Dogs and wolves were beloved symbols to London. The wolf is wild and free, yet clearly a clever animal. Dogs, while no less intelligent, stay tied to the world of humans: They are tame and loyal. Most fascinating to him, though, was the idea that each of these two beasts has the capacity to become like the other.
This ability to change is at the heart of Call of the Wild and its “sequel,” White Fang. In the first, a domestic dog-named Buck is driven by the cruelty of one master and the death of another to retreat from the world of man. He becomes wild, like a wolf. In the second, a ferocious wild wolf called White Fang is captured, beaten into submission as a sled dog, and then sold to a vicious master who uses him for dogfights. He is made more fierce by these men than he ever was in the wild, but a kind and loving master saves him, and transforms him into a domestic “blessed wolf,” capable of as much loyalty as any dog born tame.
London challenges the notion that there are set boundaries in life that anything has a “nature” that cannot be defied. The tamest beast, when forced to fight or die, becomes a wolf, and even the wolves, who have always struggled to survive, can become tame when given love and compassion. From what we know of London, his writing a novel about reversion to the wild makes perfect sense. But why did London, who believed so strongly in survival of the fittest, choose to show the taming of a feral dog?
To answer this question, one must note when London wrote each novel. Call of The Wild, which hurtled London to fame and fortune, was written in 1903, when he was firmly entrenched in his political dogma. The writing is bleak and piercingly real. By the novel’s conclusion, Buck’s reversion to wild beast is only inevitable. London is reaffirming his doctrine: the strongest, like Buck, no matter how abused and downtrodden, will overcome and survive—even if they must become savage. London believed this to be the case in his own life: He had survived adversity by forsaking civilization and becoming a “lone wolf.”
White Fang was written in 1906, during London’s second marriage, to Charmian Kittredge. While his first marriage, to Elizabeth Maddern, was an unhappy one, London and Kittredge were, as he was fond of saying, “love-mates.” London—who called himself a “blond beast,” often went by the nickname “Wolf,” and named his ranch “Wolf House”—believed that Kittredge had tamed him with love. The narrative of White Fang is more optimistic than that of Call of the Wild; though the description is every bit as natural, particularly the scenes of violence committed by and against White Fang, the novel ends happily, with the wolf-hero domesticated, looking at the puppies he has sired.
London tells us not only that man can change; he tells us that he himself has changed. In these two novels, classics since their publication, he explores the nature of man, the nature of the beast, and the nature of Jack London. He had once sought to conquer the world around him, to be the strongest and the boldest. In the last decade of his life, he came to realize that he did not have to conquer to survive or be happy.
—Aaron John Loeb
1994