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D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Fox is regarded as the supreme work in which Lawrence was tinkering with highly artistic vision and purest inspiration. The approach to The Fox I am proposing is a Lacanian reading to present the working of the unconscious and desire. Jacques Lacan combines features of classical psychoanalysis with linguistics. Sigmund Freud argues that condensation and displacement are the two factors of the form assumed by dreams. Lacan has correlated essential modes of the functioning of unconscious processes, condensation and displacement, with Roman Jokobson’s linguistic axes of metaphor and metonymy. In The Fox, unconscious content is condensed as metaphor and displaced as metonymy, and these substitution and combination are the mechanisms through which the character’s desire operates. I hope to define that March’s visionary fox is a Freudian condensation and Lacanian metaphor which means the symbol of sexual vitalities and the suppressed desire to mate. As her companion Banford embodies March's repression, Banford represents the powerful inhibitions against union with the male. As her characteristics of being dreaminess and semi-consciousness show, March is suspended between the pull of unconscious and the counterpull of her conscious will. March’s two dream sequences about the fox can be analyzed by Freud’s dream work process. Her first dream in which fiery foxtail brushes her mouth mirrors a repressed physical drive and her fear of penetration in sexual intercourse. In her second dream, like a wish-fulfillment, March dreams about Banford’s death because she wants to get rid of Banford. However, as March covers Banford’s body with the fox skin, she seems to desire the union with Banford like her mother as the primal lack. In addition, the hunting metaphor which pervades the story is pivotal role in a hunter-quarry relationship between man and woman. By repeating the animal images associated with the three main characters, Lawrence makes the link between the fox and Henry. March is portrayed with rabbit while Banford is described as bird or chicken. Fox-like Henry imagines March as an animal to be preyed upon, and he kills Banford by allowing the tree to fall on her. Like the fox, Henry intrudes the farm to raid the hen house, he now hunts two women as a fox does. The fox is condensed as a metaphor in that it not only acts through the desire toward sexual union and life force, but it also reflects March’s desire to escape the mother’s grip upon her in the Imaginary order. Metaphor, ironically, operates through the omission of latent thoughts which is a sort of obsession with Banford as March’s mother figure. Although March gains Henry in marrying him, on the Symbolic level, she still wants Banford like a demanding conventional mother, as her primal desire in the Imaginary order. In this way, March’s unfulfilled desire is endlessly deferred through her contradictory attitude to changing target of desire. Lacan argues that symptom is a metaphor and desire is a metonymy. Reading the text through metaphor and metonymy can demystify the linguistic workings of the unconscious in The Fox with all its complexities.
