This novella has caught my attention since those days in which the teacher was introducing the texts that we are supposed to read during this course. What I found interesting about this story is that it was centered in a man who arrives to a farm owned by two women that supposedly had a kind of relationship. Even though in the novella is never said in an explicit way the sort of relationship they had, the topic and its development caught my attention considering the period of time in which it was written and how strong were the gender roles in society.
If we go back to The Fox, Bandford is described as a small, thin, delicate thing, and March as more robust, and also it says that she had learned carpentry. Considering this features, we can easily say that Bandford was the female and March the male of the relationship. However, if we look into the personalities of both of them, Bandford was the principal investor of the farm and the one that was in charge of making decisions, whereas March was more introverted and had a submissive attitude. The fact that they run a farm, live together and even sleep in the same bed, was something completely normal in their own world, the farm. Nevertheless, when Henry arrives and sees all of this, it is like he does not conceive the idea of the two girls' lifestyles, and he develops a fixation towards March and all he wanted to do was marry her.
In Henry we can see a strong patriarchy role, because when he meets the girls, he feels that if he marry March, he would make her free of her reality and by making March his, she would feel like a real women, and Henry like a real man. March would stop doing man work, and would have the female role that she is supposed to have as she is a woman. So, we can say that Henry arrives to the farm in order to disrupts the reality existing there, that was completely different as the typical one existing in the modernism era.
All things gathered, I am really interested in going deeper through this novella and the different meanings behind it, since I am really into know more about how are gender roles portrayed in literature.
I think it's really interesting this topic for many reasons; as you stated in your entry, when I started to read The Fox I thought that Brandford was the female and March the male in their relationship, but as we saw in the book, it was just a stereotype. Henry, on the other hand, was this young man who tried to change the lifestyle of these two women and he tried to posses March, he tried to change this "uncommon" way of living in those days and he tried to invert the role of March, he wanted to become March as a ordinary woman in that era.
ResponderEliminarI found really interesting the way Lawrence put this characters into conflict and I really liked the way you analyzed the roles in this novella.
I have to highlight the way you, as Vania said, analyzed the characters and their roles, it is amazing how a writer can play with your sense of imagination, for instance that Banford and March had a relationship. It is breathtaking too, the way the fox is introduced and how it ends... an interesting book, an interesting critic, an interesting way of how the events were developed.
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