[Riverhead; 2011]
Mr. Fox, Helen Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, takes its name from the English version of the Bluebeard fairytale — in which a Mr. Fox murders and dismembers all of his wives until his soon-to-be wife Lady Mary visits his castle, discovers his chamber of bodies, and manages to avoid her fate. In that tale, Lady Mary exposes Mr. Fox by recounting in the form of a dream the murder she watched him commit, using such detail that the menacing Mr. Fox begins to shirk away from her words. In doing so, Lady Mary thwarts Mr. Fox’s horrible intentions and triumphs over him through the power of her narration.
In Oyeyemi’s reinterpretation, Mr. Fox does not shrink away when Mary accuses him of murder in the opening chapter. This Mr. Fox is a professional writer of fiction, not a fearsome castle dweller, and Mary is merely one of his characters. To her complaint he simply replies, “It’s ridiculous to be so sensitive about the content of fiction.” So saying, he attempts to wash his hands of responsibility for his other female characters, killed off with excessive violence and gore. At the same time, while Mr. Fox claims to be in love with his invented Mary, he has a real life wife named Daphne whom he mistreats by routinely ignoring her. Perhaps because Mary is also a figment of Mr. Fox’s imagination, she empathizes with the fictional characters in his stories and challenges him to do likewise.
Over the course of Mr. Fox, Oyeyemi playfully casts and recasts these two central characters into a series of loosely connected love stories. Accordingly, Mr. Fox reads more like a short story collection than it does a novel, with each story vaguely echoing rather than building upon the last. As these stories progress, Mary and Mr. Fox begin to not only write stories together, but to inhabit them as well, and as Mary transforms Mr. Fox from author to subject matter, she slowly exposes to him his own brutality.
Oyeyemi explains that she wrote Mr. Fox in reaction to an onslaught of news stories concerning male against female violence: “There was a point when every other news report concerned the death or injury of a woman or girl, at the hands of her husband or lover or ex-lover or father. I started to think about how such events are normalized… and started looking at the narrative structure of violence against women in fairytales.”
The novel is predicated on the idea that knowledge of brutality can precipitate change. At the root of each story are Oyeyemi’s musings about the transformative power of storytelling. One of Mary’s incarnations claims that she loves fairytales because of the transformations they illustrate. “Everybody was in disguise, or on their way to becoming something else,” she observes. But as in those fairytales, Oyeyemi unfortunately mitigates the disturbing nature of violence with a playful writing style and the sense that, in the end, everything will be ok.
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