vixen

   Female foxes are evidently very badtempered and to call a woman a vixen is to say that she is ‘a nasty quean, a slut, a scold’, as Burton expressed it in The Anatomy of Melancholy. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare has Helena say of her closest friend, Hermia: ‘O, when she is angry, she is keen and shrewd;/She was a vixen when she went to school;/And, though she be but little, she is fierce.’ ‘Let me come to her,’ says Hermia in reply, and has to be restrained from showing just how fierce she can be.

   Shakespeare does not use ‘Vixen’ as a vocative, but ‘you little vixen’ is a typical expression used to a girl or woman who is being aggressive verbally or physically. It is spoken by Reddin to Hazel in Gone to Earth, by Mary Webb, when Hazel attacks him for being cruel to an animal. Its use in that particular book could hardly be more poignant, given that Hazel has a pet fox and dies trying to save it from the hunting pack.

   In The Billion Dollar Killing, by Paul Erdman, a husband says to his wife: ‘Martha, you old vixen. And you always tell me that you can’t tell the difference between a mark, franc and lira when we go on vacation.’ The wife has just revealed that she is more aware of money matters than the husband supposed, and he appears to be thinking of vixen merely as a feminine form of ‘fox’, in its sense of somebody who foxes you by being cleverer than you anticipated.

   World So Wide, by Sinclair Lewis, has: ‘“I’m not a round-heel like Livy.” Olivia was like a leopard leaping. “You little vixen. And I am not a…I don’t even know what the vile word means!” “How come it makes you so sore then?”’ ‘Round-heel’ in American slang refers to a promiscuous woman.