68 pages • 2-hour read
Fox
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and child sexual abuse.
“Mr. Fox”
Mr. Fox’s name ties him to the wily carnivore that can sneak into hen houses and make off with chickens. In folkloric traditions dating back to antiquity, foxes are associated with cunning, and this association highlights the tactics of manipulation that Fox uses against the girls he abuses and the adults who might stand in his way. In “The Wedding of Mrs. Fox,” a fairy tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm, the wealthy Mr. Fox seduces a young woman to be his bride, but she learns to her horror that her betrothed is a serial killer who preys on young women. One night, she witnesses him with his latest target and retrieves the dead girl’s ring as evidence that the events occurred. Later, she tells a story at their wedding feast, exposing his murderous tendencies to the wedding guests. He is duly punished by death. This tale is a variant of the tradition of Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” which Oates has used for retellings before (in the short story “The Blue-Bearded Lover” and the novella Beasts). Elements of the classic tale—particularly the theme of silence and speaking, the serial nature of Fox’s crimes, and the prop of the ring—play out in Oates’s novel.
Broken Dolls
While walking through the wetlands, Eunice and her father discover a broken doll, which Pfenning describes as “an ugly sight, the doll torso, bald doll head with no eyes in its sockets. Yes, something obscene about it” (30). This object has several symbolic meanings, echoing other images in the novel. The dismembered doll echoes Fox’s body, which lies torn apart a short distance away. The doll is found by one of Fox’s targets, Eunice, who killed him, rendering him empty like the doll. The doll is also a symbol of the violation of the bodies of the girls Fox victimized. Young girls often play with dolls. However, when they grow to be preteens, they often reject them as childish toys, tossing them away. In this way, Eunice may perceive the doll as a symbol of her innocence, which has been used and broken. Later in the novel, Fox also compares Genevieve to “a sweet-rag-doll kind of puppet” that he can toss around and manipulate (373). The used, broken quality of the doll is used to symbolize what Fox did to Eunice, Mary Ann, Genevieve, and others in his long career as a pedophile.
The Human Tongue
One of the most disturbing events in the novel is also one of its most important symbols. Princess Di’s retrieval of Fox’s tongue symbolically announces that Fox has been silenced. The tongue is laid at the feet of P. Cady, the headmistress of the school, who has failed in her responsibility to fully investigate Fox before hiring him. This is a symbol of her guilt. As Fox calls his genitalia “Mr. Tongue” when he is with the children, his tongue, torn out by animals, is symbolic of his castration via death. His demise eliminates his ability to violate. Further, not speaking is one of the repeated mantras that Fox drills into his targets’ psyches. His desire is for the girls to “never reveal [their] secret” (3). Like most pedophiles, his success relies on the girls’ silence. His disembodied tongue shows that he can no longer manipulate the narrative nor tell his twisted version of the truth. Finally, it takes Princess Di’s acting in an uncivilized manner, running wild through the Wetlands, to retrieve the tongue, even as she is being treated like a human child by Cady. This mirrors Eunice’s animalistic crime of passion in killing Fox, whose tongue is silenced at her feet.
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