Reading transformations: from David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922) to Sarah Hall’s “Mrs Fox” (2013)

ABSTRACT

This article compares the short story “Mrs Fox” by Sarah Hall (3013) with David Garnett’s novel Lady into Fox (1922). Albeit different in some regards, these stories both center a human-animal transformation, and thus take part in a world-wide tradition that has existed since ancient times. How, then, is this motif rendered meaningful in modern times? This question is addressed in a discussion of the possibilities for different interpretations of these magical-realist stories. On the metaphorical level, the stories seem to be about gendered relations and woman’s situation in patriarchal society. This is the most common way to understand them in previous research. It also makes sense, however, to read them on the metonymical level, at which they tell the story about the relationship between the human and the non-human world, human and non-man animals. Finally, it appears to be productive to embrace the enigma at their core, the transformation, as a real event according to a different ontology. Indeed, it seems to be the liminality at its core that gives the human-animal transformation its ability to remain meaningful in times and places that are widely different, and in fictional genres far apart.

KEYWORDS:

• human-animal transformations
• Garnett
• Hall
• foxes
• reading transformation

In 2013, the BBC National Short Story Award was given to “Mrs Fox” by Sarah Hall. According to Mariella Frostrup, who chaired the award’s judges, this story is a “thoroughly modern interpretation” of “the classic literary motif of metamorphosis” which “asks unsettling questions about our relationships to each other and to the natural world.” However, “Mrs Fox” is not the only literary narrative to address the woman-fox transformation in contemporary British literature. In 1922, David Garnett’s debut novel Lady into Fox was published, and “Mrs Fox” is, according to Hall herself, inspired by and “loosely based” on this previous narrative (The Guardian, 9 October 2013). Indeed, by naming the female protagonist Sophia Garnett, Hall indirectly indicates that her narrative aims at complementing and rewriting Garnett’s novel in relation to contemporary times.

The similarities between the two narratives are striking: a young, happily married couple who lives in the British countryside takes a walk during which the wife turns into a fox. The husband takes her home and tries to live with her as before, but eventually gives in to her longing for freedom and sets her free. After some time, she gives birth to a litter of puppies in relation to which the husband comes to function as a benevolent father figure. It is only the end that differs markedly between the two narratives: in Lady into fox, the wife-fox Silvia is ultimately killed by a pack of dogs during a fox hunt, while Sophia in “Mrs Fox” continues to be mysteriously missing. Other differences concern style and length, and also the fact that Garnett’s story is set in the 1880s and Hall’s takes place in the twenty-first century.

When Garnett and Hall choose to centre their respective narratives around a human-animal transformation, they take part in a world-wide tradition that has existed since ancient times (Leavy 1994). In a European context, this motif was elaborated in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE), which constitutes a frame of reference for shapeshifting in both historical and contemporary times, in genres as different as “myths and wonder tales, fairy stories and magical realist novels” (Warner 2002, 18). Indeed, it appears to be the liminality at its core that gives the human-animal transformation its ability to remain meaningful in times and places that are widely different, and in fictional genres far apart.

Within the field of literary studies, human-animal transformations have attracted attention because of their possibilities for multi-level interpretation. It is often meaningful to read them on a metaphorical level, as “really” depicting something else. However, it usually also makes sense to read them metonymically, as a story of the relationship between the human and the non-human world, and, more specifically, between human- and nonhuman animals (Lönngren 2015, 15–20; 2021). In this article, I take the distinction between metaphor and metonymy as a point of departure for a comparison between Lady into fox and “Mrs Fox.” The aim of this article is to investigate the ways in which these narratives render the ancient figure of human-animal transformation meaningful in modern society; more specifically, from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century.

Transformation as a metaphor for female emancipation

In both Lady into Fox and “Mrs Hall,” shapeshifting occurs at the story’s opening, and so we learn very little of the previous lives of the women characters involved in it. What we do get to know is nevertheless significant. In Garnett’s novel, we learn that Silvia’s¹ maiden name was Fox, a name that perhaps, the omniscient narrator speculates, derives from the fact that her family is said to have had a half-tamed fox chained up in the yard sometime before her own birth. We also learn that Silvia was already encouraged to participate in a fox hunt as a 10-year-old and that she “took great fright and disgust at it, and vomited after it was done.” The memory of this experience has led her as an adult to always speak of “the poor foxes” (1922, 3). From these sequences we learn that there is a connection between Silvia and foxes, perhaps even a hint at the possibility of reincarnation, since the fox that her parents kept was there only before her own birth. This association with foxes is the only elaboration of her pre-transformation character that goes beyond that of a loving wife.

The question of narration and focalisation is of interest here. In Lady into Fox, we learn so little about Silvia because the omniscient narrator (who sometimes addresses the reader directly) constantly focalises the husband. In “Mrs Fox,” there is also an omniscient narrator who, however, focalises the husband almost all of the time, but not entirely. On one rare occasion, before the transformation has happened, focalisation shifts to Sophia and we learn something about her beyond the realms of marriage. This happens when she and her husband are going to bed for the night: “After she has cleaned herself and joined him in bed, she dreams subterranean dreams, of forests, dark corridors and burrows, roots and earth.” (2013, 4)

Sophia’s dreams carry threefold importance in relation to possible understandings of the story’s human-animal transformation. Firstly, they signal that she is feeling trapped in her current situation, as she longs for the freedom outside the confines of the house in which she lives – and perhaps also outside of society. Secondly, the images of dark corridors and forests point towards the impenetrability and labyrinthine quality of her mind, which forms a stark contrast with the husband’s impressionist descriptions of her as a body with a set of behaviours, movements, and character traits. Thirdly, the images of earth and roots give the reader a sense of Sophia’s animal nature, her liminality, thus foreshadowing the transformation that is to come. Interestingly, just as Silvia did as a child, Sophia also vomits before the transformation (2013, 4–7); due to illness or pregnancy, we never know for sure.

These premonitions mean that it would make sense to read the human-animal transformation in Lady into fox and “Mrs. Fox” against the backdrop of European women’s emancipatory movements from the 1920s until the present. Garnett himself was deeply involved in the cultural life of London at the time and part of the Bloomsbury group centred around Virginia and Leonard Woolf, in which the relationship between the sexes was a much debated issue (Ellmann 2021, 92; Gilead 2022, 401–402). From this perspective, it is relevant to note that the transformation in Lady into Fox occurs as Mr. Tebrick tries to force Silvia to do something against her will. This happens as the young couple is walking on the moors, when suddenly they hear the sounds of a fox hunt, “hounds and later the huntsman’s horn in the distance.”

Hearing the hunt, Mr. Tebrick quickened his pace so as to reach the edge of the copse, where they might get a good view of the hounds if they came that way. His wife hung back, and he, holding her hand, began almost to drag her. Before they gained the edge of the copse she suddenly snatched her hand away from his very violently and cried out, so that he instantly turned his head.

Where his wife had been the moment before was a small fox, of a very bright red. (Garnett 1922, 5; italics in original)

Silvia’s transformation happens when her husband tries to force her to watch the fox hunt, which portrays marriage as an institution characterised by violence and coercion. Although the specific marriage depicted in Lady into Fox appears to be a happy one, the narrative constantly focalising the husband means that the reader never gets Silvia’s point of view. Moreover, the constraining and disciplining function that has historically been exercised in formalised heterosexual coupling is made visible in the fact that it is Silvia’s body which the husband, through a firm grasp of the hand and despite her apparent resistance, tries to drag in the direction he himself wants to go (this was previously noted by Fernandes 2020, 164). Silvia does not slip from his grasp until her body has been transformed, from female human to female fox, which cannot be correspondingly controlled within the confines of marriage. Thus, Silvia’s transformation appears as a variant of the swan-maiden motif, which has traditionally been used to depict female figures who transform into wild animals in order to escape their limiting existence as wives (Leavy 1994; Warner 1994, 353–356; see also Ellmann 2021, 93).

Just as in Garnett’s novel, the wife in “Mrs Fox” is depicted as much-loved and highly valued by her husband in a so far childless marriage. Since Hall’s story is set in the twenty-first century, both partners work outside the home, and the marriage seems equal enough when it comes to cleaning and cooking. As in Lady into Fox, the oppression depicted in the marital institution is subtle, and most markedly visible in the narrative’s focalising of the husband. Julia Ditter (2019, 191) claims that the husband’s gaze at his wife gives the impression of an unbridgeable gap between the two, but I propose that in “Mrs Fox,” there is greater significance to gaze and vision than that.

The definition of the husband as someone who sees is apparent even in the story’s beginning, where the second sentence reads: “All day at work he looks forward to seeing her.” (2013, 1, my italics). The husband is the one who sees, and Sophia is the one being seen; indeed, his constant focus on his wife’s body, movements, scent, and state of health generates a claustrophobic feeling. This aspect of Hall’s story offers a clear literary example of that which Laura Mulvey, in relation to film studies, has defined as “the male gaze.” In a world of sexual imbalance, Mulvey claims ((1975) 1989, 19), pleasure in looking is split between active/male and passive/female. Although Sophia’s eyes are repeatedly described, we never learn what she sees, and thus Sophia is totally defined and limited by how she appears before her husband.

It is this gaze and the activity associated with it that Sophia appropriates by turning into a fox. On the morning of the transformation – in the weekend, when the couple have the day off – Sophia skips the breakfast she usually eats; instead, she sits by the kitchen table and “keeps looking towards the window.” (2013, 8) This is the first time we are told that Sophia herself is looking at something, and her gaze tells us what previously her nocturnal dream hinted at: she wants out. Thus, when her husband proposes a walk in the nearby surroundings she immediately says yes, and it is during this stroll that the transformation happens. It starts with a depiction of how the husband sees that Sophia suddenly starts running until she is down on all fours and her body has shrunk to the size of a fox.

As Fernandes points out, the transformation makes the husband come across as “incredulous and impotent” (Fernandes 2020, 163); an impression that intensifies as the first thing Sophia does in her new form is to turn her head and look at him (2013, 11). This is something she never did as a woman. However, focalisation does not change, so instead of learning what she sees, we get the husband’s description of how her eyes and face shift as the transformation progresses: “Topaz eyes glinting. Scorched face. Vixen.” (2013, 11) Neither the narrator nor the husband understands that everything is now changed, and that Sophia has abandoned her previous position characterised by its passive “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey (1975) 1989, 19). Thus, the narrative keeps on focalising the husband, and he continues to regard her as before, even as she has changed into a fox. This inability on the husband’s part to see his wife as a subject with an agenda and a will separate from his own makes up the core of the tragedy in “Mrs Fox.”

By becoming a fox, a space is created in both of these stories, for the female development of autonomous needs. Thus, Silvia’s and Sophia’s transformations come across as “lines of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari [1975] 1986, 12) from the patriarchal regimes under which they both live, and from where there is no other way out than abandoning the human life altogether. But freedom does not come instantly. In both stories, the husband takes the vixen in his arms and carries it home and tries to live with it as before the change. However, Silvia’s and Sophia’s bodies are freed from the human patriarchal system and eventually escape oppression and expectations by asserting their own “foxiness”. In the long run, this change comes with a fundamental disinterest in sustaining a relationship with a human. Although the husbands try as best as they can, their wives’ new shapes as foxes prevent them from having the same kind of mental and physical contact with them as before, and they are also gradually forced to adjust their behaviour and habits to that of their fox-wives. Thus, the transformation overturns the power balance between the sexes, and as the vixens grow increasingly restless, the husbands eventually have to let them go.

How far from the human sphere of marriage the women in both narratives finally move is apparent as, after some time in freedom, they both give birth to a litter of puppies. The liberation that began with Silvia resisting being dragged by the hand by her husband to a spectacle she does not want to see, and Sophia refusing to be defined by her husband’s gaze, thus ends with a full-scale liberation of their bodies and sexuality. This conclusion can be linked to the fact that emancipation in 1920s England not only concerned women’s freedom of movement and self-determination but also included the questioning of sexual morality and a proclamation of freedom to organise erotic relationships and family formations beyond the boundaries of normativity (Langhamer 2000, 113–132). Also this political struggle has indeed continued into the twenty-first century, not least in the gay rights movement.

Although there are no explicit references to lesbianism in either of the texts, it would make sense to read the human-animal transformation in Lady into Fox and “Mrs Fox” as a metaphor for the abandonment of heteronormative living arrangements to the benefit of queer partnerships and alternative family formations. There is a long tradition of using the fox as a metaphor for entrapment and freedom, especially in relation to womanhood and sexuality (Baker 2019, 75–108). Also, as regards non-normative sexual desires, Lady into Fox is positioned in an intertextual relationship with, for example, Mary Webb’s novel Gone To Earth (1917), D.H. Lawrence’s short story “The Fox” (1922), Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show (1936) (Wachman 1998, 109; see also Tukacs 2012). As we have seen, this conclusion makes sense also in relation to “Mrs Fox,” not least as regards the name Sophia, which is also what the main character in Townsend Warner’s novel is called. Indeed, Hall’s story can be seen as an expression of the urge by modern feminist writers to rewrite fairy tales and classical myths, previously represented by, among others, Angela Carter and Tanith Lee.

Transformation as indicative of the human-fox relationship

As the discussion above shows, it makes sense to understand the human-animal transformation in these texts metaphorically, as “really” being about women’s emancipation. This is in line with a lot of previous research. For example, Tukacs (2012, 19) writes that Lady into Fox, in “an era when social transformations profoundly questioned and redefined the role of women,” negotiated the theme of married life and the position of women in these relationships. As regards “Mrs Fox,” Fernandes (2020, 164) makes a similar claim when she states that “Hall’s modern fable ‘Mrs Fox’ comprises an overt political commentary on gender and sexual politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”

What happens, then, if the transformation is not read metaphorically, but metonymically, with a focus on what it tells us about the relationship between the human and the non-human world, human- and non-human animals? Indeed, the depiction of the vixens in these narratives is increasingly realist as the story unfolds, something which, as Greg Garrard notes (2017, 221) in relation to Garnett’s novel, makes it more difficult to sustain a metaphorical reading.

The realist trait in Garnett’s story can be understood against the background of England in the 1920s being marked not only by gender emancipatory movements but also by ecological interests in non-human life (Czarnecki and Neverow 2013; Czarnecki and Rohman 2011; Melkas 2011). In connection to the Bloomsbury-group, these interests manifested in, among other titles, Finnish-Estonian author Aino Kallas’ novel Sudenmorsian (1928; Eng. The Wolf’s Bride 1930), Virginia Wolf’s novel Flush (1933), David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo (1925) and, of course, Lady into Fox. Hall’s story has been put in a similar context by among others Ditter (2019, 190), who claims that it is situated in a “framework for approaching animal alterity” which “generates a broader ecological consciousness in urging a readjustment of how we perceive our role as humans within the ecosystem of the nonhuman world.”

From this perspective, it is relevant to emphasise that in Lady into Fox, Silvia’s transformation happens as she refuses to watch the fox hunt, a reluctance which, as stated above, she has expressed ever since childhood. Fox hunting in its modern form emerged during the 18^th century, and was firmly established as England’s “national sport” by the 19^th. After an attack by historian E.A. Freeman in 1869, who deemed the sport cruel, the focus of the debate regarding fox hunting became the welfare of the fox (May 2013, 1, 9). Thus, Silvia’s reluctance to participate in any activity connected to hunting situates her right in the political debate about the human-animal relationship at the end of the 19^th century. Taking this stance, she becomes part of what Marti Kheel has defined as a tradition of female dislike of the male practice of hunting (1995).

In Lady into Fox, this criticism is paired with one that concerns norms and practices within different social classes. While Silvia’s transformation means that she escapes the “Victorian social customs” (Baker 2019, 82) and the bourgeois habits as regards eating, dressing and entertainment in the late 19^th century (Garrard 2017, 219), her dislike of the fox hunt as well as her death clearly displays the cruelty inherent in the upper-class English hunting practices. Thus, the novel contains critical scrutinising of norms in several social strata in late 19^th century British society – manifested in a woman’s transformation into a fox.

After Silvia’s transformation, what she previously disliked so strongly about the hunt becomes the problems of Mr. Tebrick, who worries that Silvia’s life is now continually threatened by traps, dogs and hunters. As Deleuze and Guattari point out (Deleuze and Guattari (1975 1986), 41), the line of flight is no refuge, and this becomes horribly clear as Silvia dies in the novel’s end. Thus, the novel’s design of the human-animal transformation comes across as an embodiment of the difficulties in limiting and predicting the effects of even institutionalised violence, which in this case, even though it is directed against another species, has far-reaching consequences for human life.

In “Mrs Fox,” hunting is a more subtle motif, but it is nevertheless there. Sophia and her husband live in a house on the corona of what appears to be a larger city. However, it is underlined that this area “was once heath” (2103, 4), something which connects this story to Garnett’s and also points to the urbanisation that has happened since the end of the 19^th century. As Sophia and her husband goes for the walk during which she will transform into a fox, it is clear that human activity has for a long time gravely affected the landscape, and still does:

They walk through a gateway onto scrubland, then into diminutive trees, young ash, recently planted around the skirt of the older woods. Two miles away, on the other side of the heath, towards the city, bulldozers are levelling the earth, extending the road system. (Hall 2013, 8)

The grove here comes across as a borderscape, a liminal, interstitial place between city and countryside, culture and nature – and also, as this is where the transformation happens, between human and animal. As such, the forest contributes to the story’s thematisation of border crossings, in relation to which foxes inhabit both sides. This species started to appear in British cities around the mid-20^th century. Their small size, preference for garbage bins, and relative harmlessness has been put forward as reasons for why foxes have been allowed to inhabit urban space to the extent that they have. In 2016, Lucy Jones (2016) estimated that out of the approximately 33,000 foxes living in England, around 10,000 could be found in London (211). As Sophia transforms into a fox, she would then be one out of many, and this could of course potentially draw the attention of hunters. However, the place in which she dwells is clearly not a place for hunting; as the day progresses, it will fill with “dogs tugging against leads, old couples, children gadding about.” (2013, 13)

Although no “real” hunt takes place in “Mrs Fox,” the first thing the husband does after Sophia’s transformation has begun is to chase after her; this makes Sophia come across as one of the foxes in the hunt that Mr. and Mrs. Tebrick hear right before the transformation happens in Lady into fox. But modern urban man does not hunt, so when the husband later in the story has finally, angrily, been forced to let fox-Sophia out of the house, he merely dreams of “machinery and dogs, his own brutality, and blood.” (2013, 25). Here, the fox hunt comes across as a violent practice executed by men in order to gain control over a feminised non-human world. However, since this option is only present in a dream, it also appears as out dated, a relic from an upper-class masculinity performed in the past.

The gendered connotations of the hunt connect with another aspect of the human-animal transformation in these texts, namely, that the husbands continue to regard the vixens as their wives, even after they have become non-human animals. In Lady into Fox, immediately after the transformation has taken place and Mr. Tebrick sits down on the ground next to Silvia and together with her mourns this unexpected event, between sobs he kisses her “quite as if she had been a woman, and not caring in his grief that he was kissing a fox on the muzzle.” (1922, 7) Mr. Tebrick’s kissing of his wife’s nose recurs throughout the novel, as do caresses of the beautiful soft fur and admiring descriptions of its lustre and colour and of Silvia’s well-balanced and smooth movements.

Similar tendencies as in Garnett’s novel to regard the vixen as a woman occur in “Mrs Fox,” in which it is said that right after the transformation, as soon as they are back in the privacy of the home, the husband directs his objectifying gaze at Sophia’s new form, which he studies like “a curious lover” (2013, 16). The way in which he experiences the female fox is explicitly erotic: “The texture of her belly is smooth and delicate, like scar tissue; small nubbed teats under the fur. Her smell is gamey; smoky, sexual” (2013, 16–17). Later he describes her as “a beautiful arch being.” (2013, 18).

In these sequences, the husband in both Lady into Fox and “Mrs Fox” wrestle with a dilemma that, according to Barbara Fass Leavy, is recurrent in transformation stories, namely how sexual desire should be handled in relation to someone who was, and on a mental level may still be, human, even though the body has become that of an animal (1994, 101–155). In “Mrs Fox,” the husband experiences life with the vixen as increasingly unbearable, partly because of “his unnatural longing, which can never be resolved, nor intimacy converted, even as his mind nudges against the possibility” (2013, 24). Mr. Tebrick goes further than that, as one night, under the influence of alcohol, he attempts to get down on all fours and “be a beast too like his wife.” Exactly what unfolds next we are not told; rather, this sequence is apparently so delicate it calls for an authorial intrusion: ”To what lengths he went then in that drunken humour I shall not offend my readers by relating” (1922, 36).

Later on Mr. Tebrick shall, however, state that “Were I to lust after a vixen, I were a criminal indeed” (1922, 74). The conceptualisation of human-animal sexual contact as “criminal,” along with the statement in “Mrs. Fox” that the husband’s longing for a vixen is “unnatural,” connects very well to the historical context. At the time of publication of Lady into Fox, bestiality was regulated in the Sodomy Act (Miletski 2005, 1–22), and thus considered an abomination to God and nature as well as a crime. Although this act was abolished in 1967, there remained a very strong social taboo, and these two circumstances together have been put forward as an explanation of the large-scale production of animal pornography that took place from the 1960s onwards (Grebowicz 2010, 1–17). Indeed, the common use of animals in the sex industry is one reason why sex with animals was re-criminalised in many European countries and US states at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Garrard 2017, 211–212). England followed the general development in the West in this regard and re-criminalised sexual acts with animals in 2003.

In Lady into fox, Garrard claims (2017, 220), the topic of bestiality can be seen as an obstacle against reading this novel allegorically. Moreover, it is the erotic aspect of Mr. Tebrick’s relationship to his former wife which leads to scenes of jealousy as she gives birth to her puppies, which evidently means that she has been intimate with another “man.” This makes Mr. Tebrick reflect thoroughly on the relationship between human and non-human animals, and with time, he develops an entire theology which posits non-human animals as pure, innocent, and good, and man as sinful because he cannot be as the other animals (1922, 89–90). In the isolation from human companionship in the forest, he adjusts his behaviour to his wife’s: walking on all fours, neglecting his hygiene, sleeping out in the woods. In this way, Mr. Tebrick claims that he experiences true happiness for the first time ever. Thus, the forest in Lady into Fox is rendered a similar quality as was previously noted in relation to “Mrs Fox”: as a liminal, interstitial place, a borderscape, in which the divide between city/countryside, culture/nature and human/animal is questioned and undermined. Indeed, Mr. Tebrick appears to be in the process of “becoming animal”; something which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ([1980] 2004), makes visible the inherent instability of the category “human” and relates it to other forms of life. Thus, the human-animal transformation in Lady into Fox ultimately leads not only to an overturning of the anthropocentric paradigm which places man as a superior being close to God, but also displays the instability in the category of the “human.”

Reading transformations

I have now demonstrated that it is possible to read Lady into Fox and “Mrs Fox” in two different ways, metaphorically and metonymically, and that both of these readings generate relevant meanings, albeit in different ways. This division between distance and proximity is thus one way to read transformations, but the question is if by focusing the categories human (metaphor) and animal (metonymy) as separate entities, I have not deprived the text of some of its possibilities to become meaningful. The enigma of the text, the magical, fantastic liminality of the motif of transformation in itself – how can this be understood? I suggest that there are three different ways to approach that question.

The first way is to read Garnett’s and Hall’s stories within the genre of magical realism, which is characterised by the occurrence of fantastic events in seemingly completely ordinary worlds, often without attracting much attention (see, for example, Faris 2004; Faris and Zamora 1995). This is an approach that is well represented in the previous research about these texts (see, for example, Ditter 2019), and also referred to in the literary texts themselves. For example, as the husband in “Mrs Fox” tries to find the answer to how his wife has been able to turn into a fox, he ponders the concept of magical realism, and, in this process, seeks guidance in Lady into Fox (2013, 20–21). Although it is perfectly reasonable to position these stories in relation to the magical-realist genre, whose conventions further contribute to blurring ontological borders and limits, such an approach nevertheless means that the fantastic, subversive elements of the text are explained away and rendered harmless (see Lönngren 2015, 156–157).

Therefore, I prefer to turn to my second model of explanation, which entails the attempt to re-establish the texts’ own ontology. This would meaning taking seriously the initial words in Lady into Fox:

Wonderful or supernatural events are not so uncommon, rather they are irregular in their incidence. Thus there may be not one marvel to speak of in a century, and then often enough comes a plentiful crops of them; monsters of all sorts swarm suddenly upon the earth, comets blaze in the sky, eclipses frighten nature, meteors fall in rain, while mermaids and sirens beguile, and sea-serpents engulf every passing ship, and terrible cataclysms beset humanity.

But the strange event I shall here relate came alone, unsupported, without companions into a hostile world […]. (Garnett 2022, 1).

The question of how the transformation in Lady into Fox can be understood as a “real” event was previously discussed by Gilead (2022, 402–404), who proposes that the text is a world of its own, with its own ontology. On a general level, I agree with this, but I think that the interesting questions are formulated as we relate this literary world to our own. What properties must we attribute to matter and bodies if transformations between man and animal are to be possible? Indeed, it is the firm opinion of the narrator that the transformation of Mrs. Tebrick into a fox is “an established fact”. (2022, 1). Here we can benefit from thoughts developed in the field of “new materialism,” according to which matter is presumed to have its own history, qualities and agency, independent of prevailing discourses (see Latour 2005; Bennett 2010; and others).

Temporality and scale are constructive aspects to take into account in this context (see, for example, Clark 2012). It could be argued that a literary transformation makes visible the changes different organisms undergo over time, albeit in an accelerated form. To take humans as an example, the fertilised egg is not at all like what is visible at birth, and what is made visible at birth is often very different from what is the case at the death of this organism. Like the cells in our bodies, we are all in constant transformation. From that perspective, the transformation can be seen as a making visible of processes that are constantly taking place on scales other than those from which we tend to measure the human.

The third way to approach the liminality in the figure of the animal-human transformation is to acknowledge its potential to draw attention to the non-stable boundaries between humans and their surroundings. It can be argued that the transformation between animal and man serves as that which Adorno and Horkheimer ([1944] 2002) have defined as a reminder and a restoration of a lost connection between the human and the non-human world. However, reconnection does not come without a risk. As Jacques Derrida has discussed, to overturn the hierarchy between human and animal and to question the borders between them comes with the threat of a collapse into madness ([2006] 2008, 9–10). Also Pär Segerdahl has claimed that an encounter between human and non-human that shakes the foundations of the anthropocentric world view may cause an “ontological vertigo” with unpredictable effects (Segerdahl 2014, 125–149). Indeed, the suspicion that the husbands in “Mrs Fox” and Lady into Fox are mad haunts the reader throughout these stories, but also the literary characters, who continuously ponders this possibility. It is part of the attraction of these narratives that they never provide a clear answer in this regard – neither to the reader nor to the characters themselves.

Nevertheless, these are risks that humans, in the era of “the posthuman” (Braidotti 2013) are obligated to take. As Ditter claims in relation to “Mrs Fox” (2019, 189), this story calls “into question the nature of the borders we construct, and invites us to look across the epistemological divide between humans and animals to develop a new ethic for approaching animal others.” “Mrs Fox” is more overtly post-anthropomorphic, but the call for a renewed ethics is certainly present also in Lady into Fox. In today’s hegemonic anthropocentric-capitalist approach to the non-human world – which, as we know, has resulted in an ever-deepening environmental crisis – it is the ethical approach that produces the most relevant answer to the question I posed at the outset, how Garnett’s and Hall’s design of the human-animal transformation makes it relevant in modern times.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann-Sofie Lönngren

Ann-Sofie Lönngren is a professor in literature at Södertörn university, Stockholm, Sweden. She specializes in Northern-European literature after 1880, queer theory and human-animal studies.

Notes

1. In the novel, the husband is consistently referred to as Mr. Tebrick, while Mrs. Tebrick is mostly referred to by her given name “Silvia” The explanation for this could of course be gender conventions, but also the fact that Silvia does not speak at all (because she is a fox), while, on the other hand, she is talked about and addressed a lot by Mr. Tebrick. In this article, I follow the practice in the novel and thus alternately write “Mrs. Tebrick” and “Silvia.”