Fox (Animal)
Language: English
Pages: 206
ISBN: 1861892977
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Whether portrayed as an unrepentant thief, a shape-shifter, or an outlaw, the fox’s primary purpose in literature, Wallen demonstrates, is to disrupt human order. In Chinese folklore, for example, the fox becomes a cunning mistress, luring human men away from their wives. Wallen also discusses the numerous ways in which fox-related terms have entered the vernacular, from “foxy lady” to the process of “foxing,” or souring beer during fermentation. Thoughtful and illuminating, Fox shows that this lovely creature is as beguiling as it is controversial.
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according to Ovid, enacts the legend of a girl who wrapped a vixen in straw, then set it afire, letting it run into the cornfields and burn the crops. Ovid’s legend recalls an equally brutal biblical scene describing how Samson, when having problems with the Philistines, angrily caught 300 foxes ‘and he turned them tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails. And when he had set fire to the torches, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up the
. . The natures of their matter are of the same kind as the locality where they exist.’5 What is more, he also says that animals’ ‘food differs chiefly according to the matter out of which they are constituted. For each one’s growth comes naturally out of the same matter.’6 Since foxes burrow in the earth, they would be made of earth, and would even eat that which they are made of, for ‘what is natural is pleasant; and all pursue their natural pleasure’.7 Aristotle’s word for ‘natural’ here is
signifies the lady’s sexual appeal remains unstated, and unstatable. In the film Pulp Fiction, when Mia Wallace, played by Uma Thurman, describes to John Travolta the pilot film she made, she says the title was ‘Fox Force Five’, fox because the main characters are all foxy chicks, force because they are a force to be reckoned with, and five because there are one, two, three, four, five of them. (The title also alludes to Foxforce, the blaxsploitation and martial arts film of 1976 by Cirio H.
pecking the fox-cubs and the vixen herself; when the ravens see this they come to their aid against the aesalon as against a common foe.’11 Here the animals do not just prey on one another for food or territory, but because, like humans, they actively and consciously dislike one another. As an officer in the Roman army, Pliny colours his descriptions of animals with the martial tones of a warrior used to weighing up the friendships and conflicts that potential enemies and allies bring with them.
beautiful harmony – and three-way sex. Tao frightens his brothers with a fox carcass in Stanley Tong’s Fox Ghost (2002). Rainia Huntington points out in her study of spirit-fox narratives that ‘sex is one of the possible aspects of an exchange with the spirit world’, although it is not the only one.7 She points to a traditional analogy, that the most lustful people are prostitutes, just as the most lustful animals are foxes, to emphasize the point that sex with spirit-foxes seldom brings
