Jack London's Female Watchers in the Game and the Abysmal Brute

The Familiar Uncommon Spectator: Jack London's Female Watchers In The Game and the Abysmal Brute Scott Emmert In recent decades, Jack London's significant contributions to American literature have gained an increasing amount of critical recognition. Among these acknowledged contributions is his status as the first "serious" writer of sports fiction in America. Biographer James Lundquist, for example, notes that London "was one ofthe first writers to take sports seriously as the raw material for novels and stories" (179), and critic Michael Oriard goes further, identify ing London the "father of American sports fiction" meant for adult readers (Dreaming 9). Specifically, London's accomplishments as a writer ofsports lit erature rest mainly on his boxing fiction. 1 As one biography puts it, "London virtually invented the modern prizefight story" (Labor and Reesman 157 n.7), this invention being represented by the short stories "A Piece ofSteak (1909) and "The Mexican" (1910) and by the short novels The Game (1905) and The Abysmal Brute (1913). Always mindful of his audience and of his sales, how ever, London crafted this inventive prizefight fiction so as not to offend his readers with the brutality ofboxing, a sport so violent and decadent that it was deemed unfit as a subject of serious literature until London "gave it literary respectability" (Oriard, Dreaming 9). When describing what happens inside the square ring, London seeks a measure of respectability for boxing by tempering his descriptions ofviolent action with a compassionate depiction ofhumanity. London's naturalistic box ing fictions, in the way of most naturalist stories, seek to evoke the reader's sympathy for protagonists at the mercy of fo~ces beyond their control. "A Piece 138 Aethlon XXII:l / Fall 2004 of Steak," for instance, features an aging prizefighter who faces inevitable de feat at the fists ofyounger man; that he does so without rancor or malice and with a stoical understanding of his own waning powers makes him a sympa thetic character. In The Game, Joe Fleming is a young, handsome, confident boxer on the rise. Recently engaged, he promises his fiancee that he will give up prizefighting after his latest bout. But the boxing game, ruled by chance as much as ability, cannot always be won by the most skillful (or even the best looking) man: the beast-like John Ponta kills Joe with a single "lightning lucky punch" (97). The pathos in the plight of these characters is not the only way London mitigates the brutality of boxing to encourage the sympathy of readers, how ever. In his boxing novels, London introduces two female characters, women each in love with a prizefighter, to evoke pity and respect for the male protago nists. In both novels, these female characters secretly watch their lovers fight, __ and through their reactions London reinforces existing notions ofgender not only to ensure the respectability ofhis subject matter but also to dramatize his ideas about infrangible masculine and feminine essences and to present his characters as mythic archetypes. Besides lending service to his stories dramatically and thematically, the device ofplacing female spectators in usually all-male boxing clubs was likely suggested to London by his own personal and journalistic experience and by contemporary newspaper stories that emphasized the rare and sensational at tendance bywomen at prizefights. Use ofsuch extraordinary real events is com mon in American fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; more particu larly, this use reflects the desire among naturalist writers to depict unusual experience found in everyday life. Frank Norris, a theorist as well as a leading practitioner of literary naturalism, expresses this preference for the unusual when he insists in the essay "A Plea for Romantic Fiction" that "the characters ofa naturalist tale ... must be twisted from the ordinary" (72). By basing dra matic situations onwhat Ihave termed "familiar uncommon" experience, natu ralist writers were able, in part, to combine the probability ofrealism with the extraordinary qualities ofromance, much in the manner ofthe yellow press of the time, which reported sensational stories as part of day-to-day events. Fa miliar but uncommon events significant in naturalist fiction include the real murders that inform Frank Norris's McTeague (1899) and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), and the incidents ofshipwreck found in Norris's Vandover and the Brute (1914) and London's The Sea-Wolf (1904). In the late 19th century, the familiar uncommon occurrence of women watching boxing matches was also often reported, largely because such occur rences were transgressive. Historian Dan Streible summarizes this coverage: The figure of the lone, disguised woman at ringside became a recurring one in tabloid stories of the late 1890s; some were intended to be comical, others sensationalistic. In the Corbett- Emmert / The Familiar Uncommon Spectator 139 Fitszimmons era, such anecdotes peppered the pages ofthe widely read boxing bible, the Police Gazette. Colorful items such as 'How a Female Saw a Fight: in which a cigarette-smoking blonde sat near ringside dressed as a man, drew upon boxing lore which dated back to at least the days of John L. Sullivan (when his girlfriend, Ann Livingston, reportedly attended the Sullivan Charlie Mitchell fight 'dressed as a boy'). (31) Women also attended two later prizefights upon which Jack London based the bout portrayed in The Game, the 1901 fight between Jim Jeffries and Gus Ruhlin and the .1905 match between Jimmy Britt and Battling Nelson (Oriard, "Introduction" Game xi-xv). One newspaper report mentioned the presence of women at the 1901 contest noting that "'[0]ccasionally women hide their fea tures behind thick veils [and attend] prize fights in San Francisco'" (qtd.. in Oriard, "Introduction" Game xiv). Other newspaper accounts were less neutral in their reporting offemale spectators at boxing matches. Coverage ofthe 1905 fight called the women who attended "misplaced" and questioned their de cency by applying to them the epithet "jaded" (qtd. in Oriard, "Introduction" Game xiv-xv). In addition to remarking on female spectators at boxing matches, newspa pers at this time also presented stories ofactual female boxers. Frequent stories in the Police Gazette, for instance, featured "female pugilists" mainly for the purpose ofridiculing them as unfeminine (Streible 31). Not all press coverage ofthe time, however, sought simply to satirize female boxers. Two stories that appeared in 1892 in The Examiner (San Francisco), for example, present more straight-forward accounts ofwomen prizefighters. One ofthese stories, head lined "Defeated by a Woman," reports that a woman in Indianapolis "dressed in tights and short skirts" knocked out a man in "nine desperate rounds" to win "a purse of $500." The only hint of ridicule in this account is that the woman is called an "Amazon" who "tipped the beam at 166 pounds." A later report ofa so-called "prize fight" between two women is more tongue-in-cheek, as can be judged by its alliterative headline, "Pugilists in Petticoats." This story from Springfield, Ohio, narrates a three-round fight between "the wives oftwo respectable business men" engaged in a feud. Although the writer exhibits amused scorn for these women who scratch and pull hair during the fight, he also appreciates the technical skill of one boxer who "feinted with her right until she saw an opening"-before he concludes with the shocking detail that "[t] he women are both mothers offamilies." For his fictional accounts ofboxing, Jack London did not choose to ques tion the morality of female boxing spectators, nor did he choose to depict women in the ring. The explanation that he doubted the athletic ability of women might account for this latter choice. Yet, that explanation seems not to square with the fact that London sparred with his second wife, Charmian. In deed, as biographerAlex Kershaw writes, London was attracted to Charmian in 140 Aethlon XXII:1 / Fall 2004 large measure because she would avidly compete with him in a variety ofgames and sports, including boxing. Throughout their relationship, Charmian gamely accepted physical challenges from London, even though, as Kershaw notes, "Jack more often than not won their bouts with clinical efficiency" (133). A more likely explanation for why London never wrote about female box ers, choosing instead to write about women as boxing spectators, and then only under certain conditions, may be found in his thematic purposes. His first boxing novel, The Game, carefully presents his male and female protago nists as exemplars ofmasculine and feminine ideals. Genevieve Pritchard is, in keeping with the contemporary ideal, described as "sheerly feminine, tender and soft and clinging, with the smouldering passion of the mate and the motherliness of the woman" (26). One obvious illustration of her feminine credentials is her lack of understanding about boxing; she does not under stand, for example, how odds are set on Joe's chances ofwinning, nor does she comprehend, when first watching Joe in the ring, the action of the sport, its subtleties and strategies. Throughout The Game, London preserves Genevieve's essential innocence, her inviolable femininity. She must therefore remain a passive spectator, one who is doubly disguised: She not onlyviews Joe's prize fight screened by a wall and through a peephole, but she also dresses like a man to gain entry to the boxing club. After Joe is killed in the ring, Genevieve still in disguise-is hurried from the club lest her name appear in the newspa pers. In the end, she can be comforted only by Mrs. Silverstein, for only a woman's compassion can possibly console her. She will get no comfort from the invincible Game and "the grip it laid on men's souls" (102). Any direct contact with masculine contagion-in the realm ofsport, sex, or journalism would sully Genevieve and deny to The Game its depiction ofgender purity.

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