Lady into Fox (David Garnett, 1922): Un-Weaving a Tailor-Made Gender or Re-Taming the Shrew?

Abstract

Abstract One day, while going for a walk with her husband, the young Mrs Tebrick turns into a fox. At first, they both try to keep things the way they were. The lady-fox dresses, drinks tea and plays cards with her husband until she breaks herself free of conventions and opts for a wild life in the forest which Mr Tebrick apparently accepts, claiming an unchanged marital love. One wonders though whether this metamorphosis sincerely unwinds the tailor-made gender Mrs Tebrick had to endorse in her marriage and whether Mr Tebrick’s full freedom of speech honestly echoes an agonistic discourse revealing injustice, a courageous parrhesiastic protest against compulsory gendered structures, Parrhesia being, according to Foucault, a “transhistorical possibility we have” to speak up against the powerful. In other words: Is David Garnett critically re-gendering “The Shrew”, un-weaving a tailor-made gender, or simply re-taming her anew for a XXth century readership?