Confessions of the Fox

With the help of Hell-and-Fury Sykes, Wild cases an upper-class coffee shop, hoping to understand how the stockbrokers and businessmen speak and operate. Wild and Sykes notice that the people in the cafe use coffee as a way to power through their bodies’ need for rest and to continue working and producing wealth. Wild is concocting a plan to produce and patent a substance to sell to the upper-middle-class businessmen of the coffee house that will do everything coffee does for them and more. Wild plans to become obscenely rich from this substance.

Meanwhile, Voth finally relents and accepts Sullivan’s deal. Voth doesn’t have another choice and is quickly running out of money. Voth signs the contract, becoming a freelancer for P-Quad and signing over any rights to the work he produces to P-Quad. Sullivan acts as his direct supervisor and scrutinizes every tiny detail of Voth’s work. Voth hates turning his back on his ideals but believes one has to compromise in order to survive economically.

Jack, Bess, and Aurie leave the Black Lion and find that the neighborhood is crawling with police in the wake of the plague ships’ arrival. Jack and Bess are quarantined in the Seraglio and unable to leave. Jack stews in his own thoughts and becomes both jealous and insecure. These feelings are triggered by a book Bess is reading, Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, given to her by a client named Evans. Evans is a surgeon specializing in “chimeras,” his term for people and animals that do not adhere to human notions of a neat and tiny gender/sex binary (such as garden slugs, which each contain both male and female reproductive anatomy). Jack believes Bess wants to make him jealous by telling him she has a surgeon client who gifts her books; Jack feels inadequate compared to the cisgender men she has for clients. Jack fears that she talks to Evans about his “Somethingness” in detail. Bess wants to see Jack naked again, but he refuses due to his dysphoria regarding his chest.

While Bess sleeps, Jack looks through her book, which contains a painted illustration of intersex genitals purportedly typical of “Sexual Chimeras.” The book makes Jack feel terrible because it diagnoses and classifies everything about his body as an abnormality. Rather than attempt to reproduce this image in the Confessions manuscript, Voth notices that he has represented it by an abstract painting of circles and blobs, reminiscent of the deliberately vague language with which he describes his Something.

The next morning, Jack and Bess engage in intimacy and Jack drinks Bess’s urine. Jack reflects on the apparent paradox of his willingness to engage in unusual sexual acts with Bess while being unable to take off his shirt for her.

Sullivan demands that Voth clarify what the text means about “Sexual Chimeras.” Sullivan wants the manuscript to diagnose, label, and describe Jack’s body for the reader’s gratification. Sullivan is convinced that the stand-in picture for the illustration isn’t supposed to be there. He demands that Voth find the missing illustration and replace the abstract art with a graphic illustration of intersex genitals.

Jack goes looking for Evans, who is also in the Seraglio with Jenny. Jack asks Evans about chimeras. Evans believes that chimeras are caused by diseases and in need of “disease-correction” (143). He views chimeras as people of “both misery and shocking pleasure” (144). Evans offers to help Jack by removing the parts that make him miserable and accentuating what makes him happy. Evans believes that chimeras need management by a professional expert who is not a chimera, such as himself.

Evans offers to perform a mastectomy on Jack to fully remove his breasts. Jack agrees and Evans gives him the operation in the quarantined brothel. Evans gives Jack a strange drug to ease the pain of the operation. Evans faints the moment he pierces Jack’s skin with the scalpel. He has never done surgery before on a living person and has exaggerated his own skill. Bess takes Evans’s anatomy book and performs the surgery herself. Jack grits through the excruciating pain thanks to copious amounts of alcohol. As Bess finishes the surgery, the police enter the brothel and demand to know if they are harboring any illegal individuals, such as lascars, who may be vectors of the plague. The owner and other workers lie to cover for Bess. Evans regains consciousness around this time and tries to expose Bess to the police. Jack panics and suffocates Evans to death to stop him from exposing Bess. Jack then passes out, leaving Bess to clean up the mess.

Sullivan continues to insist that Voth find the missing picture and add sensationalist descriptions of Jack’s genitals for readership engagement. Sullivan also demands to know whether Jack’s mastectomy is a “first” for gender-confirmation-related surgeries. Voth replies that firsts do not matter in this regard given how little information on marginalized communities has been preserved over the centuries.

Jack wakes up in Bess’s room. Jenny has fled since she was the last person seen with Evans. She and Bess disposed of Evans’s body before she left. Bess found a cryptic note on Evans that mentions meeting individuals named Okoh and the Lion Man at the Tower to discuss an issue with replicability. Neither of them knows that this note refers to the strength gravel Wild wants. Jack spends a week recovering in bed from his surgery.

When the quarantine ends, Jack is mostly recovered from his surgery. Jack’s newly flat chest makes him incredibly euphoric and happy. His body feels like his own, and he finally feels at home in his own skin. More plague ships begin to gather in the harbor as time goes on, despite the lifting of the quarantine.

The streets of London are crawling with police due to the plague mandates. Life is very difficult for thieves who do not work for Wild. Bess suggests that Jack rob the lighthouses on the Thames since they have less security and are more laden with goods due to the plague ships passing through.

Jack decides to break into one of the lighthouses now that his scars are healed. Once inside the lighthouse, Jack does not hear the usual voices of commodities. He hears a single voice repeating “nobody” over and over. The lighthouse is empty of commodities except for a strange, brown substance (the strength gravel). Jack instantly recognizes it as the substance Evans gave him before the operation. Jack loads up a bottle with the substance and leaves. On the way out, he accidentally wakes a guard and reveals that he is Jack Sheppard as he makes an escape to Bess. Jack tells her that he didn’t find anything of value. He yells back at the guards as they escape, and Bess chastises him for his hubris.

Once they are back in Bess’s room, Jack tries to apologize for making her angry. Bess isn’t angry due to his outburst but is sad because she knows he lied about not finding anything. Keeping these secrets, she says, will create distance between the two of them. Jack agrees to tell her about what he found if she agrees to tell him about Popham’s Eau. Bess promises to tell him some day. Jack tells her about the substance Evans gave him, the bottle he snatched from the lighthouse, and how the bottle speaks to him, repeating the word “nobody.” Bess believes that the substance and the increasing plague ships on the river are related. Bess doesn’t believe they are plague ships either. She believes that they are ghost ships—ships of which the crews of conscripted sailors and enslaved sailors staged a mutiny, killing their oppressive masters and jumping ship to islands or continents far away. Ghost ships drift along tides and often end up in port cities. The ghost ships are figures of superstition among the Navy and trading companies, but conscripted sailors of color and enslaved people see them as beacons of hope. Bess tells Jack about her father, a lascar sailor conscripted into service on a boat against his will. Bess believes the ghost ships have returned and are being used as an excuse to further oppress and surveil the population of London.

The two become intimate, and Jack remembers the bill of sale he stole from the trunk along with the strange substance. He reads it and realizes he has stolen “granulated strength elixir” from Jonathan Wild, bound for a destination called the “House of Waste.” Bess is astounded by Jack’s audacity in stealing from Wild.

P-Quad withholds Voth’s paycheck due to the missing illustration of genitals. Sullivan and P-Quad both find the lack of description and detail around Jack’s unique body disappointing and want it fixed. Voth refuses and declares a strike, withholding his labor from the company; Sullivan laughs at his one-man strike and does not consider it a threat. Voth pledges to finish transcribing the manuscript for people like him and refuses to sanitize the more convoluted portions of the manuscript for people who are not like him.

Reading about the relationship between Jack and Bess, Voth reminisces about his unnamed ex. His ex introduced him to revolutionary communist politics and made him into the person he is today. Voth believes that his sexual relationship with his ex helped him understand himself as a transgender man. They shared “the fuck you can never get away from,” and the experience fundamentally shaped how Voth views himself and his body (172).

Wild visits Lloyd’s, an insurance broker, and deals with a meddling part-time employee named Mandeville. Mandeville is likely Bernard Mandeville, a real-life Dutch philosopher who lived most of his life in England. Wild wants to take out insurance on a Royal Navy ship en route to the Java Sea (to secretly retrieve the remainder of the strength gravel from Okoh’s commune). Wild wants to insure this ship in case anything happens to his strength gravel since Jack stole the only other strength gravel in existence. Evans’s disappearance has also impeded Wild’s plans significantly, as Evans was his primary researcher on the strength gravel.

Mandeville tells him he cannot insure the ship, and Wild refuses to accept this. The two engage in philosophical conversation about the nature of commerce. Wild believes that being a merchant is simply aiding the process of the flow of goods and profit. If he insures the ship, then he is fulfilling his role as merchant by ensuring that profit flows even if the goods go missing. Mandeville rebukes him, telling him that the nation, and not a merchant, owns the vessel. Mandeville understands Wild’s ulterior motives and hands Wild a copy of a medical treatise from Holland titled A Remedy for Wastefulness. Mandeville insinuates that the contents of the treatise will help Wild achieve his aims if he does not mind getting his hands bloody.

Jack’s exploits in the lighthouse dramatically increase the police presence on the Thames. Jack and Bess read a broadhead, dated November 12, 1724, that gives advice on avoiding the plague and lays out decrees by the Royal Society of Physicians and the mayor of London. The broadhead directly blames sailors from abroad, people of color, and lascars for spreading the plague. Police presence will dramatically increase in impoverished neighborhoods where they will arrest and detain anybody they deem a lascar. The city government also declares that any vagrants or corpses found in Whitehall, Christ Church, or Charing Cross (all upper-class neighborhoods) will immediately become property of the state.

Jack and Bess are accosted by a police officer who wants to detain Bess due to her appearance. The two flee the scene after Jack picks a fight. Bess dissociates from her body as they flee and worries about her future in London now that she cannot move about freely. They find Bess’s rooms ransacked by the police while they were gone. The two decide to flee to Dennison’s, a brothel of lesser reputation where Jenny is currently hiding after Evans’s death. As they pick through the wreckage, Bess realizes that the moniker “House of Waste” must mean the strength elixir is made from some sort of refuse or garbage. Jack is stunned by her ability to continue to think and concoct ideas while the state is hunting people like her. Bess wants to tell Jack everything about her life in case something bad happens to her.

Bess explains that she is one of the last survivors of the Fen-Tigers, a group of resistance fighters who lived in the English fens (marshes). Her mother lived in the fens, and her father found his way there after jumping ship in the Thames and making his way to the countryside to escape his pursuers. Her parents and their fellow Fen-Tigers were followers of James Nayler, a Quaker activist of the 17th century. The English government wishes to drain the economically unproductive fens and convert them to pastures and cropland. The Fen-Tigers resist this plan, which would deprive them of their way of life, forcing them to become wage workers in the cities.

As the English draining of the fens advanced, the fen dwellers became less inclined toward the pacifism and forgiveness that traveling preachers espoused. Bess stole a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics, a philosophical treatise on the mathematical laws of morality, from a traveling preacher. She committed herself to reading and learning its contents. Her father took issue with Spinoza’s idea of humans as detached observers of the world; he believed that distancing oneself from the events of the world led to abstractions and excuses for exploitation and misery. Her father put his ideas into action when he and her mother helped form the Fen-Tigers to combat the English. The Fen-Tigers staged an uprising at Popham’s Eau alongside Scottish prisoners who were used as laborers by English overseers. Bess watched as her parents were slaughtered by the overseers. With the help of a mysterious girl dubbed the “fen-angel,” Bess buried herself in the fen to hide from the overseers.

After the death of her parents and community, Bess had nothing to survive on. The fens became unsustainable due to the drainage, and there was not enough food for her to forage. With no other choice, Bess had to leave and make her way to London to find a living.

After her story, Bess and Jack pack their things. Jack has been taking the strength gravel, and his supply is running out. The two have sex, but this time it is apparent that some change has happened to Jack’s body. The narrator refuses to describe Jack’s genitals in detail, using metaphors of wolves to describe the growth Jack has experienced. Jack’s growth allows him to achieve penetration with Bess without the prosthetic. The two leave for Dennison’s, drunk and making love in the back of a carriage. The changes in Jack’s body and his newfound confidence make them more attracted to one another than ever. When they arrive at Dennison’s, they learn that a “Lion-Man” is on display at the King’s Tower. Bess believes this is the same Lion-Man as the one mentioned in Evans’s note, and the two prepare to visit the tower the next evening.

Voth notes that the language around genitals is odd for the time period given the lack of specificity; Metaphor for the body, especially abnormal bodies, was not used in the 18th century. Voth interprets the wolf metaphor for Jack’s in terms of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s ideas about sex. According to Freud’s case study of the “Wolf Man,” who had a nightmare about wolves, men become jealous of their fathers having sex with their mothers and want both to be with their mothers and destroy their fathers, while fearing destruction in return—a dynamic Freud termed the Oedipus Complex. Freud believed the Wolf Man’s nightmare about wolves was actually a fear of castration at the hands of his father. Voth treats Freud’s ideas as foolish and turns to the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who believe that sex and genitals are not Oedipal and do not involve fears about parents; instead, they are issues of privacy and the relationship of the state to the individual. Deleuze and Guattari believe that, just as the refuse in the Thames is deemed property of the English state, so too are people’s genitals treated like state property, dispensable on certain grounds and in certain sanctioned circumstances (such as through familial bonds, marriage, sex work, and so on). Deleuze and Guattari reimagined the Wolf Man case study as a fear of the masses instead of a fear of one’s father. Voth asserts that Deleuze and Guattari have a more correct view; Voth believes that sex and the free use of one’s own body is an act of liberation, defining one’s body as one’s own property rather than that of the state or any other entity.

Jack and Bess make their way to the King’s Menagerie. They discover that Wild’s gang have also come to see the Lion-Man. Once Wild’s gang leaves, they approach the Lion-Man and ask him about the note. The Lion-Man is a large, burly man with fur glued onto him to make him appear as if he is a monstrous animal for the sake of raking in profit from gullible people. Bess and Jack want to know about his connection to Evans, but this requires that the Lion-Man first tell them the story of Kojo Bekoe Okoh.

Kojo Bekoe Okoh was an African who was captured at 17 and bound for the West Indies as an indentured servant. He escaped from service on the Temperance, only to be pressed into service on the British East India ship Katherine. The captain, John Hunter, was a brutal man who mistreated Okoh. Hunter sought the maximum profit on each voyage, often at the expense of his crews’ well-being. The Katherine was attacked by a crew of women pirates, and much of the crew mutinied, joining the pirates. The captain refused and was killed. The Katherine pirate crew gathered more vessels over time and then settled down into an anchored, offshore community in the Java Sea. The freebooter society enjoyed a non-hierarchical way of living, free from the exploitation that had harmed much of the crew before they became renegades.

The freebooter society encouraged the pursuit of arts and science. Eventually, the community discovered strength gravel, which they were able to derive from pig urine under extremely specific circumstances. The crew used the strength gravel for their own benefit and to fatten their livestock. The freebooter society was short lived; in 1722, the East India Company came hunting for their lost property. The freebooters had disarmed themselves and were completely defenseless against the attack. The Lion-Man was part of Okoh’s crew and was one of the few that survived the trip back to England. Okoh escaped the East India Company but was shortly brought to the King’s Tower prison and housed next to the Lion-Man. Evans and Wild came and questioned them both relentlessly about the strength gravel recipe.

The Lion-Man tells Bess and Jack that he does not know why Evans and Wild want the recipe, but he knows that there’s a ghost ship named the Poor Maria coming up the Thames soon that Wild is interested in. Bess and Jack promise to free the Lion-Man someday, but the Lion-Man doesn’t believe that his freedom is possible due to his history as a mutineer.

Jack and Bess return home and discuss what they learned from the Lion-Man. Bess realizes that Wild intends to fund his operations and rise to power with the strength gravel. Bess tells Jack that they must destroy the gravel to keep it away from Wild. Jack cannot deny her logic but is dismayed by the implications; the strength gravel has alleviated much of his dysphoria. Without the strength gravel, Jack fears he will become dysphoric and alienated from his own body again. Jack worries that Bess will no longer want him if he loses the changes that strength gravel has made to his body. Bess assures him that she will always love him, but he does not believe her. Bess offers to help him search for a way to make it on their own.

When Bess goes digging through their bags, Jack panics and thinks she wants to destroy his limited supply of strength gravel. He attacks her only to find out she was looking for lotion and had no intention of taking his strength gravel. Jack is ashamed of his own behavior and leaves without resolving the tension with Bess.