美国国家公共电台 NPR A 18th Century, Gender-Bending Mystery: What Did 'The Fox' Say?

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

"Confessions¹ Of The Fox" is a mystery story enrobed in a mystery. Dr. R. Voth is depressed² and dedicated³, a literary scholar recently discarded from a romance who has now, in his phrase, slipped off the map of the world. He slipped off to both certify⁴ and conceal⁵ a manuscript in his possession, dated 1724, that may tell the untold⁶ story of Jack⁷ Sheppard, legendary⁸ criminal who may have been born a woman but became the man who became a notorious and celebrated⁹ professional thief and jailbreak artist - and I do mean artist. Then the seeker of secrets himself becomes pursued.

"Confessions Of The Fox" is the debut¹⁰ novel of Jordy Rosenberg, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he teaches 18th-century literature and queer trans theory. He joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

JORDY ROSENBERG: Thanks for having me on.

SIMON: This is what they call speculative¹¹ fiction these days. But there was a Jack Sheppard, wasn't there?

ROSENBERG: There was a Jack Sheppard, and many of your listeners may know that Jack Sheppard was the 18th century's most famous British prison break artist. His exploits were chronicled in John Gay's "Beggar's Opera," which was performed throughout the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries. But in the 18th century, it had the longest run that any opera had had until that point. And then Brecht did a version of John Gay's "Beggar's Opera" called "The Threepenny Opera."

SIMON: So did you imagine or infer he was born as a woman who wanted to live as Jack?

ROSENBERG: That was a fully¹² speculative element, and really what I was trying to get at there was not this question about, like, the empirical case history of Jack Sheppard. Like, was he or was he not born a woman? But why is it that over the course of centuries, gender¹³ nonconformity gets represented as a form of deviance that is also connected with other forms of political resistance? And so you can think of it as a literalization of a metaphor¹⁴. And that's not an uncommon¹⁵ genre¹⁶ for speculative fiction these days. So you - I mean, these are not the same kind of novel in any way. But Colson Whitehead's incredible "Underground Railroad" is a literalization of a metaphor about the Underground Railroad.

SIMON: Yeah. Tell us, please, about Jack's relationship, his love for-with Bess Khan, a professional woman as used to be said.

ROSENBERG: In the source material from the period, Jack is actually connected to many different women. But over and over again, he's primarily connected to a woman who went by the name of or was given the name of Edgworth Bess, reputed to be a sex worker. And in that material, she was not represented in a very kindly¹⁷ way in the period. She was represented as kind of the person that lured¹⁸ Jack into a life of crime. And I was sort of interested in re-envisioning that, really just writing it as a love story, more of a feminist¹⁹ take where she isn't sort of this vixen that creates this perilous²⁰ path for Jack but that there's a kind of, like, consensual and jointly²¹ shared hatred²² of capitalism²³ that they embark²⁴ on together.

SIMON: I think you're a little overintellectualizing the feeling they have for each other, if you catch my drift.

ROSENBERG: Oh, my. OK, that may be - yes. The author may have that tendency.

SIMON: (Laughter) Speaking as a reader...

ROSENBERG: I'm - OK. I mean there is a - they're having a queer romance. One of the things that I wanted to be able to represent was the way in which something like a transgender identity isn't just the conceptualization of a single person in a vacuum but is something that really is crafted together very intimately and lovingly often between two people. And I think I'm trying to represent the labor²⁵ that Bess has to put in to doing that, so...

SIMON: I mean, in the interest of disclosure, this novel can be very graphic²⁶ about all kinds of things. Let me put it that way.

ROSENBERG: There's a lot of sex in it, if that's what you're saying.

SIMON: I guess, I am, yeah - and not just sex. I mean, 18th-century London was a pungent²⁷ place. Let me put it that way.

ROSENBERG: You know, people keep remarking on that. I just really like smell and I really like writing about scent²⁸, whether it's what's considered to be, like, a pleasurable scent like a bodily pleasurable scent, the scent of someone else's body, or whether it's the scent of streets.

SIMON: And Dr. Voth discovers that uncovering a story from the past has current hazards, doesn't he?

ROSENBERG: Yeah. So, I mean, obviously I wanted to play off some of the resonances²⁹ between the present and the past - right? - and the ways in which these things that we think of as sort of like imperial barbarism of the 18th century are really still with us. They just have taken different form and sometimes not so different form.

SIMON: Do you think there's a lot of history that can be rewritten or at least reimagined through the eyes of people who - if I might put it this way - had to live in the shadows, who were overlooked and discounted?

ROSENBERG: I think we all know that what gets archived in the official archives and what falls out is not a neutral operation. And so I guess my answer to you is, yes, necessarily so, and yes.

SIMON: Jody Rosenberg's novel, "Confessions Of The Fox," out Tuesday. Thanks so much for being with us.

ROSENBERG: Thanks so much, Scott.