The Sea-Wolf

Charles Walcutt describes London as an excellent naturalist author whose works always inevitably end up a sentimental mush. Having only read Martin Eden recently, that seemed an incorrect characterization.

The Sea-Wolf could not more perfectly fit that description. It is the perfect example of Donna Campbell's "second thematic course" of naturalism: "Sissy" van Weyden, a literary critic, is rescued from shipwreck by a sealing ship that won't set him back in San Francisco, but takes him out to Japan to hunt seals, on the captain's whim. The captain is Wolf Larsen, a sort of evil inversion of the Martin Eden character: he's physically enormous and strong, but also a self-trained philosopher who, following Nietzsche and Darwin, believes that life is nothing but the struggle between various forms of yeast, trying to stay alive. He has the beliefs of the beast, and the erudite philosophy to back them up; Martin had the philosophy, but never seemed quite able to hold to it.

Under Larsen's order, Hump shapes up and becomes a man. Then, as Bosley Crowther put it in a review of the John Wayne Western "Red River," which is also "the story of a desperate contention between two strong-minded men, a hard-bitten veteran and a youngster." Crowther writes: "Then the cowboys—and the picture—run smack into "Hollywood" in the form of a glamorized female." In The Sea-Wolf, the women is Maud Brewster, an acclaimed writer that the literary critic van Weyden had much praised in the past. The two eventually end up together on an island and then, after refurbishing Wolf's ship and overcoming a stroke-weakened Wolf, end up happily together in a load of sentimental mush.

A number of interesting issues are in play here. One is Wolf Larsen's brother, Death, who is never onscreen but hunts Wolf down; Wolf describes him as identical to himself, but without the whimsical or philosophical underpinnings. This suggest to me that philosophy, as London perceives it, may be just window-dressing or a veneer; Wolf and Death don't act any differently, even though one has read Darwin and one not. Alternately, Wolf might be worse than Death, as his belief-system leads him to toy with people, as he does with two sailors he promises Hump that he will not harm but then repeatedly sails outside of their ship's reach so that they drown.
Also notable is the fact that Hump is never able to murder Wolf; Wolf taunts him that society still has its grips on him. Although Hump is toughened by his conflict with Wolf, he retains society's deepest injunctions against murder. This tells us two things. First, in the second thematic form of naturalism, the classist fantasy that the man of good stock can be toughened by the encounter with the brute is complete: he is toughened, but he never becomes the brute. Second, like in Red River's infamous climax, you cannot kill the father in naturalism: the urge to cut the ties completely and institute a new system of government is never realized. At any time, Hump could have killed Wolf and liberated the crew of the Ghost from his tyranny, but he's never able to act on this impulse.