Jack London †to his wife Essay

Once Charles Child Walcutt described Jack London as a steamer, which â€Å"was supposed to have more power than any man dared use, but it was also known to run out of steam halfway up a long hill; and everybody knows that it was a trial to start and a constant threat to explode†(Charles Child Walcutt. 1956. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, p. 87). Yet in 1906, when the book â€Å"White Fang† was published, the writer still demonstrated tremendous vigor in enchanting reader’s by the set of his ideas. Originally a companion volume to â€Å"The Call of the Wild† â€Å"White Fang† narrates about a wolf who is domesticated through circumstances by a man. London himself wrote of it: â€Å"Life is full of disgusting realism. I know men and women as they are – millions of them yet in the slime state. But I am an evolutionist, therefore a broad optimist, hence my love for the human (in the slime though he be) comes from my knowing him as he is and seeing the divine possibilities ahead of him. That’s the whole motive of my † White Fang . † Every atom of organic life is plastic. The finest specimens now in existence were once all pulpy infants capable of being molded this way or that. Let the pressure be one way and we have atavism – the reversion to the wild; the other the domestication, civilization (Book of Jack London, I, 384. In Walcutt 1956:92)†. In the quotation are acknowledged the bunch of motives – portraying the juxtaposition â€Å"man vs environment†, â€Å"wildness vs civilization†, and â€Å"naturalism vs romanticism†. This is the story about the challenges of growing alone and never experiencing the meaning of love, generosity and care, overcoming so many challenges endured. Driving off the author’s motivation in this very tapescript we’ll analyze the book’s infrastructure, as far as themes, text interpretation and narration techniques are concerned. The aim of the following part is to trace how Jack London’s depiction of White Fang’s life portrays the themes of naturalism, survival of the fittest, romanticism and parallels his own struggles. JACK LONDON MIRROWIMG IN WHITE FANG PAGE #2 DETAILED ANALYSES NATURALISTIC COBCEPTION This piece of work by London represents the evident case of endured naturalistic manner. Generally, naturalism refers to those who viewed life strictly from a scientific approach; in this case that translates to the view that man and other creatures were victims of their heredity and environment. The environmental theme is enrolled in the very first passage with a landscape description. It thrustingly combines â€Å"a foreboding animism with a sinister desolation (Brittany Nelson. http://www. gradesaver. com/ClassicNotes/Titles/white/fullsumm. html. October 29, 2000)†. – Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. (Jack London. White Fang. http://www. gradesaver. com/ClassicNotes/Titles/white/fullsumm. html. October 29, 2000) The mood is shown through the covetous gamma of colors, simile (â€Å"smile of the Sphinx†) and personification i. e. (prosopopoeia). Wild is ruled by the death principle: â€Å"Life is an offense to it, for life is movement: and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea: it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man – man, who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement (WF)†. Sentences constructed by analogy roll JACK LONDON MIRROWIMG IN WHITE FANG PAGE #3 monotonically, dictating the rhythm. â€Å"Viewed from this bleak cosmic perspective (Brittany Nelson. http://www. gradesaver. com/ClassicNotes/Titles/white/fullsumm. html. October 29, 2000)†, lost for civilization, men are no more than â€Å"puny adventurers pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little wisdom amidst the play and interplay of the great blind elements and forces (WF). † In London’s story, the terror at the environment is augmented by a number of fine touches. The dogs, for example, disappear silently, lured one by one to their deaths by the cunning of the she-wolf. And she is shown not like flesh-and-bone creature but like something ghostly: – Full into the firelight, with a stealthy, sidelong movement, glided a doglike animal. It moved with commingled mistrust and daring, cautiously observing the men, its attention fixed on the dogs. One Ear strained the full length of the stick toward the intruder and whined with eagerness. (WF) Bill not simply dies out off the scene, but disappears at the desperate sounds of three shots in the place, encircled by the wolf litter. The contrast of a man, Henry, sitting at the fire and darkness with glittering eyes of the beasts produce a breath-taking effect. With the environmental theme in mind, London wrote the novel with biological and social determinism. Donald Pizer in his â€Å"Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature† (1984. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, p. 167) says: â€Å"The Call of the Wild and White Fang are companion allegories of the response of human nature to heredity and environment†. JACK LONDON MIRROWIMG IN WHITE FANG PAGE #4 SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST The problem of environment is tightly knotted to the process of â€Å"natural selection†, i. e. the benefit of only the strongest, brightest, and most adaptable elements of a species to survive. In this regard the writer follows H. Spencer: â€Å"I am a hopeless materialist. I see the soul as nothing else than the sum of the activities of the organism plus personal habits, memories, and experiences of the organism (L. S. Friedland. January 25, 1917. Jack London as Titan. Dial, LXII, p. 51)†. The Spencer’s theory was closely linked in London’s mind to Darwin: â€Å"The idea of life as a struggle for survival appealed to him tremendously. Concepts of strength and the purity of an unmixed breed evoke images of savage men who have survived through pure physical strength. London’s heroes are likely to evince this atavism when they are thrust into the struggle for survival under brutal frontier conditions. When such atavistic power surges up, nothing can safely oppose them, and they exult in the glory of it. (Walcutt 1956:90-91)†. This idea is embodied by the character, White Fang. â€Å"He was different from his brothers and sisters† (WF: ch. 3), â€Å"the fiercest of the litter†. Since the eye-openening days White Fang was the one to dare getting closer to the cave entrance. He was the only one of the litter to survive the famine. His strength and intelligence make him the most feared dog in the Indian camp. While defending Judge Scott, White Fang takes three bullets but is miraculously able to continue living. One element of the book, portraying White Fang’s ability to adapt to any new circumstances, is how he learns to fight and to love. â€Å"He had a method of accepting things, without questioning the why and wherefore. In reality, this was the act of classification. He was never disturbed over why a thing happened. How it happened was sufficient for him (WF:Part II, ch. 3). It is in the last section of Part II the homey narrative tone changes as White Fang learns more about the world where â€Å"dog eat dog† – literal and figurative: a hawk digs its sharp talons into the soft flesh of a ptarmigan while the frenzied bird screams in agony. White Fang’s biological heritage discussed in JACK LONDON MIRROWIMG IN WHITE FANG PAGE #5 the first chapters more than symbolic. When in the parts III and IV White Fang’s deepening estrangement from all living things is shown, a nihilistic world of violence and hate steps forward. White Fang becomes the personification of the masculine principle of the demonic wild: â€Å"The outcast† and â€Å"The Enemy of His Kind,† who is â€Å"hated by man and dog† and in turn hates them. Even his name suggests both the demonic white wilderness and the savage Darwinian world governed by the Law of the Meat, the Law of the Fang. – Before, he had hunted in play, for the sheer joyousness of it; now he hunted in deadly earnestness (WF:Part II, ch. 5). – â€Å"Savageness was a part of his make-up, but the savageness thus developed exceeded his make-up. He acquired a reputation for wickedness [†¦] Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to take care of himself in a mass-fight against him; and how, on a single dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time. To keep one’s feet in the midst of the hostile mass meant life, and this he learned well. He became cat-like in his ability to stay on his feet † (WF:Part III, ch. 3). – â€Å"The months went by. White Fang grew stronger, heavier, and more compact, while his character was developing along the lines laid down by his heredity and his environment. His heredity was a life-stuff that may be likened to clay. It possessed many possibilities, was capable of being moulded into many different forms. Environment served to model the clay, to give it a particular form (WF:Part III:ch. 6)†. Through the usage of metaphor London proves the â€Å"first survivor† law at the example of White Fang, nut, at the same time implies irony, narrating how the creature surrenders himself to the strongest – e. g. to Gray Beaver (â€Å"for the â€Å"possession of flesh-and-blood good,† White Fang† JACK LONDON MIRROWIMG IN WHITE FANG PAGE #6 exchanged his own liberty (WF:Part III, ch. 3). † The wide scope of methods help to project natural laws at the canvas of fictional text. ROMANTICISM The depiction of romanticism in this novel is evident by White Fang’s trust, love and ultimately sacrifice for Weedon Scott and his children. White Fangs pays back. Part V reflects how love can tame natural behavior and instincts: â€Å"White Fang refused to growl. Instead, and after a wistful, searching look, he snuggled in, burrowing his head out of sight between the master’s arm and body (WF:Part V, ch. 1). As White Fang learns to love Weedon Scott, this love produces a desire in the dog to do anything to please his â€Å"love master. † This includes having Weedon’s children climb and play with him, and learning to leave chickens alone, although the taste was extremely pleasing to him. Just as White Fang was tamed by love, Jack London was tamed by love as he began staying away from the whorehouses in San Francisco and trying to overcome a severe drug habit, having been just married. And thus we came to our conclusive part: the parallel between the book and the reality of Jack London’s life. â€Å"†¦ interesting symbol in this novel is the oasis of the campfire (Chapter I) surrounded by the sinister darkness of the wild. This image is a microcosm of the larger landscape; the Northland wilderness as opposed to the grassy estate in the Santa Clara Valley – the â€Å"Southland of life,† in which â€Å"human kindness was like a sun. † Although very naturalistic in his approach to this novel, London received a great deal of criticism for the abrupt ending. When White Fang finally recovers from his injuries, he ventures out into the warm California sun and greats Collie and his new puppies. Instead of ending the novel in the same naturalistic vein he began, London ends White Fang with a distinctively romantic flare (June JACK LONDON MIRROWIMG IN WHITE FANG PAGE #i Howard. 1985. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill, NC:University of North Carolina Press, p. 170)†. CONCLUSIONS The novel demonstrates the effects of a change in environment on the creature. Dogs and men are portrayed in some kind as moral symbols, but derived from Jack’s own experience. â€Å"He never stopped fighting, and the struggle with life is no more important to his success than his struggle with ideas. One led to the other, and the battle of ideas dramatizes with extraordinary clarity the confusions and tensions which I have attributed to the divided stream. In the melee, blond beasts, ideas, and supermen drip with blood like White Fang himself (Walcutt 1956:88)†. As Jack was an illegitimate child, forever uncertain as to his father, unloved and hungry throughout his youth, he hoped to found something of a dynasty in his magnificent home called â€Å"Wolf House,† and so he longed for a male heir. â€Å"White Fang† was written during the courtship and marriage of London to Charmian Kittredge and a romantic theme is part of the novel. The man is tames – as well as his personage. In the book â€Å"White Fang was torn by conflicting feelings, impulses. It seemed he would fly to pieces, so terrible was the control he was exerting, holding together by an unwonted indecision the counter forces that struggled within him for mastery. † And so it was with Jack London. Then all went wrong. He only had daughters and these were estranged from him: his house burnt down just as his special ship had foundered; his friends drifted away. It is hard not to feel that those counter forces which harassed White Fang also undermined that prodigy of lonely energy, Jack London– or â€Å"Wolf† as he insisted his wife should call him. â€Å"He was able to flourish within and finally to rise above the hard conditions of his early life; and the fact that he gloried in the JACK LONDON MIRROWIMG IN WHITE FANG PAGE memory of his early adventures shows to some extent how he saw himself as embodying the bone-crushing vitality which he continually celebrated in his stories. He saw everything from farming through fighting to reading in heroic terms, and this side of his character is not without its ludicrous aspects: he could not help being self-conscious about his manliness (Susan M. Nuernberg ed. 1995. The Critical Response to Jack London. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, p. 89)†. LIST OF REFERENCES 1. Charles Child Walcutt. 1956. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 2. Brittany Nelson.