White Fang 719of White Fang had been molded until he became
what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and fero-
cious, the enemy of all his kind,” because life in a
dogsled camp had influenced him to live this way.
For instance, “had Lip-lip,” a particularly aggressive
sled dog, “not existed, he would have passed his pup-
pyhood with the other puppies and grown up more
doglike and with more liking for dogs.” His attack
style does not betray his wolf heritage, however, for
it retains a silent and stealthy strategy: he “never
barked . . . [but] dr[o]ve straight at the intruder.”
Eventually, he even learns to reject his roots, thus
more fully accepting his identity as a domesticated
animal. After a couple of ill-fated attempts to recon-
nect with his mother in the wild, he finally ignores
her cold snarls—having outgrown even her.
Character develops only through fateful cir-
cumstance (nurture over nature), creating an irre-
sponsible world—a place where only results, not
accountability, exist. After Beauty Smith (whose
very birth name misidentifies his character) devi-
ously arranges White Fang’s purchase, London
elaborates on how one is not culpable for identity
or behavior. He comments that “Beauty Smith had
not created himself, and no blame was to be attached
to him. He had come into the world with a twisted
body and a brute intelligence. This had constituted
the clay of him, and it had not been kindly molded
by the world.” Similarly, because White Fang knows
only that he must obey and be with his master,
regardless if he is, like Smith, “a veritable, if terrible,
god,” he transforms into a fight dog. Faithfulness is
the strongest quality in White Fang’s clay, but with
Smith he becomes hateful, molded “into a more
ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature.”
His fights are put on exhibition, and he is christened
“The Fighting Wolf.” Thus nurture is stronger than
nature, with individuals the victims of their environ-
ment, devoid as they are of free will.
Then two miners, Weedon Scott and Matt,
forcefully purchase and thus save White Fang from
Smith. They begin the slow and painful process
of remolding his behavior, almost giving up and
shooting him until they recognize his intelligence.
The new stimuli for his behavior modification are
“kindness,” freedom, and physical petting. However,
White Fang’s final transformation, which London
claims was “nothing less than a revolution,” is pos-
sible only because of his childhood experiences
with men: “The seal of his dependence on man had
been set upon him . . . Early . . . when he turned
his back on the Wild and crawled to Gray Beaver’s
feet.” During this period, “White Fang was in the
process of finding himself . . . [and] his nature was
undergoing an expansion . . . His old code of con-
duct was changing . . . [and] oft-times [he] elected
discomfort and pain for the sake of his god” (pining
for Scott when he left home to travel; submitting
himself to Scott’s hand during petting, although he
regarded hands as something to avoid and distrust
because they usually wielded a club). “Now, with the
love-master, his snuggling was the deliberate act of
putting himself into a position of hopeless helpless-
ness . . . an expression of perfect confidence, of abso-
lute self-surrender.” In this final incarnation, White
Fang comes to be known as the “Blessed Wolf.”
Lori Vermaasnature in White Fang
The novel opens with a stark description of nature,
saying that its “dark spruce forest frown[s]” and
leans, “black and ominous.” It is a mute landscape
out in the wild, “the land itself . . . a desolation,
lifeless,” suffocating under “a vast silence,” “lone and
cold.” If there is any spirit or levity, there’s only a hint
of it in a sinister laughter—“a laughter more terrible
than any sadness”—evidence of its devilish sense of
humor, one unimpressed with its subjects’ struggle to
survive, for it “laugh[s] at the futility of life and the
effort of life.” Such is “the Wild, the savage, frozen-
hearted Northland Wild.”
This kind of nature is a killer, a combatant who
always wins, is puffed up with winning, and who
“conquer[s].” Indeed, wild nature goes so far as to
abhor action, because that shows signs of life: “it
is not the way of the wild to like movement. Life
is an offense to it, for life is movement; and the
Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes
the water [and] . . . drives the sap out of the trees.”
Man is a particular nemesis, since man “is the most
restless of life.”
Nature is unrelentingly cruel, its ruthlessness
embodied in the wolf pack, which in the first three
chapters patiently and inexorably stalks Henry and