Summary

Chapter 8:

In the prison yard at the Tower of London, Jack is celebrated by his fellow inmates as a great jail-breaker. All he can do, however, is remember Bess and long for her.

Voth inserts a footnote wondering whether earlier references in the manuscript to wolves were inserted by a gathering of chimeras that had formed at a psychiatric institute run by one of the scientists he had earlier referenced, Felix Guattari. At that institute, Voth writes, doctors and patients frequently produced plays together. He wonders whether “the chimera caucus … ever mounted a play titled Confessions of the Fox” (274).

Voth also considers the repeated references, throughout the manuscript, to the image of “Spread Legs” (275). He considers other works of art, visual and otherwise, in which the image is considered only from the perspective of cisgender male sexuality, and how in the Stretches...