Changing Skins and Blurring Borders: Woman-Animal Metamorphosis and the Posthuman in Sarah Hall’s “Mrs Fox”

Abstract

In current times, as defined by the connecting waves of technologically mediated globalisation and the intensification of threats to ecological and social stability, human impact on the other inhabitants on Earth and on the planet itself is not only undeniable, but also irremediable and significantly damaging. Hence, it is of utmost urgency to engage in sustainable practices that meet the social and environmental needs of the contemporary world ― an endeavour which requires the radical decentring and redefinition of the human subject in ethically accountable ways. In a critical and theoretical effort to deconstruct obsolete, unproductive conceptions of subjectivity, thinkers in the fields of Posthumanism and Animal Studies have resorted to the exploration of human-animal interactions as a fundamental gesture towards the invalidation of hegemonic ontological categories and the eventual consolidation of new, generative identitarian alternatives. It is on the basis of such considerations that this dissertation aims to analyse the negotiations of identity that emerge from the logic-defying encounter between human and non-human animals in “Mrs Fox”, a short story written by the extensively recognised contemporary British author Sarah Hall. A creative, textual articulation of posthuman becomings, this narrative exploits the inherent liminality of the short story genre as a site of dissidence and diversity as well as the remarkable effectiveness of the literary trope of human-animal metamorphosis to blur the species divide. As such, Hall’s “Mrs Fox” ultimately brings to the fore the affirmative approach to difference and the constitutive embodied and embedded inter-relationality that characterise posthuman, post-anthropocentric configurations of subjectivity.