D. H. Lawrence's the Fox: A Question of Species

Among its other distinguishing qualities, D. H. Lawrence's The Fox is remarkable for the range and intensity of the critical conflicts it has generated over the three generations since its publication (1922), and for the sheer contradictoriness of the literary, psychological and ethical claims made by critics on its behalf. Because no single, internally consistent reading has succeeded in resolving its multiple equivocations, each particular reading seems contingent, limited by the particular mindset or ideology of the individual critic. Thus a small multitude of interpretations co-exist in uneasy tension with one another, each making its own lucid, often persuasive claim to be the most acceptable one. A few selected examples may help to make the case clear. Is The Fox, for instance, one of Lawrence's "supreme things among the major tales" (F. R. Leavis's claim 309) or a deeply flawed work riddled with confusions and inconsistencies? Is Henry's shooting of the fox an act of revenge on a rival for March's attention, or an attempt to absorb the fox's animal power? Is Henry's killing of Banford a murderous act, or a creative and life-enhancing deed? Is the coda to The Fox (66-71) thinly disguised propaganda for male supremacy, or a legitimate corrective to female domination, based on the repression of male sexual impulses characteristic of late Victorian times?1 The sole approximation to a critical consensus turns on the issue of male dominance. While critics generally agree on its presence (the final version of The Fox was written at the start of the "leadership" period in 1921), they quarrel about the significance of its manifestations as well as its disabling (or otherwise) impact on the narrative. Critics have painstakingly unraveled the central discourses in The Fox--gender, class, sexual, familial--that compete for power and authority, in the process challenging and destabilizing each other. Indeed this may well be a potent source of those clashing interpretations I just alluded to. Far from homologous or evenly distributed throughout the narrative, these discourses undermine each other's positions in an incessant struggle for dominance. In discussions of the novella, however, one particular discourse is conspicuous by its absence, its failure to attract critical notice, though it exerts powerful pressures on all its dramatic events: I refer to species discourse. In The Fox species discourse is the crucial "off-site" (Cary Wolfe's phrase 11), where issues of gender, class, and sex are negotiated, subverting or, more usually, reinforcing the ideology of male dominance the narrative seeks to impose. Because male ascendency is both a cultural project and a natural given, it turns on the male capacity to transcend animality as proof of a potency which (in the novella's terms) is closed off to women. (2) Though initially Henry looks like an animal (the fox) who fascinates March, he soon mutates into a huntsman who kills other animals, aspires to bring down March as his sexual prey, and eliminates Banford like an animal to make it look more like a legitimate killing. But what more precisely is species discourse and how does it function? In the widest perspective, it tracks that ever-shifting, highly-sensitive fault-line--"the mobile border within living man" (Agamben15)--which hierarchizes and classifies those traits humans and animals share and, much more insistently, those that keep them apart. Overwhelmingly anthropocentric, Western philosophical, scientific, and literary traditions assume human species superiority, industriously cataloging those faculties--reason, self-consciousness, will, etc.--that secure human transcendence. Recently, however, Jacques Derrida, Peter Singer and Donna Harraway, among many others from widely differing perspectives, have questioned these unexamined assumptions, arguing for the amelioration or abolition of such often invidious distinctions. (3) In all of this, though species discourse generally functions to reduce or denigrate animals, it may also highlight those endowments and aptitudes that humans and animals share. …