Abstract

Abstract:Describing the metamorphosis of a beloved wife into a vixen, David Garnett's novella Lady into Fox does not depict a possible world that is remote from our actual one. This metamorphosis is a metaphor, a speech act embedded in a literary description of actual reality, in which marriage, dissociated from natural, free untrammeled love, turns into a hunt—terminating in the horrible death of the wife as a hunted vixen. The unity of the literary realism and fantasy, as a metaphor, is what makes Lady into Fox such a moving novella.