Confessions of the Fox

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3, Chapters 1-7

Part 3, Chapters 8-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Relationship Between Gender Identity, Rebellion, and Criminality

Gender identity, rebellion, and criminality are inseparable in Confessions of the Fox. As 18th-century English society criminalizes and harshly punishes people than ever before, Jack’s nonconforming gender identity makes it impossible to live as his true self without rebelling against authority. Jack has two choices at the beginning of the novel: Live an inauthentic life as a woman, where he will contribute to society through profit and industriousness under a business owner, or reclaim his labor and his body under the new identity of Jack.

Jack’s rebellious reclamation of his body is not a certain outcome. Being a “part churning product towards profit” allows him to hide from his true self (his Something), which he knows is incompatible with life as a cog in a machine (25). When he first meets Bess, he is terrified of leaving his miserable life. He flees from Bess back to the “wretched unseenness to which he’d become accustom’d” (78). Jack dichotomizes being with Bess as being seen and living under Kneebone as a kind of invisibility. While life with Kneebone is miserable, it follows the social script that Jack has been given. Jack’s position as an indentured servant is a socially sanctioned one appropriate for a young adult. Becoming Jack means breaking this social script and refusing to do what society believes he should do. Kneebone is a caricature of the middle classes of 18th-century London. He believes that the poor suffer from a lack of morals (30) and that the mollies are “vectors of Contagion” (82). Living a gender-nonconforming life as Jack under Kneebone is impossible due to Kneebone’s views, which place criminality and Jack’s gender identity in the same category.

Once Jack becomes Jack, he is a thief who owns the fruits of his labor. Under Kneebone, every cent of profit Jack made belonged to Kneebone. As a thief, everything he steals from the rich belongs to him, and so do the profits he makes from those items. Jack’s status as a thief inverts the relationship he had with business and work in the past; a well-off man stole every ounce of Jack’s labor before, and now Jack labors to steal wealth from people like Kneebone. Jack’s thieving from the rich and powerful is what allows him to further his gender transition. Jack’s thieving brings him into contact with the strength gravel, which masculinizes his body and helps him feel at ease in his own skin (161). Jack’s identities as a transgender man and a criminal both amplify one another, and the two are equated in the eyes of society, represented through Kneebone.

History and Knowledge Through Community

Rosenberg argues that history and knowledge are impossible without community. The knowledge that P-Quad desires is a product of communal undertaking. Voth is a representative of the transgender community in a long line of LGBTQ+ people who have added their knowledge to the Sheppard manuscript. Voth’s footnotes and addition of the final line are a tiny layer of the sediment that adds up to the whole Sheppard manuscript. Each “layer” of sediment is another nameless LGBTQ+ person who has added to the manuscript or edited it, like the Chimera Caucus (272). It is impossible to find the “original” Sheppard manuscript underneath the layers of additions, alterations, and censorship by various authors throughout the years. Rosenberg’s argument also suggests that the story of the historical Jack Sheppard is like his fictional counterpart. Jack’s real autobiography was likely ghostwritten by the author Daniel Defoe, representing a “filter” for Jack’s story, much like the fictional characters who edit the fictional Jack Sheppard’s manuscript.

Through Rosenberg’s lens, the only way to approach and understand the historical Jack Sheppard is through communal knowledge, stories, and tales about his life. Voth originally wants to determine the “authenticity” of the manuscript but quickly turns to using authenticity as a weapon against his employer, giving Sullivan the “authentic” picture of the waterlogged slug in lieu of the picture of intersex genitals (270). Voth’s disregard for authenticity as the true nature of the manuscript dawns on him suggests that authenticity is murky when we look at history through a lens of community. Indeed, “authenticity” becomes nothing more than another word for private property, as P-Quad’s efforts to establish ownership of Voth’s transcription make clear. Even when Voth realizes much of the manuscript is edited, it does not lose value for him; the manuscript’s value only increases once he realizes how many people have edited it over the centuries. Voth treats the issue of authenticity as a red herring that distracts from the manuscript’s real value as a repository of collective knowledge.

The strength gravel is only discovered through community. Wild and Evans’s science demands an exact recipe of measurements and steps, which do not exist in the original strength gravel “recipe.” The Lion Man asserts that “[t]here are certain forms of knowledge develop’d collectively that can’t be translated into a simple recipe” (220). The Lion Man’s emphasis on “recipe” suggests a disdain for the scientific exactness that Wild and Evans demand. When Bess and Jack find Evans’s attempt at writing down the “recipe” from the Lion-Man’s knowledge, it is dense and archaic. Evans frustratedly notes that the Lion Man “seems genuinely unable to re-create the formula without his mates. He mutters something about collective knowledge and Context” (309). Collective knowledge and culturally sensitive context are positioned as antithetical to a decontextualized and endlessly replicable “recipe.”

Economic Privatization and the Modern Prison System

Rosenberg writes Jack’s fantastical story in the historical birth of the modern surveillance state and prison-industrial complex. A surveillance state is one that believes the functioning of an orderly society depends on documenting, tracking, analyzing, pre-empting, and restricting the movements of its citizens through police forces, legal documentation, and legal precedence. This is usually done to protect economic productivity and keep work forces in places where they may be used by certain industries. Scholars consider most countries to be surveillance states today. The prison-industrial complex is an industry (like agriculture or medicine) in which profit is extracted from a relationship between incarceration and the production of goods in factories. Typically, the prison-industrial complex uses prisoners as free laborers in factories appended to the prisons. Many of the most prominent corporations today exploit the prison-industrial complex for free labor. The prison-industrial complex is associated with an increasingly outsized public fear over violent crime, which rationalizes the imprisonment and harsh treatment of prisoners required to fuel the prison-industrial complex (Donziger. “The Prison-Industrial Complex.” The Washington Post, 17 March 1996).

Eighteenth-century London was a hotspot for both the surveillance state and the prison industrial complex. With the influx of goods, wealth, and raw exotic materials from colonies, those in power needed a way to track all these goods and produce cheap labor to turn the raw exotic materials into luxury items. Scholars consider 18th-century London to be a testing ground for many of the ideas around surveillance, property, labor, and policing that we understand today. In Jack’s story, the increasingly harsh privatization of economic life makes it possible for him to be sold as an indentured servant to Kneebone. Under Kneebone, Jack is isolated and vulnerable to exploitation. The laws against vagrancy and idleness make it impossible for him to escape from the house during the day unless it is for business purposes. The notice that Kneebone places in Jack’s room is the 1714 Vagrancy Act, a bundle of legislation that consolidated laws around the punishment and state possession of loitering people found in public that were deemed economically unproductive (30-31). Jack’s desire to exist freely outside of Kneebone’s home constitutes vagrancy and criminality; the laws of London conspire to keep him vulnerable and exploitable under Kneebone.

Wild’s schemes and the increased presence of police due to the “plague” are early examples of the prison-industrial complex under the surveillance state. The police presence allows more “vagrant” people to be arrested, where their bodies are forfeited as property of the state. Wild’s fictional schemes have real-world precedence: The bodies of convicted criminals were deemed property of the state and were often sold to medical societies, universities, and other medical industries for profit. The desire to make the bodies of prisoners “useful” by turning them into strength elixirs that facilitate profit and commodity exchange is a fantastical exaggeration of the realities of the 18th century.