WHITE FANG
Jack London
William Collins
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Source ISBN: 9780007558124
Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007558131
Version: 2014-07-30
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Animals in Literature
The literary establishment has always tended to consign novels about animals to children’s fiction, mainly because of the more imaginative and open nature of a young audience. The appeal of the animal kingdom and the anthropomorphism of creatures has always been something that delights children and is perhaps less likely to excite an adult reader.
The anthropomorphism of animals has a long tradition in literature, and can be dated back to Aesop, a Greek storyteller from the 6th century BC. The many fables attributed to Aesop are moralistic stories that often feature animals as their protagonists, such as the well-known tale of The Tortoise and the Hare. It is almost certainly easier for children to access these stories because of the imaginative use of animals, but it is also a useful device for adults because it pares down or simplifies any characterization, and therefore the characters lose the complexity of human personality. This enables the storyteller, or novelist, to focus on the issue at hand, rather than becoming bogged down by intricate character analyses.
There have been numerous popular novels that feature an animal as the central character. Perhaps the best known example is Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), which tells the story of a horse from a quasi-equine point of view and drew attention to the notion of animal mistreatment in the Victorian age. In 1893 came a similar book titled Beautiful Joe, by Margaret Marshall Saunders, this time from a quasi-canine perspective. Saunders’ writing was heavily influenced by Sewell’s Black Beauty. Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) also tells the story of a dog, although it is written in the third person, rather than the first.
The Call of the Wild is about a German Shepherd named Buck who finds himself being taken from his wealthy original owners to join a sled team in Yukon, Canada, during the Klondike gold rush of 1897–8. Buck is maltreated by his inexperienced new owners, only to be saved by John Thornton, an outdoors man who duly nurses the dog back to health. Thornton is then killed in a raid by Native Americans leaving Buck alone to fend for himself. He joins a wolf pack, eventually giving in to his wild and primitive instincts and becoming pack leader, but never forgets the kindness shown to him by Thornton.
Jack London and his Work
Jack London was a proactive socialist as well as a writer. His work is allegorical in the sense that The Call of the Wild may be interpreted as a treatise on moral and ethical conduct, along with it being an exploration of love and loyalty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was also a dog lover. The Call of the Wild shows how dogs have evolved as pack animals, learning to bond and obey within a group. In the wild, wolves learn to curry favour within their pack in order to survive and therefore breed with the pack females, thus passing their genes on to the next generation. These inclinations are so strongly imprinted that domestic dogs express them in their behaviour towards human owners, and dog owners interpret this natural instinct as love and affection.
London