From Being to Becoming: ‘Female Will’ and the Politics of Human-to-Animal Transformation in Sarah Hall’s Mrs Fox (2013)
In traditional tales of human-animal transformation, the young wife’s bodily metamorphosis into a fox symbolises female cunning and betrayal. Sarah Hall acknowledges this tradition in her novella, Mrs Fox (2013) through a wealth of intertextual allusions to David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922) and o...
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| Опубликовано в: : | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Главный автор: | |
| Формат: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Язык: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2026
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| Предметы: | |
| Online-ссылка: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Итог: | In traditional tales of human-animal transformation, the young wife’s bodily metamorphosis into a fox symbolises female cunning and betrayal. Sarah Hall acknowledges this tradition in her novella, Mrs Fox (2013) through a wealth of intertextual allusions to David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922) and other early twentieth-century British fictions on the same subject. The article argues that Hall invokes this topos only as a starting point for the construction of her own counter-narrative. From Hall’s postfeminist perspective (Young), the young wife’s dream of escape becomes a new materialist story of Sophia’s vibrant corporal matter (Bennett) enacting a ‘no’ to her married life and expressing the capacity to swerve from the trajectory prescribed for her by her possessive and inattentive husband. Thus, Sophia’s ‘willful’ (Ahmed) transformation into a vixen may be said to respond to an embodied urge to ‘becoming animal’ (Deleuze and Guattari) that enhances a politics of female agency and assertion and gainsays classical humanist binary oppositions such as human-animal, man-woman, nature-culture, homosexual-heterosexual, etc. |
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