Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 281Inadvertently, by their very weakness, they reveal where London’s fundamental
sympathies lay. The imaginative commitment of The Sea-Wolf is to the character
who is, in many ways, a version or projection of its author, or at least of how he
would have liked to see himself. And that is especially the case in its closing pages. At
the end of the novel, Larsen is deserted by his crew. Suffering from cerebral cancer,
he first goes blind and then dies on a deserted island. Struggling to survive against
his creeping paralysis, his will and his disbelief in immortality never falter: as the
very last word he ever writes, a defiant “B-O-S-H,” indicates. He ends as he began in
the novel, by saying no, in thunder, to convention, custom, and conscience and by
demonstrating his core belief in willpower and struggle. He dies, as so many of
London’s human characters do, the sacrificial death of a hero who embraces his
dying as a necessary part of the “yeast,” the “ferment” of existence. It comes as little
of a surprise to learn that, after a turbulent forty years of living and writing (not only
fiction, but vivid accounts of poverty like The People of the Abyss (1903) and social
treatises such as The War of the Classes (1904)), London committed suicide. His
body worn down by the strenuous life he had gloried in, and by alcoholism, his
mind worn out by disillusionment and depression – the things he had seen and
endured, the discrepancy between his own success and the suffering he still saw
around him – he performed one last act of the will. For London, life was struggle.
While he could, he engaged in the struggle with intense enthusiasm; when he felt he
could no longer, he embraced the inevitable. Like his hero Martin Eden, in effect,
he ended by affirming his own bleak belief that life is “a thing that moves” and then
moves no more – and his power over at least one “thing” that moved, himself.The Development of Women’s Writing
Writing by African-American women
The world of the Naturalists is, on the whole, a determinately male one, defined by
power and struggle. In the work of Norris and London, in particular, there is a dis-
tinctively and additionally masculine strain, marked by barely concealed homoerotic
feelings and loving admiration for those men who have understood and perhaps
embody the principle of force. In the work of a number of women writers of the
later nineteenth century, there may be a similar interest in the allocation and
distribution of power. However, it tends to express itself in different forms, less
conspicuously wedded to the notion of life as war. The forms in which women
writers expressed themselves during this period were several, and usually involved a
continuity with writing before the Civil War. Some of the forms they took up and
developed, such as spiritual autobiography, Gothic and polemic, had not been the
special preserve of earlier women writers. Some, like domestic realism, had. But
there was a marked tendency to use these forms to explore, as Kate Chopin did, the
condition and vocation of women, their relationship to the changing worlds of
home and work. And there was an equally marked tendency to look, as Mary WilkinsGGray_c03.indd 281ray_c 03 .indd 281 8 8/1/2011 7:54:23 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 23 AM