The Woolf, the Horse, and the Fox: Recurrent Motifs in Jacob's Room and Orlando

Summary

References to the horse and the fox in Jacob's Room (1922) and Orlando (1928) have been noted in passing but have neither been analyzed in depth nor in relation to one another. In my examination of these two motifs, I have become particularly intrigued by what the conventions of the horse's domestication and the fox's ferality might signify and have also noticed that there are strong sexual overtones underlying some references to these two species. Let me begin, however, by tentatively aligning the horse and fox with another related and oft–discussed animal motif—the dog. With regard to dog references in Woolf 's work, various scholars—including June Dunn, David Eberly, Emily Jensen, and Ruth Vanita—have explored canine sexual significance, especially with regard to possible allusions to coded lesbian and male homosexual relationships. More recently, Jane Goldman, in “‘Ce chienest â moi’: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog,” an essay that will soon evolve into a book–length work, has tackled dog references even more rigorously and from multiple perspectives. In her argument, Goldman articulates the “troika slave–woman–dog,” a concept “rooted in the legacy of counter–enlightenment discourse that links slaves and dogs, as well as an equally entrenched patriarchal discourse that links women and dogs” (Goldman 59). Such compounding of hierarchical exploitation is similarly evident when Orlando, at the time still a man but now obsessed with the “glory” of “a man who had written a book and had it printed,” ticks off a list of former pleasures: “a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards” (61). The glib inventory, which echoes the timeworn phrase “wine, women and song,” indicates Orlando's prior preferred indulgences, a hierarchy that privileges the dog over the other items. Further, the generic woman in question would certainly be a prostitute and seems to have been less interesting to Orlando than an animal and just barely more important than the joys of gambling at cards.

Like dogs and women, horses and foxes are intrinsically categorized as “Other,” and references to them are embedded within discourses that justify abuse and persecution.