Jack London and the Sea by Anita Duneer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jack London and the Sea by Anita Duneer Kenneth K. Brandt (bio) Jack London and the Sea, by Anita Duneer. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022. 225 pp. Cloth $54.95. Anita Duneer’s discerning and informative Jack London and the Sea is the first book-length study of the maritime influences, themes, and sources in the writing of Jack London. Through London’s sea writing, Duneer explores how the author depicts “big philosophical ideas about race, heredity, gender roles, and sexuality, individuality, and community, human difference and common humanity” (2). Duneer asserts: “Like his American predecessors, London envisioned new American characters, whose ideologies of self and the world are challenged by the brutal forces of nature and exposure to social and cultural differences” (3). The crucial opposition in London’s maritime writing for Duneer is the juxtaposition of the “maritime romantic ideal” of the bygone Age of Sail (with its nostalgic past) against the often-grim reality of shipboard life and the modern Age of Steam (with its capitalist oppression). Duneer explains that London saw “the sea as a liberating realm of adventure, discovery, and romantic possibility. Yet he always countered romance with a gritty realism to interrogate the ideologies and larger power structures that the sea imported from the land” (33). As Duneer reminds us, London tends to plot a course of “idealized realism” (5) in all things nautical. The first chapter, “The Call of the Sea,” focuses on the idea of the sea as an extension of the frontier and an escape from the restraints of civilization, which London often imagines as a more primal realm suitable for quests of romantic self-actualization. Land is ordinary, while the sea brims with freedom and opportunity. Offering specific examples from London’s extensive subject files on sea-related topics, she elaborates on the maritime romantic ideal by discussing sea chantey-inspired poetry and accounts of “hell-ships,” sensational travel narratives, and nautical pseudo-histories and satires. The discussion of London and surfing is particularly notable. [End Page 89] Duneer argues that London’s understanding of surfing is “Zen-like, accepting the real power of the ocean” (21). In this chapter and throughout the book, Duneer skillfully interweaves discussions of key sea-writers for London: Stevenson, Cooper, Melville, Kipling, Dana, Norris, and others. Chapter 2, “The Maritime Romantic Ideal on the San Francisco Bay,” provides nuanced readings of two early London works most scholars skim: The Cruise of the Dazzler (carefully analyzed alongside Kipling’s Captain Courageous) and the short story collection Tales of the Fish Patrol. Chapter 3, “Hell Ships and Seafaring Women,” examines The Sea-Wolf and The Mutiny of the Elsinore. Duneer studiously reads The Sea-Wolf against Norris’s Moran of the Lady Letty. One of the book’s major high points is her reading of The Mutiny of the Elsinore. She contrasts this novel with The People of the Abyss and “How I Became a Socialist,” rightly identifying The Mutiny of the Elsinore as a “social Darwinian burlesque” (47). This novel founders because its tangled plot of love, philosophy, and racist characters is devoid of the “humanistic social philosophy that readers expect from the best of London’s social writing” (70). Overall, Duneer sees London’s treatment of race and white privileged in his sea fiction as mixed: “London’s maritime writing presents conflicting views of race and white privilege, leaving some assumptions unexamined and some explicitly critiqued” (170). In Chapter 4, “Crafting the Sea in Martin Eden,” Duneer finds London’s Martin Eden “flooded with language and imagery of the sea” (71). She asserts that this Künstlerroman is “a reversal of [the] motif of initiation” in which the protagonist’s “journey turns inward as Martin attempts (and ultimately fails) to find his existential bearings, and ultimately downward, as Martin forces himself into the depths of the sea to escape an existence of surfaces, both on land and in the water” (75). In the fifth chapter, “The Specter of Survival Cannibalism,” Duneer showcases how London taps into primal fears “through the dark doubling of the gothic and Darwinian” (91). She specifically catalogs how London’s writing reflects common tropes from various cannibalism...