Stefania Michelucci: The Relativity of Death in DHL's The Fox
Stefania Michelucci: The Relativity of Death in DHL's The Fox
Stefania Michelucci: The Relativity of Death in DHL's The Fox
1
The Golden Bough, Ancient Art and Ritual, The Elementary Form of Religious Life.
also hidden sexual desire (what is forbidden, the man, the masculine itself, according to
Doris Lessing). All these aspects are there, of course, but there is also something more,
the discovery of an alternative world, of an unspeakable otherness which March cannot
reveal to the other characters of the story. It could be described as a longing for a pre-
Christian, mythological past when all nature might be felt to be full of magic and human
beings could believe themselves to be part of it. Such magic was experienced by
Lawrence himself during his stay in Cornwall, which he described as his “first move to
Florida”: “It seems as if the truth were still living here, growing like the sea holly.[…] I
do like Cornwall […] One can feel free here […] feel the world as it was in that flicker
of pre-Christian Celtic civilization, when humanity was young.” (Letters II, 491, 492,
495). And young – just a boy – who has still to grow into a man, is the male protagonist
of the story, who suddenly interrupts the isolation of the two women. He himself seems
to have appeared from nowhere, magically, like the fox. He breaks into their house one
evening, penetrating their lives and subtly destroying the balance between them. He
soon conceives the idea – although at first in a hesitant and puzzled way – of settling
down on the farm and marrying March. The look of the soldier has a hypnotic effect on
the latter (“for March he was the fox”), as if the animal were the totem of the young
man, his ancient ego, his hidden, wild, mysterious identity. From her own inescapable
attraction for the fox, March finds an obliged way out – not something she has been
looking for, but something which is violently imposed upon her by the young man –
only after the death of the animal. The episode is very revealing as it happens at night,
when the young soldier is hunting out of anger and frustration (he cannot stay inside or
sleep after hearing the bad things Banford has been saying about him). In the logic of the
tale, as in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of Folktales (1928), once the first antagonist
(the fox) is destroyed, the subconsciousness of the girl becomes free again. From now on
the fight between Banford and Henry for the territory and for the contended prey
(March) becomes fiercer and fiercer: hate and anger, as well as a blind egoism, permeate
human relationships after the disappearance of the fox. This fighting game ends with
Banford’s death and, as regards March and Henry, with the vague perspective of a future
together in a far away land (Canada), which leaves them uncertain, sadly isolated (there
is hardly any verbal or bodily communication between them), on the wild Cornish coast
at the end of the story.
2 D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, edited by Bruce Steele, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 213,
216.
..
That is what happens in The Fox, when the young soldier goes out in the night; he is
not going willingly to kill the fox, he is killing the animal because he feels thwarted,
oppressed by the words of the two women. As for Banford, he cannot admit to
himself the desire to murder her. Yet, he has to win the battle in the jungle of
contemporary existence and for the moment there is only the blind elimination of the
obstacle, with no thought of the consequences. It cannot be an intentional murder
because Henry did not know what they were going to do when he arrived at the farm;
he helped March hew the tree and told Banford to move. Being stubborn and
opposing him, she refused, but she could as well have moved away from the scene.
Yet, the tree falls on her because Henry cuts it down in the way he knows is best for
him, to kill her! And she dies.
In the existential watershed brought about by the disaster of World War I
Lawrence is trying to consider and redefine from a multiple, anthropological and
biological perspective the basic values of human existence, that is death, life, the
relationships between human beings and nature, from a private level (the microcosm
of a couple) to a public one (the macrocosm of a new society as in Kangaroo and in
The Plumed Serpent). But in spite of all efforts and attempts, there is, at least in the
final part of The Fox, no hook, no real hope (apart from a far away land to be reached
in the future (“Yes, I may. I can’t tell. I can’t tell what it will be like over there.”) to
achieve the longed for happiness and a satisfying life together.