Jack London's literary treatment of women Item Type text; Thesis-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Garfield, Virve M. Sein, 1938- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 25/09/2021 01:14:54 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/318943 JACK LONDON'S LITERARY TREATMENT OF WOMEN by Virve Sein Garfield A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH n Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements fo r the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This thesis has been submitted in partial fu lfill­ ment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in The University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable with- out special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in their judgment the proposed use of the m aterial is in the interests of scholar­ ship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR This thesis has been approved on the date shown below \ Date CONTENTS Chapter Page INTPO0UCT9ON Ooo OO O O 00 90 OOO O 09 e OOOOOOOOOO 00 0 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0 1 Io THE HEROINES IN LONDON'S NOVELS,,o6»,,.o 6 Frona Welie Dede Mason Joan Lackland Saxon Brown Paula Forrest I I , THE TYPICAL LONDON HEROINE,.o.oooo.ooo.oooooo 42 III, BIOGRAPHICAL INFLUENCES ON LONDON'S LITERARY.TREATMENT OF WOMEN,....ooo.o.o 55 IV, CON CL U S 1 0 Noooooo ooooooo o.ooooo oooooo oooo oo ooo "85 WORKS CONSULT ED,,,,,,'.. o , 0 . 0 , . , o.,,,, o, o,.,. ©.,, o o 85 INTROBUCTI ON Jack London wrote twenty novels8 many of which have women as protagonists. Yet hot one of these heroines emerges as a believable, real-life woman. It is true that character­ ization was not London's forte as a writer, but the women in his novels seem to be even less convincing than the men. Many c r itic s have commented on his weak characterization and especially on the unrealistic portrayal of women. Grace Isabel Colbron remarks that London's "power to portray men was far greater than his power to portray women" and that he "has given us no big [sic] woman character that could for a 1 moment compare w ith any of a dozen men." One of London's contemporaries wisely remarked that he "does not enter into an understanding of women as he does of dogs, in his pages his dogs liv e ; his women do not."^ One of the few to attempt to find the cause for his "failure to create an ^"Jack London: What He Was and What He Accomplished," The Bookman, LXIV (January 1917)$ 446-4?. ^WiIfrid Lay, " ‘John Barleycorn' Under Psychoanalysis The Bookman, VL (March 1917)$ 48. 2 adequate heroine in the whole range of his work" is Maxwell Geismar, who attributes i t to London’s "ignorance and fear of women» Unfortunately, no evidence is used to support this conclusion,. These comments show that c r itic s are aware of the, problem Jack London had in realistic character portrayal of women; but in spite of this awareness, there exists not one satisfactory work on this problem. The only existing study that treats exclusively London's treatment of women charac- ■ ; 4 1 ' ters appears in a 1919 magazine. Other works on London either simply mention the fact that London was unable to create a convincing heroine, or devote only a small fraction of the space to this problem,^ It is the object of this thesis first to find out what kind of women London's heroines are and then to formu­ late possible reasons for the portrayal of such women, 3"Jack London: The Short Cut" in Rebels and Ancestors The American Novel, 1890-1915 (Boston, 1953), p.TgO, race V, S ilv e r, "Jack London's Women," Overland Monthly, LXXXIV (July 1919)$ 24-28. This article seems to be aimed at a popular audience rather than a scholarly one. 5The most useful treatment of London's female characr ters appears in an unpublished Ph.D. di ssertati on by Margaret Isabel Pope. In "Jack London: A Study in Twentieth-Century Values" (Dept, of English, University of Wisconsin, 1935), Miss Pope devotes about four pages to London's heroines, listing their common characteristics and then finding proto­ types in London's own l i f e . The first part of the thesis is devoted to the major women characters in Jack London's fiction. After a study of each of the heroines of fiv e selected novels (A Daughter of the Snowsy Burninq Day1jqhtV Adventure, The Va11ey of the Moon3 The L it t le Lady of the Big House) , there emerges a portrait of the typica1 London female. The noveIs are ar­ ranged chronologically according to the date of publication* so that any changes or growths in London's delineation of women might be noted. The second part of the thesis consid­ ers London's views about women and the women in his life and attempts to estimate what their relationship is to his por­ trayal of fictional heroines. Since London did not excel in playwriting (he wrote three very unsuccessful plays), and since the short story does not afford as good a medium for character portrayal as the novel, this study is lim ited to London's novels. Only those novels have been selected in which a woman is eith er the protagonist or the deuteragonist. The female characters of two of London's most popu­ lar books, Ruth Morse of Martin Eden and Maud Brewster of The Sea-Woff, have been omitted from this study. London himself admitted that Martin Eden was supposed to be a biog­ raphy describing his years of struggle in becoming a writer, and that the character of Ruth Morse was based upon his 4 fiancee, Mabel Applegarth, The Sea-’Wolf was planned to con­ tain no feWaTe characters at a lt 5, but at the editor's insist­ ence London. inserted a love element in the form of Maud Brewsters who was supposed to be model led a fte r Charmian Kittredge,^ Because this thesis Is concerned with those heroines who London insisted were fictional characters, Martin Eden has been omitted,. And because Maud Brewster is not the protagonist or deuteragonist (and is not supposed to be entirely fictional). The Sea-WoIf has also been disregarded. The five heroines of the novels selected are supposed to rep­ resent entirely fictional female characters. ^Shortly after the appearance of The Sea-Wolf in 1904, Ambrose Bierce wrote to London's friend"*"George Sterlings "The ' love' element, with its absurd suppressions and impos­ sible proprieties, is awful, j confess to an overwhelming contempt fo r both sexless lovers." Quoted by P h ilip S. Foner, Jack London, Amer ican Rebel s A Go 11 ect ion o f Hi is Soci al Wr 1 1 - ings, Togetner with an ExtensTve Study of THe"~FSan and His T 1 mes (New Ydrk, T947T, p .61. RusselT.ITanken's'h'fp expresses the same opinions "The book is amazingly effective, and if London had not slipped toward the end in the melodramatic in­ troduction of a useless woman character, the novel would have been a masterpiece of dynamic strength." American Literature as an Expression of the National Mind (New York, 1931), p. 5 6 7 . But London himself, who at this time was at the height of his love for Charmian K ittredge, lo y a lly defended his portrayals "I was in love with a woman, and I wrote her into my book, and the critics tel 1 me that the woman 1 love is unbelievable.^ Quoted by Irving Stone, Sailor on Horsebacks The Biography of Jack London (Boston, 193^77 p . 103. ' ■ 5 Similarly, it is beyond the scope of this study to examine in d e ta il the sources of London's philosophy, the four writers who influenced him most were Darwin,. Spencer, Marx, and Nietzsche, and it is from the latter that he got his superman theory0 To some extent London made use of the Nietzschean superman idea in his portrayal of women charac­ ters, . , : ... ; ’ ' : CHAPTER 1 THE HEROINES IN LONDON'S NOVELS Frona Weise A Daughter of the Snows (1902) is Jack London's firs t novel, The central character of the book is Frona Welse, a superwoman of the twentieth century= We f i r s t meet her when she is on her way home to her Alaskan home which she has not seen during her years of expensive education in the United States and abroad* Around her the rough pioneering men give forth a flood of swearing and blasphemy, forgetting the presence of a young lady* But this does not bother Frona, who is quite Used to i t and who can probably outdo the men. When she meets a childhood friend whom she has not seen since she was a 1i t t l e g i r l , she immediately knots her bicep and asks him to feel and admire the strong muscles.