A Second Caveat: D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox

Abstract

A S E C O N D C A V E A T : D. H. L A W R E N C E ’ S T H E F O X RONALD GRAN OFSKY McMaster University I I n a 1959 article, British critic Ian Gregor took issue with the prevailing positive critical attitude toward D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Fox. In “ The Fox: A Caveat,” Gregor argues that the story, in effect, gets away from Lawrence; that the necessary balance between symbol and narrative breaks down; and that, as a result, a gap opens up between the author’s intention and his achievement. The crucial scene in which Henry, by sheer force of will, causes the tree he is felling to strike and crush his antagonist, Jill Banford , fails to convince the critic that it is the natural and appropriate climax to the narrative.1 I agree with Gregor that there are serious flaws in The Fox, but I would like to argue that, although the balance between symbol and narrative does, indeed, break down, those flaws are not so much the result of a gap between intention and realization as they are the result of an unresolved conflict in the intention itself, a conflict which makes its way into the fabric of the tale almost unnoticed and which is embodied in the char­ acter of Henry Grenfel. Readers usually see Henry as a typically Lawrentian personification of a natural force which brings about significant change in the life of a woman caught in a web of unnatural confinement. His character is viewed as static. Graham Hough writes that, when Henry’s course “leads to an act of halfdeliberate and brutal violence, we feel this to have sprung naturally, almost inevitably, from his being.” 2 George Ford has called Henry “an agent of release from isolation rather than himself released.” 3 I do not see Henry Grenfel as a simple natural force nor as an unchanging catalyst. I believe that his character undergoes a significant development during the course of The Fox and that the development is an expression of Lawrence’s own equivocal attitude to primitivism, an attitude which Lawrence explores in a more explicit way in subsequent fiction. E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C anada, x iv , i , March 1988 Ian Gregor assumed that the then-unavailable first version of The Fox, written in 1918, ended with Banford’s death. He argues that the abrupt switch to direct commentary in the final version is Lawrence’s attempt to convince the reader by argumentation where his narrative has failed by demonstration. We have known for some time now that the original story, in fact, ends with the marriage of Henry and M arch: And on the morrow they were married, although to Banford it seemed utterly impossible. Yet it was so. And he seemed so cocky, in his quiet, secret way. And Banford was so curiously powerless against him, and March was so curiously happy. . . . He had to go away, in ten days[’] time after the marriage. She suffered when he was gone, and he suffered in going. But he went in the inevitable decision to come back, and his decisions fulfilled themselves almost like fate, unnoticeably. He would come home by instinct.4 So ends the short story. Banford is chagrined but very much alive at the close. The fox, too, survives in the 1918 version. Henry is an altogether more natural, less scheming young man, whose most outstanding trait is the ability to combine will and instinct, as above. It is only in the novella, written at the end of 1921, when Lawrence added what he called “a longer tail” to the short story, that Henry becomes the hunter who stalks and brings down his prey: first the fox, then Banford. In the novella there occurs a dissociation of will from instinct, as Henry’s character develops under the pressure of Lawrence’s ambivalence. In Henry, Lawrence presents a primitive man who might have descended from Frazer’s Golden Bough. Feline curiosity is attributed to him repeatedly. He is described in feral terms both when the description is...