The Call of the Wild and White Fang - Jack London [9]
Leclère, himself the product of violence, fosters Bâtard’s innate evil until “the very breath each drew was a challenge and a menace to the other. Their hate bound them together as love could never bind” (“Bâtard,” p. 389). Equals in violence and vileness, neither can “master” the other, and throughout the story, each bides his time, assesses the other’s weaknesses, and plots the other’s destruction. At the end of the text, man and dog die together. Leclère, who has been falsely accused of murder, stands on a box with a rope around his neck, while Bâtard sits grinning at his feet. When his executioners hastily leave to assess new evidence in Leclère’s case, Bâtard exacts his own revenge and knocks the box out from under his tormentor. The executioners, who return to free the innocent man, find Bâtard clinging by his teeth to Leclère’s dead body. They shoot him for it.
After detailing this anatomy of hate, London undertook to reen-vision the relationship between human and dog, and specifically between sled driver and sled dog. Native American tribes long used dogs to pull sleds, and dogs in the Arctic performed essential functions. Without them, the delivery of supplies, mail, and other necessities would have been nearly impossible. Despite the real function of dog as work animal, however, there exists between man and dog in London’s Klondike a deep and passionate love—nowhere is this more apparent than it is in the profound relationships between Buck and John Thornton and between White Fang and Weeden Scott. London loved his own dogs; he even fought a bitter custody battle with his first wife, Bessie Maddern, over their husky, Brown Wolf. Buck loves Thornton with a “love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness” (p. 58). White Fang loves Weeden Scott with an emotion akin to religious devotion. London saw in the relationship between a man and a dog a sentiment so raw and so powerful that it can arrest an animal’s irresistible call to roam the trackless wilds or draw that wild animal away from freedom and into bondage.
The intense love exhibited between the human and the dog in these texts is both positive and affirming and dangerous and destabilizing. On the one hand, this love confirms the greater connection between the two animals; it reiterates the initial connection that drew the wolf into the human home in the first place. But at the same time, such all-powerful love displaces the fundamental command of nature to preserve the self and the species. Such a love demands a loss of borders between the self and the other, a loss that can potentially enact the destruction of the self. Consider, for instance, Buck’s willingness to throw himself off the cliff at Thornton’s command, all for the love of a man; or, more to the point, White Fang’s near-fatal impulse to protect Weeden’s family.
Love equalizes. It dismantles the hierarchy that places humans above “lesser” animals and, as a result, forces us to envision moral codes in a profoundly different way. Love makes operative this new vision of morality—the one based on social instincts and a concern for the “general good of the community.” Naturally, some found this portrait hard to ingest. Theodore Roosevelt called London a “nature faker” and accused him of shamelessly humanizing dogs in his novels and stories. London published a scathing reply to these charges in an essay entitled “The Other Animals”; in this piece, he argues that denying the reasoning and emotive capacities of animals denies the obvious kinship of creatures in the natural