“A stout fox drawn from covert, brush pointed, having buried his grandmother, runs swift for the open, brighteyed, seeking badger earth, under the leaves” (Joyce 467).
Look familiar? This is the same fox, now stout, that Stephen thought about back in the Nestor chapter of Ulysses (Joyce 22). Now, here in Circe, maybe because of the format of the chapter, written in the style of a play, internal thought isn’t able to be explicitly explained, but the stout fox shows up again in the middle of stage directions – being put in the middle of the landscape.
Though, in its second appearance, the stout fox and his story is gotten wrong again, probably highlighting the idea that it remains in Stephen’s consciousness throughout the novel. Instead of burying its mother, the stout fox “runs swift for the open” after just having buried its grandmother.
This, coming the Stephen Dedalus who has exhibited unwavering guilt about not having paid enough respect or praying over his mother’s ailing body as she died. The stout fox serves to readers of Joyce’s created universe of Ulysses as a reminder of Stephen, his guilt, and his constant thought of his own-self being directly tied to the death of his mother.
Also, important to note in this section is that the stout fox is being chased by “the pack of staghounds” who live with the “Ward Union huntsmen and huntswomen…hot for a kill” (Joyce 467). Sometimes it can be more illuminating to consider what other options an author could have made when it comes to word choice, to help understand their implicit meaning in the crafting of these particular phrases. Why Union? Why include huntswomen?
Seems like an odd choice to make if Joyce wasn’t trying to evoke the idea of bloodthirsty England chasing around poor old stout fox Stephen – particularly while we continue his story in seeing the progression of his fight with English redcoats, Privates Carr and Compton.
Fiona Bardhoshi
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