet got her” (175). March wants “to see, to know, to understand … to be alone: with him at her side,” that is, to be an attached yet an aware and separate person. But Henry-the-hunter is still seeking to submerge her being, to “put her independent spirit to sleep,” and as he tempts her to close her eyes she fights against sleep “as if sleep were death” (178).⁹

The overt victim of Henry's foxlike maneuvres, however, is Banford, “full of perky interest, like a bird” (123), whom he literally does slay. Although she controls the farm itself, and her name like March's is reminiscent of the barnyard (bantam), and at one point she is described as “a little fighting cock” (159), she is more to be identified with the povre widwe of Chaucer's tale than with that ruler of the roost, Chantecleer. Moreover, Lawrence describes her more often in terms of a wild bird than as a barnyard fowl. Henry gets the idea of killing her by allowing the tree he is chopping down to fall on her; first he watches her “like a huntsman who is watching a flying bird” (172); then he freezes: “His heart held perfectly still, in the terrible pure will that she should not move” (173); and when she is struck down, “He watched her with intense bright eyes, as he would watch a wild goose he had shot. Was it winged or dead? Dead!” (173). Lawrence has subtly established this image many pages before, when Henry tells Banford of the agreed plan of marriage and she looks at March “like a bird that has been shot” (141). Even earlier in the story, on his first day as a guest on the farm, Henry “shot a rabbit and a wild duck that was flying high towards the wood” (127).

But March is the one designated by Henry as his long-term victim. Throughout the story she is subject to, as it were, hypnotic attacks: “Her eyes were wide and vacant, and her upper lip lifted from her teeth in that helpless, fascinated rabbit look. The moment she saw his glowing, red face it was all over with her” (170). When Henry “wins” her by achieving Banford's death, March “stood there absolutely helpless, shuddering her dry sobs” (174), and when they are married she is the shot rabbit hanging in his hand: “Instead of her soul swaying with new life, it seemed to droop, to bleed, as if it were wounded” (175).

With March's chief characteristic being her dreaminess, it is not farfetched for the main action of the story twice to be foreshadowed by her dreams, much as Chaucer's Chantecleer is forewarned by his prophetic dream of the reddish-yellow animal that he does not recognize as a fox (lines 2898-2906). No more does March recognize her own nemesis under the image of the fox in her dream, “very yellow and bright, like corn.” He is singing and she reaches out her hand to touch him, but suddenly he bites her wrist, turns to run, and whisks his tail, his brush, “across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain. She awoke with the pain of it” (126). Later this language is echoed when Henry first “kisses her on the mouth with a quick, brushing kiss. It seemed to burn through her” (140). Though her “mate” Banford does not know of the dream about the fox, March does tell her on a later date about her dream of a funeral (without mentioning that it is a funeral for Banford herself). Banford's sarcastic reply about dream-significance that follows reminds one of Pertelote's equally dismissive reaction to her husband Chantecleer's dream of the fox (157; cf. Nun's Priest's Tale lines 2921-22).¹⁰ When Henry contrives to kill Banford “accidentally” by allowing the tree to fall on her, events disclose that March's dream was, after all, as prophetic as Chantecleer's.

Lawrence further manipulates the conclusion of the fable when March fills the role of victim as the story moves on. Now the theme of “keeping one's eyes open” becomes important. The motif of eyes in the story has been noticed before (Draper 162, citing Moynahan; and, most interestingly, Nelson 137-41), though not in this fable connection. In Chaucer's fable the fox persuades Chantecleer to close his eyes so that he may sing the more beautifully. (Perhaps this motif suggested to Lawrence the curious and evocative idea of having March imagine the fox himself singing in the woods [126, 136].) The fable fox's purpose beneath his flattery is to make his prey more vulnerable to attack, and in the moral at the end of the tale Chantecleer recognizes his acquiescence to that flattery as willful blindness:

For he that wynketh, whan that he sholde see,
Al wilfully, God lat him nevere thee [thrive]!

(Nun's Priest's Tale, lines 3431-32)

Lawrence significantly shifts the symbolism of closing the eyes to mean a lack of mature self-direction. March has always held her eyes half-closed, and it is only with Henry's pressure on her to close them completely that, “al wilfully,” she realizes that she wants them open. As we have seen above, Henry's final wish is to deprive sleepy-eyed March of all consciousness (178), but as they sit on a seacliff in Cornwall, looking west, preparing to travel to America, “she stretched her eyes wider and wider. Away to the West, Canada, America. She would know and she would see what was ahead … she would not sleep: no, never” (178-79). It is the first time we have seen her struggle strongly against her own inclination to drift into semi-consciousness, a tendency predating Henry's arrival.

Henry interprets sleeping and waking in terms of gender and power as he associates his own maleness specifically with mastery over the dreamy woman. If March will yield to him by sleeping, he will have both her life and his own: “Then 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. She would not be a man any more. …”¹¹ Nevertheless, the story ends with March trying to stay awake. Henry tells her that she will feel better when they arrive in Canada, and in response she looks at him “with the strained, strange look of a child that is struggling against sleep”:

“Shall I?” she said.

“Yes,” he answered quietly.

And her eyelids dropped with the slow motion, sleep weighing them unconscious. But she pulled them open. …

(179)

Though Lawrence ends his novella on a note of uncertainty about who has won this battle of wills or what the final outcome will be, it seems likely that, if March can keep her eyes open, as Chaucer's Chantecleer did not, the “fox” who killed Banford may now be foiled. Even when Chantecleer allows himself, by closing his eyes, to be caught, he nevertheless is sufficiently clever to extricate himself from that death-trap by tricking the fox into the ill-judged remark that allows him to escape. Such a final result is suggested by Henry's not-yet-verbalized thoughts on the last two pages of the story. Lawrence makes it clear that a fascination of each with the other's otherness has brought these two people together, and that this idealized romantic attitude is not a binding force that well sustains the stress of clayfooted reality.

The final pages of “The Fox” have incited feminist fury against Lawrence, as one might well expect. After the series of fairytale transformations in which March, like Cinderella, “changes clothes,” in which Henry is in some sense a were-fox (indeed is specifically compared to a werewolf in the original story [Moore 47]), and when Banford has turned into “a queer little witch” (163), in the conclusion of the story a male desire is expressed for a closure with the heroine “perfected” in a catatonic Sleeping Beauty state.¹² But here the fable paradigm of the tale and its biographical reference make some difference in how one might best interpret. First of all, the desire for March to yield is not Lawrence's but Henry-the-Fox's (although it echoes certain bombastic doctrines that Lawrence begins to preach in his own voice at this time); secondly, in the most famous of the fox fables the fox first catches then loses his prey. While Lawrence sets up the possibility for a final outcome where March gets free, he is not so insensitive as to present it blatantly; he is, after all, not writing an allegory but a more realistic fiction. Moreover, the ambivalence about submission that March feels at the end of this story is expressed elsewhere as Lawrence's own:

Must we hold on?
Or can we now let go?
Or is it even possible we must do both?

(Collected Poems 429)

There is perhaps a further reason for the oblique conclusion to this story. This brings us back to the biographic sources and Lawrence's well-known practice of turning his life into art (see Sagar, Life). The most obvious inspiration for the initial situation is the household of the two women at Grimsbury Farm near where Lawrence and Frieda were staying in Berkshire: “There, like March and Banford, the fictional proprietors of Bailey Farm, Violet Monk and Cecily Lambert lived precariously as amateur agriculturalists. They were visited as well by a soldier on leave, specifically by Cecily Lambert's brother, who undoubtedly contributed to the characterisation of Henry Grenfel, March's wilful suitor” (Devlin 76; for a detailed analysis of this background see Ruderman 57-68). But when Lawrence names the young man Henry and makes him “Cornish by birth” (123), it is hard to miss the connection with Lawrence's Cornish friend William Henry Hocking. “According to Frieda, Lawrence … had, with the sensuous, uneducated and adoring William Henry, the physical relationship he had been unable to have with the repressed, intellectual and critical Middleton Murry” (Meyers 214). Whether or not this is in fact the case, Lawrence implicitly celebrates Henry's sexuality in Kangaroo by giving him the name “John Thomas,” British slang for the penis. If the story of the “fox” in some sense reenacts an erotic desire or experience, this would account for March's peculiar cross-sexual point of view. As the chief narrative consciousness she represents Lawrence's position, as his female central characters so often do, though usually they do so with less graphically physical implications. As March watches the retreating fox's buttocks with symbolically male desire, raising her gun, the scene offers a multiple role reversal. Lawrence's ability to move into “allotropic states of feeling” draws him here to identify with a woman dressed as a man having a homoerotic impulse, a gender confusion that substantiates Anne Smith's statement that “he lacked a healthy sense of the ‘otherness’ of women” (13). Perhaps the brief erotic mood of March's encounter with the “Henry-animal” represents a disguised and artistic reenactment of a moment still vivid in Lawrence's mind; perhaps it is merely wish fulfillment about William Henry, as the wrestling match in Women in Love was about Murry, but this time not even recognized by Lawrence himself. Obviously, these are speculations.

In any case, the friction at the end of the story, rather than occurring between representatives of sexual genders as such, is between the one partner who in order to dominate strives to “take away [the] consciousness” of the other, and the other who strives rebelliously to stay awake. It reflects, as several people have pointed out, not so much sexual strife as a mother-child relationship (see Nelson in particular). Much of Lawrence's writing—his fiction, poetry and letters—expresses both the fear and the attraction of being lulled to sleep, swallowed up, devoured by experience, sexual or otherwise. In the very letter to Katherine Mansfield in which he announces that “The Fox” is still unfinished (number 1665), he speaks of having previously cast himself into the devouring “womb” of his wife: “I have done it, and now must struggle all my might to get out.” In the story, March is similarly struggling against her own tendency to submit to the dominance of others. Certain passages in “The Fox,” like key passages elsewhere, suggest that Lawrence's ambiguous feelings about gender in his fiction are related to an equal ambiguity about his own gender or role identity and place in the struggle for power; his letters indicate that he felt under particular threat at this time. Lawrence's fiction and paintings certainly confirm the homoerotic interest about which so much has been written, but whether his ambiguous attitude indicates a genuine sexual anxiety or merely a creative impulse to explore unusual options is something that second-hand hearsay cannot reliably tell us.¹³ Yet the question about the biographical factor might not be so demanding if the author were not D. H. Lawrence, whose practice of writing romans à clef entices us beyond his fiction into his own life story.

There is still another biographical element possibly operating at the psychological level of this story. It is widely agreed that Lawrence killed off his mother in various fictions,¹⁴ and in this story, in order for the central character to achieve her natural gender identity, the figure who must be destroyed is both “wife” and Magna Mater. (I use the Jungian term from Lawrence's 1918 letter to Katherine Mansfield mentioned above, number 1665.) Although with the dramatic death of bird-like Banford Henry the fox wins at least that battle in his territorial fight, earlier in the story March has been liberated by the dream-death of this mother figure who so strongly represents society and its doctrines (Holderness 166-74), and who frowns on March's romantic liaison just as Lawrence's mother frowned on his. Trying out variant selves, exploring one's sexual identity, is notoriously difficult when “mother” is watching and trying to socialize her child. Thus with the death of demanding, conventional Banford, March as Laurentian androgyne is liberated from that constraining relationship to become the yielding woman, but specifically and suggestively, in terms of Lawrence's own biography, to take on the woman's role in relation to a Cornishman named Henry.

Lawrence's most amazing maneuvre in these multifaceted metamorphoses, however, is the subtle way in which, by repeating and varying the animal images associated with the three main characters, he draws the reader from the realistic and psychological levels of his fiction (the real fox and March's obsessive association of its image with otherness and Henry) to an allegorical level where a moral fable is being enacted. Or rather, the fable is being restructured to offer a shockingly inverted conclusion for a moral allegory, one in which evil intention wins: the “natural” fox succeeds in killing his “domesticated” bird and perhaps he will gain a mesmerized rabbit into the bargain. Such a realistic conclusion to a barnyard raid is entirely in keeping with a story presenting the male character as a sly and hungry fox. Lawrence, displaying his awareness of our potential moral outrage at this conclusion, both softens the blow and implicates us morally by having the frail, generous Banford of his original short story become a figure of age and repression. While we certainly cannot agree with those critics who would sanction her murder and ennoble Henry for his “deed of life,”¹⁵ there is an element in this modern fox fable that appeals more than virtuous moral consciousness might care to admit. Even March is ambivalent about her friend's death; after all her tears, “she was glad Jill was dead” (176). Of course she does not know that the death was murder, or that she too is regarded as prey by her vulpine lover.

Thus we see that Lawrence's principal focus in this story is no more sex (or, more properly, gender) than it is young love. These are only aspects of a far more elemental theme revealed by Lawrence's revised fable about the bantam-like “ruler of the roost,” the preying fox, and the hare. Lawrence's story concerns the desperate dangers of human relationships that cast one into first one role then another, roles that may present a danger to those who do not keep their eyes open and thereby keep a firm hold on their essential selves. With all its complexities, both literary and autobiographical, “The Fox” is at base a powerful fable about threatened identity.

Notes

1. Chaucer is not mentioned in Burwell's “Checklist of Lawrence's Reading,” though Lawrence refers to him approvingly three times in the late essay, “Introduction to These Paintings” (Phoenix 551, 552, 555). At the beginning of his “Study of Thomas Hardy,” written before The Fox, Lawrence refers to several classical fables, but in his writing there is nothing beyond the circumstantial evidence of The Fox to suggest that he knew Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale in any version. Yet with his interests, and when he was reading such literary sources as Bulfinch while writing his history book, Movements in European History, it is unlikely that he would have missed Chaucer's tale of the fox and the cock. Interested in dialect though he was (and intrigued as he would have been to know that Henryson expands the name of the fox from the dialect term “Laury” to “Lawrence” in his continuation of Chaucer's tale), Lawrence probably knew the Chaucerian version of the fable in modern English, perhaps even in an oral retelling. Since I do not have his source, I shall quote from the original as edited in The Riverside Chaucer.

2. Placing The Fox into the context of Lawrence's life, Devlin comments that “its composition was spread over three years that were tumultuous even by Lawrence's standards” (77). He particularly relates the story's composition to the tensions surrounding the first World War. Judith Ruderman examines the biographical setting of the novella in far more, but different, detail and relates it to her psychological theme of “the devouring Mother” (59-70). The two discussions supplement rather than conflict with each other.

3. In Son of Woman (1931) John Middleton Murry opened the question of Lawrence's possible homosexuality, in print at least. The Jacksons review some of the discussions that followed in their introduction to Critical Essays (16-17), and Joyce Carol Oates examines the homoerotic relationship in Women in Love with particular sensitivity in an essay in the Jacksons' book (101-04).

4. I am using the text in D. H. Lawrence: Four Short Novels. Page numbers are cited in parentheses.

5. Lawrence's protagonists often manifest a sense of dialectic ontology of character, as he did himself: “You are the call and I am the answer, / You are the wish, and I the fulfillment”—“Bei Hennef” (Complete Poems 203).

6. This description of vulpine behavior was provided by my student Joy Irani after consultation with a friend who had much the same farm experience as Lawrence would have had in hunting down marauding foxes. C. J. P. Beatty (54) points out how the inbuilt mechanism that comes into play when Paul Morel fights with Baxter Dawes in Sons and Lovers (“like a wild beast,” etc.) is closely paralleled by Konrad Lorentz's description in King Solomon's Ring of wolves fighting for leadership.

7. Though he does not observe the beast fable equivalences as clearly as Lawrence draws them, Ford Madox Ford may be the first to recognize the fable element when he suggests that “Lawrence identified himself with the russet-haired human fox who was to carry off the as-it-were hen-girl of the story” (qtd. by Ruderman 68).

8. In the slightly earlier (1916) novel Women in Love, in the chapter titled “Rabbit,” Gudrun exclaims, “Don't they make the most fearful noise when they scream?” There Gudrun herself is described, like the rabbit, as silken and soft (271, 275, 276), and yet like March she is also “manlike” (277).

9. This aspect of the story closely echoes that brutal poem, “Love on the Farm” (Complete Poems 42), in which a woman associated with a hunted rabbit wishes for sexual surrender and sleep. In The Fox it is the man who wishes for the woman to sleep.

10. Jean-Pierre Naugrette associates March's dreams in The Fox with Freud's dream interpretation, and then the story itself with the Freudian idea of dream analysis: “D. H. Lawrence obliges his reader to be the accomplice, if not the voyeur, of a kind of writing which aims at searching the character's psyche thoroughly” (English summary).

11. Jan Good discusses Henry's desire for dominance and concludes that his coersion of March is “necessary and productive” (226) in terms of her gender conflict. Other interpretations of the end of this story demonstrate an equally surprising lack of moral sense; see note 15.

12. See, for example, Kate Millet, Sexual Politics 265. One feminist critic interprets March's desire to “go west” as her death wish, not taking into account the fact that the idea is initiated by Henry, was shared by Lawrence and Frieda in real life, and is equated by all four with a real place, America, offering renewal. Lawrence himself, in one of his letters, refers his correspondent to the conclusion of The Fox as evidence of his continuing wish to travel to America.

    I believe that Gilbert and Gubar likewise misinterpret as they conflate Henry's desire to subject March, never entirely fulfilled, with Lawrence's artistic purpose. In Sexchanges, they observe accurately how in changing from male to female attire March literally disarms herself of her “hard-cloth breeches … strong as armour,” making herself accessible to Henry (338), but they go too far when they speak of the story “gloatingly” showing Henry as unambiguous winner and March as loser in the final power struggle.

13. Maurice Beebe's “Lawrence as a Fictional Character” is a brief and intriguing survey of fictionalizations of Lawrence not only in novels (both famous ones, like Huxley's Point Counter Point and Brave New World, and obscure) but also in what Beebe describes as “creative scholarship that enables inventive biographers to shape their versions of truth in strange ways” (296). The way Lawrence fictionalizes himself in his works, drawing on moods and events evidenced in his letters and elsewhere, complicates the problem of separating fact from fiction in his real life. (Idella Purnell complicates the issue further in the novel about Lawrence and his friends in Chapala that she wrote at his suggestion.)

14. Judith Ruderman, using Lawrence's letter 1665 to Katharine Mansfield as an important source, centers on this theme of devouring and rebellion against it in her book, D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother: The Search for a Patriarchal Ideal of Leadership. She does not limit devourers to women in the fiction, and therefore includes a long and interesting discussion of The Fox. But she does not discuss the poetry, in which love and fear of the mother is also expressed.

15. Ruderman collects a number of these curious assessments, of which I offer only two examples: “Eugene Goodheart … terms the murder of Banford a moment of self-realization for Grenfel [Henry], and Julian Moynahan lauds it as ‘an inspired and creative deed, … an image of the triumph of life over death’” (56; see also 194, n. 25).

Works Cited

Beatty, C. J. P. “Konrad Lorentz and D. H. Lawrence.” Notes and Queries 19 n.s. (1972): 54.

Bergler, Edmund. “D. H. Lawrence's The Fox and the Psychoanalytic Theory on Lesbianism.” A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1959. 49-55.

Beebe, Maurice. “Lawrence as a Fictional Character.” The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Gamini Salgado and G. K. Das. London: MacMillan, 1988. 295-310.

Burwell, Rose Marie. “A Checklist of Lawrence's Reading.” A D. H. Lawrence Handbook. Ed. Keith Sagar. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1982. 59-125.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Nun's Priest's Tale.” The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry Benson. Boston: Houghton, 1987. 253-61.

Daleski, H. M. The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. London: Faber, 1965.

Devlin, Albert J. “The ‘Strange and Fiery’ Course of The Fox: D. H. Lawrence's Aesthetic of Composition and Revision.” The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Gamini Salgado and G. K. Das. Basingstroke: MacMillan, 1988. 75-91.

Draper, R. P. “The Defeat of Feminism: D. H. Lawrence's The Fox and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away.’” Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Dennis Jackson and Fleda Brown Jackson. Boston: Hall, 1988.

Finney, Brian. “The Hitherto Unknown Publication of Some D. H. Lawrence Short Stories.” Notes and Queries 19 n.s. (1972):55-57.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. Sexchanges. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Vol. 2 of No Man's Land. 1989.

Good, Jan. “Toward a Resolution of Gender Identity Confusion: The Relationship of Henry and March in The Fox.” The D. H. Lawrence Review 18 (1985-86): 217-27.

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Jackson, Dennis, and Fleda Brown Jackson, eds. Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence. Boston: Hall, 1988.

Lawrence, D. H. Complete Poems. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts. New York: Viking, 1964.

———. Kangaroo. New York: Seltzer, 1923.

———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. 4 Vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979-1984.

———. Four Short Novels. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

———. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers, 1936. Ed. Edward McDonald. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

———. Women in Love. New York: Grosset, 1930.

Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. New York: Knopf, 1956.

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Meyers, Jeffrey. D. H. Lawrence: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Moore, Harry T. A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1959.

———. The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

Naugrette, Jean-Pierre. “Le Reynard et Les Reves: Onirisme, Ecriture et Inconscient dans The Fox.” Etudes Anglaises 37 (1984): 142-55.

Nelson, Jane A. “The Familial Isotopy of The Fox.” The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Michael Squires and Keith Cushman. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. 129-42.

Nixon, Cornelia. Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

Purnell, Idella. Friction. Unpublished novel, 1923.

Ross, Michael L. “Ladies and Foxes: D. H. Lawrence, David Garnett, and the Female of the Species.” The D. H. Lawrence Review 18 (1985-86): 229-38.

Ruderman, Judith. D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother: The Search for a Patriarchal Ideal of Leadership. Durham: Duke UP, 1984.

Sagar, Keith. D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. Austin: U of Texas P, 1984.

———. D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art. Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985.

Smith, Anne, ed. Lawrence and Women. London: Vision, 1980.