DOI: 10.62352/ideas.1997799 ISSN: 2757-9549

Subalternity and the Spatial Politics of Gender and Species in D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox

Rana Sağıroğlu
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This study advances a spatial examination of patriarchal and speciesist hierarchies in D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox (1922). It traces how the marginalisation of women and animals is organised through the spatial regimes of a wartime English farm. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s conceptualisation of the subaltern as a subject defined by the absence of institutionalised voice, the study positions the novella’s two female protagonists and the fox as subjects whose survival depends on spaces beyond institutional control. Nancy Fraser’s concept of subaltern counterpublics extends this framework spatially, and the study reads Bailey Farm as a precarious realm of survival and labour, held together by use rather than ownership and vulnerable to intrusions. The fox occupies an analogous position as a killable body under surveillance whose killing restores territorial order. Henry Grenfel’s arrival, his killing of the fox and his possible complicity in Jill Banford’s death together consolidate the system of patriarchal and anthropocentric governance. Reading the women and the fox together, this study argues that The Fox exposes the mechanisms by which modern rural order secures itself through the naturalisation of intersecting hierarchies of gender and species.

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