This is our second week reading The Call of the Wild, by Jack London. This week we’ll share a few paragraphs of our responses to the book, and get the next book, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, to read over break.
Last week kids brought in the results of their background research, which included sexism, colonialism, the Yukon Gold Rush, the biography of Jack London and of Robert Service, the impact of the Gold Rush on Alaska Natives, racism, and the romantic idea of Wilderness.
One thing that’s useful is the concept of colonialism, which is the set of attitudes and actions when one group takes over the land and resources of another group, and labels them as inherently inferior as a way to justify taking their stuff. This helps tell why Native Americans are depicted in certain ways in American literature.
The first thing that I noticed, and that you picked up, was that it is extremely violent. When you look at accounts of the Gold Rush, or particularly the Canadian dogsled mail service at the time, it becomes clear that he has created his own, ultra-violent world that bears little similarity to the actual Gold Rush.
Not that the Gold Rush wasn’t violent, but it was much sorrier and more diffuse than what he depicts.
At one point Buck finds a dozen wolverines feeding on a bear he’s killed. First of all, wolverines are solitary. Then he chases them off, killing two. Right! Then there is all the dogs killing other dogs, which the humans seem to find amusing. And, the real Canadian mail was run in stages, and one team of dogs would not be running thousands of miles without a break. And, why do they keep selling Buck, when he’s “one in a t’ousand.”
It seemed like most of you enjoyed the story, in spite of the exaggeration, or because of that. I think he was trying to set up this opposition between civilization and the wild. His descriptions of the violence are dramatic, and the relationship between Thornton and Buck is also well done and is actually believable.
As far as “The Wild,” the struggle for survival seems to have two ways it can influence a person, or dog – a brutal savagery, displayed by many characters and especially the Indians at the end, and the way The Wild can actually improve a person or dog that is inherently superior, by carving away all the softening effects of civilization, while leaving his moral nature intact.
This gets to the idea of Wilderness as a means of uplifting the (superior) soul, to God.
Inborn superiority seems to be a core theme. Buck, the dog, the main character, is a super dog, just as John Thornton, his human friend, is a superman. Buck is constantly fighting off much larger and more numerous foes. Early on in the book London makes a reference to the “cold-tubbing races,” and he seems to have been a racist at heart – some peoples, as well as individuals, genetically, are superior to others.
He uses terms like half-breed and squaw, which are unacceptable today, as bad as the n-word.
But the worst, and I don’t know how it is that people don’t object to it, is the end of the book, in which for some unknown reason some Indians murder all the dogs and men in the camp, shooting them full of arrows. Then Buck goes for the Indians, who are dancing, of course, in the wreckage of the camp. He kills some, and causes others to panic and shoot arrows and spears into each other, then flee the “ghost dog” and avoid that valley in the future.
London had to have brutal Indians murder his hero, John Thornton, because having him die due to an accident would make him less than super competent to survive in the wilderness. That doesn’t make it ok. This kind of stereotype of the stupid, brutal, unpredictable, superstitious, and cowardly Indian is the worst there is. To me it cheapens the whole book, and honestly, the way Buck kept fighting off bigger and more numerous enemies, already makes it more like a magazine story than quality fiction.
Obviously I have problems with this book! And am surprised that it is given to kids without a disclaimer about the racist depiction of Indians, and how unfortunately that was part of how people viewed Natives at the time. We have to do better than that, now, and get beyond the stereotypes of the Indians as in harmony with nature (colors of the wind, anyone?), or cruel stupid savages, and view Native people, past and present, as fully human, complex as anyone else.
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