The Fox by D. H. Lawrence

The Fox is a novella published in 1922. The setting is a small English farm in 1918. Two women, Ellen March and Jill Banford, usually referred to by their last names, in their late 20s and with marriage seeming unlikely, have decided to try their hand at farming. It isn’t going well. They got started three years earlier with money given them by Banford’s father but the seed money is running out. They had two cows but had problems with both and sold them. The chickens won’t lay eggs and many are lost to a fox. The action begins one evening when a soldier, Henry Grenfield, appears at their door. The war is over but he’s not completely relieved of duty. He comes in for tea. It becomes too late for him to find lodging in the village so the women let him stay overnight in their guest room and then he becomes their lodger in exchange for his help on the farm.

I seem to have stumbled upon a sub-genre. Two women sharing a house together. A man appears seeking a room, but actually seeking more than just a place to stay. He becomes a lodger and insinuates himself into the women’s lives. He proposes marriage to one of the women, but with ulterior motives. One of the women dies. That describes the major plot device of The Fox, and also The Aspern Papers, and also Lolita, and probably many others.

In The Fox, it’s March who receives Henry’s proposal. The idea pops into his head out of the blue. He’s walking back to the farmhouse one evening admiring the cozy scene and thinks to himself that he’d be happy living there permanently and that leads immediately to a plan to marry March. Why not? He seduces March. She’s skeptical but amenable. Despite having no romantic feelings for him she’s attracted to his intense spirit, which she identifies with the fox that has been bedeviling the chickens. Banford is against the plan. She quickly insists that if Henry and March do marry she will keep the farm and they will have to go away. Henry remains committed to March but changes his plans to take her to Canada with him.

There’s something queer in all this. March and Banford are not presented as a romantic couple but they are certainly a couple. Lawrence says on the first page, introducing the women and their life on the farm, “March was more robust. … She would be the man about the place.” Two paragraphs later he describes her as looking “almost like some graceful, loose-balanced young man.” March does four-fifths of the work on the farm, and doesn’t mind the extra load. She feels it her role to be responsible and to take care of Banford. March is taciturn where Banford is chatty. When Henry first appears as a stranger at the door Banford is frightened; March picks up her gun. Though sex is never implied the women do sleep together, despite having a vacant guest room. And when the idea of marriage comes up Banford responds with anger and jealousy, not because Henry prefers March, but because Henry might take March away from her.

The queerness of the story continues when one wonders why Henry would choose the masculine March over the feminine Banford. But this is where the sexuality in the story gets ugly. This isn’t a love story; it’s a story about dominance and psychological manipulation, and although the story begins by subverting gender norms the story ends with standard sex roles reaffirmed in a dark and oppressive conclusion. Lawrence presents March’s masculine role as ill-fitting and that what she needs, and secretly wants, is to be dominated by a man. She’s ineffectual as a pseudo-man, incapable of making a success of the farm, or shooting the fox when given the chance, which Henry does easily. Henry, meanwhile, is attracted to March not because of her masculinity but because he’s excited by the challenge of forcing this strong woman to submit to him.

I don’t see a spoiler alert necessary in a hundred year-old story, so here’s what happens. After a few weeks at the farm Henry is called back to his military camp a few hours away. March has promised to marry him, but, in a letter, March calls off the marriage and implies that Banford talked her out of it. Furious, Henry gets a twenty-four hour leave, borrows a bicycle and returns to the farm. At the farm, March has been trying to chop down a dead tree and is failing, again, at a man’s job. Henry offers to help. He realizes that Banford, distracted by some wayward ducks, is potentially under the path of the falling tree, if the tree twists as it falls just so. He mildly warns her to move. She, defiant, refuses. The tree falls, twists, and kills her. With Banford removed (just as Charlotte Haze is removed in Lolita, and Juliana Bordereau is removed in The Aspern Papers) Henry and March are married.

The accident with the falling tree feels like a completely contrived deus-ex-machina. My response was, “Oh, please.” And the idea that the horrible death of her friend would be followed by a marriage that her friend objected to, to a man she doesn’t really love, who was responsible for her friend’s death (even if she does believe it was an accident) just seems ridiculous. In any case, married life doesn’t lead to a promise of much happiness in the story for either Henry or March.

Lawrence is best known for Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which I’ve never read. I did read Women in Love, after seeing the movie and getting excited by the scene where Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestle in the nude. (The movie was directed by Ken Russell using a screenplay adapted by Larry Kramer.) I’ve also read Sons and Lovers, which is an autobiographical story of Lawrence’s childhood. Lawrence has a reputation as being a sex-postive liberationist, celebrating and freeing our human, animal, natures, from the strictures of 19th century Edwardian culture. I was more than happy to see two Edwardian gentleman strip down and grapple together in a quasi-sexual act, or imagine an Edwardian lady violating class boundaries in order to get it on with her gardener, thus, it was quite disappointing to have in The Fox a story that could easily have accommodated a happy lesbian couple or genderqueer polyamorous thruple end in murder and heterosexist misogyny. Maybe I’m asking too much of a novella from 1922 and an author who died in 1930 but girl, please.