London, Jack

1876–1916

Author

Jack London was a highly successful writer of popular fiction. Best known for his novel The Call of the Wild (1903), London admired, and promoted in his work, a masculinity that was achieved through physical hardship in inhospitable natural environments. His writings constitute part of a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discourse concerning masculinity, including a biological definition of manhood, the physical education of the male body, and the promotion of the outdoor life as an antidote to the perceived threat of effeminacy and degeneration posed by the artificial, urban-industrial “overcivilization” of modern American life.

This discourse was inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, according to which competition for survival among organisms improves species' adaptation to their natural environments. In The Call of the Wild, White Fang (1906), and other writings, London depicts nature as a relentless struggle for survival and supremacy, defining manhood in terms of physical brawn and strength of will. In The Sea-Wolf (1904), the impressively muscular and brutally violent ship captain, Wolf Larsen, represents a “natural” predatory masculinity that is achieved at sea. London's stories about realizing manhood in a wild space beyond the frontiers of civilization also reflected contemporary cultural concerns that the future of American masculinity was endangered by the closing of the western frontier at the end of the nineteenth century.

By defining manhood in physical and biological terms, London offered a body-centered masculine ideal. His fiction presents both an unabashed homoerotic appreciation of the beauty of muscular men's bodies—such as that of Wolf Larsen in The Sea-Wolf or of Pat Glendon, the boxer hero of The Abysmal Brute (1913)—and an emphasis on the redemptive possibilities of physical violence. For London, as for other men of the period who touted the regenerative qualities of war, violence represented a manly and immediate physical experience that seemed increasingly unattainable amid the indirect and genteel relationships of a commercial, bureaucratic society. London sought to inspire men who felt feminized and enervated by civilized gentility to pursue the exciting, as well as muscle- and character-building, experience of physical pain and endurance beyond the frontiers of settled life.

London's understanding of manhood is wrought with contradictions. While he idealized manly yet brutal competition and struggle, he also expressed a socialist sensitivity to inequality and injustice—particularly in The People of the Abyss (1903) and The Iron Heel (1908). Furthermore, despite London's socialist inclinations and his definition of manliness in opposition to modern American civilization, his valuation of a rugged and competitive individualism resembled and buttressed the ideology of entrepreneurial manhood that underwrote American capitalism.

[Page 275]That London achieved popularity in his lifetime indicates that his promotion of outdoor male adventure and Darwinian view of masculinity powerfully appealed to male readers of the time and reinforced American gender mores. In the twenty-first century, the appeal of leisure activities featuring the pursuit of excitement and danger in natural settings—such as rafting and rock climbing—suggests that London's ideal of masculinity continues to resonate.