Fox

What if one animal could reveal everything we fear, desire, and repress about ourselves? In Fox, Martin Wallen argues that the story of the fox—spanning natural history, myth, language, commerce, and cinema—is ultimately a story about humanity’s uneasy relationship with nature and the instincts we try to conceal. Wallen contends that our treatment of the fox, alternately celebrated and vilified, mirrors our cultural attempts to separate civilization from the wild, reason from desire, and morality from instinct.

Across centuries and continents, the fox has been branded with contradiction: cunning yet charming, wicked yet wise, alluring yet dangerous. The book traces how naturalists, theologians, artists, hunters, and filmmakers have obsessed over this small canid precisely because it unnervingly resembles us. To understand the fox is, in a sense, to confront our own ambiguous nature—the animal part we try to repress while simultaneously romanticizing it.

A Creature of Contradiction

Wallen opens with Aristotle’s view of the fox as an incomplete and wicked animal—cold, earthly, and deceptive. The philosopher’s taxonomy physically encodes moral judgment: the fox’s bones, dark den, and secretive nature make it inferior to humans, closer to base materiality. Yet even in antiquity, a competing fascination appears in Lucretius’s recognition of the fox’s dolus—its survival through clever deception. Over time, these conflicting views fossilize into centuries of lore defining the fox alternately as villain, trickster, seducer, and symbol of intelligence.

Human Projection and Symbol

Every culture projects its anxieties onto the fox. In Christian literature it becomes the Devil’s avatar; in the Andes, a spiritual messenger; in Japan, a shape-shifting kitsunē representing transformation and erotic temptation. The fox’s ambiguity—part divine, part demonic—lets it absorb the meanings each society needs most. Whether it burrows underground or seduces under moonlight, it always stands at the margins, mediating between worlds: earth and sky, nature and culture, male and female, reason and instinct.

A Mirror of Civilization

According to Wallen, the harder humans have tried to repress the fox’s symbolic chaos, the more we’ve relied on it to perform social rituals of order. English fox-hunting, for instance, emerged not as mere sport but as a moral theater in which chaos was ritually destroyed. The hunted fox became the outlaw sacrificed for society’s cleanliness and hierarchy. Even in commerce and modern culture—fur fashion, film, advertising—the fox’s death or stylized image conceals the tension between desire and denial. Behind every glove, beer ad, or car named “Fox” lurks the ghost of a creature that cannot be domesticated yet continually defines the edges of human civilization.

Modern Reinterpretations

By the twentieth century, the fox’s meaning had flipped again. In cinema—from Michael Powell’s Gone to Earth to Hitchcock’s Marnie and Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends—the fox becomes a victim rather than a villain, a symbol of repressed desire and social outsiderhood. Asian filmmakers reinterpret the spirit-fox as a metaphor for modernity’s loss of mythic consciousness. Through film, Wallen argues, we reveal that our fascination with the fox is an allegory of our own cultural estrangement from nature and sexuality. The more we chase the fox, the more its image leads us back to the pursuit of ourselves.

Why It Matters

Wallen’s thesis invites you to see how our definitions of nature—scientific, moral, and aesthetic—are tangled with our fears about the body, eroticism, and disorder. The fox becomes a living metaphor for ambiguity itself, resisting the binaries that structure human thought. In exploring myths from Aristotle to Gumiho, and markets from fur farms to Hollywood, Wallen reveals that we project our moral stories onto the natural world to make culture feel safe. By tracing the fox’s cunning through history, he shows that the boundaries between human and animal, reason and instinct, are not lines but thresholds through which fire still glows.

Wallen’s journey begins with natural history. He argues that scientific attempts to classify the fox have always been moral stories in disguise. From Aristotle’s hierarchical taxonomy to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary logic, the fox keeps slipping through definitions—its ambiguity disrupting neat categories of species, behavior, and morality.

Aristotle’s Wicked Earth-Dweller

Aristotle saw the fox as literally “bony” and cold because it lived close to the soil. His anatomy became metaphysics: bone meant earth, earth meant imperfection, imperfection meant wickedness. The fox’s den was both its home and its moral downfall, marking it as lowly and hidden. From this view, Western natural history inherited a belief that the fox’s ability to conceal itself in darkness symbolized deceit.

Renaissance and Enlightenment Revisions

Buffon, the eighteenth-century French naturalist, reimagined the fox as the aristocrat of the animal world. His fox was intelligent, aesthetic, and even gentlemanly: hunting for sport rather than hunger. Wallen notes the irony—Buffon’s refinement replaces Aristotle’s condemnation with admiration for precisely the qualities that humans had once called sinful. The fox becomes an analog for elite taste, “a creature of circumspect sentiment.”

Modern Science and Ambiguous Identity

When modern biologists expanded fox classification to twenty-one species, they inadvertently revived Aristotle’s moral language. Terms like Pseudalopex (“false fox”) and Atelocynus (“incomplete dog”) reveal how science still measures foxes against human ideals. Wallen describes the genus names as fossilized prejudices disguised as objectivity. Even Linnaeus’s naming of Vulpes vulpes—the “true fox”—presumes a single authentic model from which all variations must be “false.”

Adaptability as Ambiguity

For Wallen, what fascinates scientists becomes the fox’s survival strategy. Its adaptability to every habitat—Arctic, desert, city—makes it “unclassifiable.” Modern researchers like David Macdonald and J.D. Henry portray foxes as almost feline in their hunting style, agile, graceful, and solitary. The fox’s convergence of dog-like and cat-like traits destroys categorical order itself, making it biologically ambivalent and symbolically subversive.

A Moral of Scientific Storytelling

By showing how taxonomy carries hidden judgment, Wallen reveals that even modern science tells myths. When Aristotle called the fox wicked for living underground, he mirrored our fear of what lies beneath consciousness. When Buffon turned it into an aristocrat, he projected class hierarchies onto nature. Every naturalist, Wallen suggests, rewrites human ethics onto the animal world, transforming empirical observation into moral allegory.

If you’ve ever wondered why foxes appear in nearly every folklore tradition, Wallen shows that this global repetition is no coincidence. Myths about foxes, from Greece to Japan to Peru, crystallize humanity’s anxiety about boundary crossing—the fear and fascination of transformation, deception, and desire.

Greek and Christian Origins

In ancient Greece, the Teumessian fox terrorized Thebes as a creature fated never to be caught. When Zeus turns both fox and chasing dog into stone, he establishes the eternal tension between pursuit and evasion—the dynamic that defines human relation to nature. By the early Christian era, the fox reappears as the Devil himself, burrowing into the human soul. Physiologus moralizes this instinctive cunning into sin, linking physical concealment with moral disguise.

Reynard the Fox and Medieval Satire

Wallen devotes rich detail to Reynard, the medieval beast epic that transformed the devilish fox into a witty antihero. Reynard’s labyrinthine castle, Maleperduys, becomes a metaphor for the fox’s subterranean intelligence—a mind full of passages and exits. The story’s popularity, later influencing writers from Ben Jonson (Volpone) to Goethe (Reineke Fuchs), shows how Europeans came to admire the cunning they feared. The fox became the outlaw of imagination, a figure of sly resistance to authority.

South American and Arctic Symbolism

Among Andean peoples, the fox—especially the culpeo—is a guide and parent figure. It mediates between worlds, helping youth cross into adulthood and connecting agriculture with cosmic fertility. In Arctic shamanic lore, foxes lead initiates through unseen paths between life and death. Wherever they appear, foxes embody liminality—the in-between state that Western systems try to deny.

Asian Spirit-Foxes and Shapeshifting

Japanese kitsunē and Chinese Huli jing tales elevate the fox into mystical complex figures. The fox’s tail ignites with foxfire, transforming it into human form. These stories—such as the legend of the Jewel Maiden Tamamo no Mae—blend eroticism, wisdom, and danger. They compose a theology of desire where enlightenment and lust intertwine. Fox-possession cults persisted for centuries, with families accused of harnessing fox spirits for wealth or revenge. Wallen’s portrayal of these myths invites you to see how cultures externalize the forbidden and the ecstatic alike.

Universal Themes of Transformation

Wallen concludes that all fox myths revolve around transformation—the violation of categories that human societies depend on. Whether the fox seduces, guides, deceives, or enlightens, it destabilizes structure. To believe in the fox, he implies, is to accept that nature and morality are fluid; that what we fear in cunning, sexuality, and disguise may simply be our own capacity for change.

What do we mean when we call someone a “fox”? In his linguistic exploration, Wallen unpacks how human language itself becomes a map of our symbolic obsession. Across centuries, the word “fox” multiplies into idioms, metaphors, and names—each carrying residues of moral and sexual meaning.

The Linguistic Trickster

Japanese telephone greetings like “moshi moshi” confirm that foxes are unable to pronounce certain sounds—an everyday ritual of safety against supernatural deception. In English, “foxy” translates moral suspicion into compliment: what was once a deceitful thief becomes a seductive heroine. Linguistic evolution reveals cultural adaptation; every new usage marks a negotiation between fear and fascination.

Etymology and Object Naming

Wallen catalogues an extraordinary range of plants and objects named for the fox: foxglove, fox-tail grass, fox-grape, or the Japanese “fox’s candle.” Each name translates natural curiosity into metaphorical relation. The foxglove’s bells, said to muffle the sound of foxes’ paws when they steal chickens, mirror our need to make mythology domestic—to turn fear into decoration.

Family, National, and Military Associations

From Irish clan names like Sionnach (Fox) to Native American Wakoha tribes, the term becomes identity. Generals like Mikhail Kutuzov, Francis Marion, and Erwin Rommel earn epithets—the Fox of the North, the Swamp Fox, the Desert Fox—testifying that the trickster’s cunning once condemned now defines heroism. The reversal exemplifies linguistic revaluation: what was wicked becomes admirable.

Sex, Humor, and Everyday Speech

In modern slang, “foxy” shifts into erotic compliment. Wallen connects this to English drinking idioms like “to hunt the fox” (to drink to excess) and “to flay the fox” (to vomit). Even pollution of beer—called “foxy” when sour—echoes moral contamination. Uma Thurman’s “Fox Force Five” in Pulp Fiction serves as a pop-culture echo of centuries-old sexual ambivalence. Language never stops playing with the fox because we never stop negotiating its dual meanings: purity and corruption, cunning and charisma.

Meaning as Mirror of Society

For Wallen, linguistic foxing captures how words embody cultural transmission. Every idiom and metaphor about the fox carries our attempt to tame complexity with humor. We “fox” paper, boots, and beer—the verb implying stain, modification, or trick. The fox enters speech the way it enters cities—quietly, indistinguishably, reshaping boundaries between the wild and the civilized mind.

Wallen’s chapter on fox-hunting is both historical and anthropological, interpreting the sport as a ritual enactment of domination. Fox-hunting, he insists, dramatizes Britain’s moral and class struggle—where killing the fox becomes a symbolic act of purifying society from its own unruly instincts.

From Pest to Sport

In seventeenth-century England, the fox was vermin, killed for bounties. By 1750, when Hugo Meynell pioneered the Quorn hunt, sport had replaced necessity. The fox’s death no longer protected livestock; it preserved aristocratic prestige. The hunt became a stage on which class identity played out—an outdoor theatre of hierarchy reinforced through costume, manners, and violence.

The Ritual of the Kill

Paintings by Sawrey Gilpin and Thomas Gainsborough depict ecstatic chaos—hounds tearing at foxes under noble supervision. Later art sanitized this savagery, turning blood sport into pastoral spectacle. By Victorian times, fox-hunting symbolized respectable masculinity and rural virtue. Wallen likens the hunt’s phases—The Meet, The Chase, The Kill—to medieval liturgy. The fox’s execution becomes the ceremony through which order triumphs over disorder.

Gender and Social Transformation

By the nineteenth century, women like Trollope’s Lizzie Eustace joined the hunt, transforming it into social performance. The fox, long demonized, fades from visibility while etiquette and fashion dominate. Wallen argues this disappearance mirrors moral sublimation—the conversion of violence into ritual propriety. A drag hunt, he notes, with no real fox, feels soulless because the symbolic outlaw is missing. Without the fox, society loses its reflection of suppressed aggression.

The Ban and Its Meaning

When Britain banned hunting in 2005, it wasn’t ecological reform but class realignment. Wallen compares it to the Protestant destruction of the king’s deer during Cromwell’s revolution—the same transfer of power. He connects fox-hunting’s persistence to the enduring myth that “civilization sustains itself through ritual violence.” The hunted fox, condemned yet indispensable, embodies our need to perform control over the natural chaos within ourselves.

The fox’s entry into the marketplace completes its transformation from myth to commodity. Wallen calls this chapter “The Commercial Fox” to reveal how capitalism absorbs and disguises the wild under luxury, fashion, and consumer desire. Here the fox becomes property, product, and advertisement—all while retaining its cultural mask of charm.

From Bagmen to Fur Farms

Initially, imported “bagged” foxes sustained England’s hunts. Their sale for ten to fifteen shillings converted death into profit. By the nineteenth century, fur trade replaced sport as the primary source of vulpine value. Figures like Charles Dalton and Robert Oulton bred Arctic foxes in captivity, mapping the origin of industrial fur farming. Wallen traces the ecological disaster that followed: extinction of birds across Alaskan islands, pollution of ecosystems, and human moral blindness upheld by fashion’s glamorous façade.

Symbolic Commodification

In advertisements—from Old Speckled Hen ale to Audi’s “Fox” car—marketers repurpose the fox’s traits (agility, cunning, sophistication) as aspirational human qualities. Wallen shows how capitalism perpetuates old allegories under new branding. The fox is resurrected as the charming rogue we can buy, drink, or drive.

Fur and Feminine Identity

Paintings of Sarah Siddons and Marilyn Monroe demonstrate fur’s shifting symbolism—from status and sensuality to vulnerability. Wearing fox fur becomes an encoded act of possession and denial. The fashion industry conceals brutal origins by aestheticizing death—transforming suffering into beauty. Wallen’s juxtaposition of PETA’s Sophie Ellis-Bextor campaign with historical portraits exposes this hypocrisy: the sexy “foxy lady” depends on an erased corpse.

Economic and Ethical Paradoxes

Wallen highlights indigenous voices like Julia Emberley, who reveal fur’s social importance for Inuit communities. Anti-fur boycotts, while well-intentioned, undermine local economies. He argues that exploitation and preservation intertwine—the bourgeois market both destroys animals and sustains traditional human cultures. Like hunting, commerce turns moral ambiguity into ritual, forcing consumers to confront what lies beneath luxury’s sheen.

In “Twentieth-Century Fox,” Wallen moves from myth to screen, exploring how film reinterprets the ancient trickster through modern psychology, sexuality, and politics. Cinema turns the fox into allegory—sometimes for desire, sometimes for oppression, always as mirror to our inner tensions.

From Predator to Victim

James Hill’s The Belstone Fox (1973) romanticizes friendship between fox and hound—an impossible harmony punished by tragedy. This inversion of hunter-prey roles marks the fox’s transformation in modern consciousness: no longer the villain but the misunderstood outsider. In The Grey Fox (1982), the animal becomes metaphor for human outlawry, where ingenuity itself is punished.

Sexuality and Subterranean Power

Films like Powell’s Gone to Earth, Hitchcock’s Marnie, and Rydell’s The Fox translate vulpine fire into human sexuality. Hazel Woodus’s identification with her pet fox, or Marnie’s repressed sensuality among Virginia’s hunts, turn hunting into erotic allegory. Sex and death intertwine—the pursuit of the fox becomes pursuit of desire itself, forbidden yet irresistible. Wallen reads Hazel’s fall—literally “gone to earth”—as woman returning to her elemental power and social exile.

Politics and Desire in Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends reframes the medieval Reynard into a modern class allegory. His working-class gay protagonist, mocked for smell and manners, becomes literal “fox”—consumed by bourgeois ravens until his suicide. Wallen interprets this as the ultimate vulpine fate: destroyed by desire that seeks belonging in systems designed to exploit it.

Asian Cinematic Revivals

Hong Kong’s Fox Ghost and Korea’s Gumiho: The Nine-Tailed Fox reinvent the spirit-fox myth for modern identity crises. Their plots—mixing martial arts, romance, and politics—link sexuality with national history. Si Yon’s sacrifice as the thousand-year-old virgin fox reconciles Korean tradition with Western modernity: the chthonic force survives beneath capitalism’s surface. Wallen reads these films as geopolitical allegories—where the fox becomes symbol for repressed indigenous culture struggling under Western influence.

Modern Meaning

Across all these films, Wallen sees cinematic foxes as emblems of suppressed human energies—social, sexual, and spiritual. Hollywood’s anthropomorphic fox overlaps Western repression; Asian cinema channels endurance and transformation. The cinema of foxes, he concludes, isn’t about animals—it’s about humans chasing what they’ve denied themselves, and discovering in the fox’s eyes their own reflection.