Like me, my wife enjoys reading, and her birthday is December 21. Her birthday’s proximity to Christmas always makes it a challenge to get her something, notably because she always says, “I don’t want anything because we need to save uo for Christmas.” A few months ago, I came across someone on social media who talked about a birthday present they bought for their partner. They bought twelve books, one for each month of the year, and gave them as a gift.

This sounded like the perfect idea, and I spent about two hours one night choosing books that she might enjoy. I chose from her to be read list and from best of lists from the past few years. During that search, Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox popped up, and I debated getting it for her. However, since I know her reading tastes, I didn’t think she would like it, so I didn’t buy it. Yet, I knew I would find it interesting. Over the holiday break, I saw a copy in a used bookstore and bought it.

Oyeymi’s novel is hard to classify because it blends reality and fairy tales together into a reflective structure. Essentially, the writer St. John Fox creates Mary Foxe as a muse and the two engage in a game across their stories. Mary challenges St. John’s narratives, where he always murders his heroines. As well, Mary’s existence causes St. John and his wife, Daphne, to confront their own relationship, including Daphne’s own idendity. These threads crisscross throughout various short stories in the novel, each of which references previous stories, forming a tapestry of allegories within the text.

Mr. Fox warrants an engaged exploration, but today I just want to focus on one or two specific scenes. The first comes from the story “What Happens Next,” which follows the narrator, ostensibly Mary Foxe, after she sits next to Ukrainian woman on a flight and the woman dies next to her. A psychiatrist, St. John Fox, counsels her on the plane, and the two start a relationship. She worries about the man, especially whether or not he murdered his wife, and this questioning causes the woman to think about the lessons her father gave her, lessons meant to protect her.

Her father murdered her mother and beat women as as well, and he would sit Mary down, as a youngster, and would quiz her on all of the newspaper clippings about sexual violence he kept in a folder. Instead of letting her sleep, he would quiz her on why these men enacted violence on the women in their lives. Mary would go to school and tell these horrific stories to her classmates, leading to parents complaining. He dad would tell her “the world was sick and that [she] should know [she] wasn’t safe in it.” Her father traumatized her, causing her to see violence everywhere and to kick open the doors of bathroom stalls because she was afraid that a woman would be dead in the stall, her head submerged in the toilet.

While her father traumatized her, his quizzing also taught her a lesson. She learned that the “women had requested assistance.” They told people about the abuse they endured, telling them, “Someone is watching me, has been following me, has beaten me up before, has promised he will kill me.” To these statements, individuals would reply that nothing would happen and that nothing could be done, thus negating their fears. This fact exacerbated Mary’s fears, leading her to expect violence at any moment. Even while in prison, her father would send her clippings, implicitly telling her, “Your mother wasn’t the first and won’t be the last.”

The story deals with a recurring theme throughout Mr. Fox, the violence enacted against women and the lack of acknowledgement of this violence. When Mary’s father masks his own violence by telling her the stories of violence enacted on other women, he couches it by claiming that he does it to protect her, to tell her to be aware of her surroundings and to always be alert. This moment reminds me, so much, of the unacknowledged psychological and physical violence that women just by existing. I immediately thought of Gender Chores’ “January Blues,” a song that details the lessons young girls get to remain hyper vigilant of their surroundings and highlights that, as the band describes it, the violent threat to women “waits at home.”

The chorus drives this point home when Sam McCann sings that even after 47 days, “I’ll still turn on my live location” when I get home to let others know I am alive. Mr. Fox deals with this fear, notably through the stories St. John Fox tells, killing off his heroines in violent manners, such as decapitating them while they still place their head on top of their body, and other atrocities. The novel does something similar to “January Blues,” it calls out misogyny that births, as Gender Chores puts it, “gender based violence.” We see this in “What Happens Next” both with Mary’s father who kills her mother and with St. John Fox.

All of this also makes me think about Fea’s “Mujer Moderna,” a song that, like “January Blues,” deals with misogyny and sexual violence. In the opening verse, Letty Martinez asks, “So what if her shirt is low cut and her jeans are so tight?” What does this matter, and why is it ok for you to sexualize her or to sexually assault her? The same thread weaves through the second verse where Martinez sings about a woman walking home from a bar and “asking for it,” the common argument that the “woman wanted it because of what she was wearing.” This asinine argument has existed for ages, a form of victim blaming that removes the actions from the perpetrator. Just look at Bikini Kill’s “White Boy” for another example in the Riot Grrrl tradition or at statement from survivors, including Anita Hill’s testimony during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing.

There’s a lot to discuss with Mr. Fox, and I cannot cover it all, but I would highly recommend picking it up and reading it because even though it may feel, at times, hard to follow, it provides a good exploration of misogyny and patriarchy along with an exploration of the ways these intersect with race and the stories that we tell ourselves, specifically fairy tales.

What are your thoughts? Have you done unessay projects in class? Are you thinking about it? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.