The Braver Action is in Virtue than in Vengeance: Jack London’s ‘White Fang’
Believe it or not, an old teacher of mine asked me to read this slight book in my final year of high school, assuring me it would be life-changing. I mean, I wouldn’t go as far as that, but it’s certainly interesting. It may be just a short children’s story about a lonely wolf, but it raises intriguing questions about the dynamics of power. Indeed, the most profound stories ever written are always done so for children given they can often be more emotionally mature than adults.
We journey through White Fang’s life right from birth to old age, through all the trials and hardships that come his way at the hands of both extreme brutality and extreme kindness. On the surface, this is his life’s tale. Captured by a tribe of Native Americans, he is treated with severe discipline, little affection, and harsh lessons by Grey Beaver, until he becomes an animal feared by the other wild dogs and the tribespeople alike. He is fiercely bullied by the largest dog, Pip-pip, and cruelly separated from his mother, so that he becomes utterly fierce, merciless, and hostile in his alienation and isolation, forever an outsider but destined to be the greatest and strongest of them all.
But he then passes into the hands of Beauty Smith, an insane and inherently cruel master. White Fang’s nature is warped beyond all apparent hope of salvation as he transforms into a merciless killer, shattered. It is only when he is saved by an American tradesman that brutality is exchanged for kindness and the wolf learns the power of love and the purest nature of the human condition.
And so this illuminates a powerful philosophical undertone. London continually refers to the “clay” that we are made of and that is moulded by our circumstances right from birth, suggesting that the answer to the age-old question of nature vs nurture is in fact nurture. It also advocates the argument that violence breeds violence. Violence inflicted corrupts the nature of the victim and can crush their sense of morality. Brutality breeds brutality.
But there is a force stronger than hatred, than vengeance: love. White Fang’s loyalty is never stronger than when it is fuelled by love not fear as fear is a self-destructive force. The novel also poses an interesting view on rehabilitation, that perhaps the greatest cure is the inherent benevolence of humanity. It made me think of a fascinating article I read about an English professor who taught Shakespeare to maximum-security prisoners in Indiana for 15 years, arguing “they’re the ones who need education the most.” The article, for National Geographic, is entitled “Shakespeare in Shackles: Shakespeare has the power to educate convicted killers.” This is particularly relevant in the UK given the controversial ban by the Ministry of Justice on books sent to prisoners in England and Wales. One of the inmates of the Pendleton Correctional Facility in Indiana, Larry Newton, told Bates that Shakespeare “saved my life.” I find this deeply inspiring.
And it’s true, Shakespeare devoted his life to the exploration of the human condition, to the consequences of our own self-destructive flaws, and to the riddle of humanity, of what it means to be human. And in The Tempest, in my humble opinion his greatest play, he reaches a truly profound conclusion. Prospero, an inherently powerful sorcerer exiled and alienated from humanity, has the opportunity at the climax of the play to enact bitter revenge on all of his enemies. However, on the brink of such seemingly inevitable carnage, he pauses. The disarming realisation of just how blind and arrogant his power has made him, how it has dehumanised him, warped his perception of morality and isolated him from reality, stops him cold. And in one of Shakespeare’s most poignant and beautiful speeches, Prospero resolves to give up his magic and embrace humanity once more. Such mercy is the ultimate reconciliation. His acceptance of all of humanity’s faults, of both human frailty and mortality, illuminates the truly remarkable force eternally burning at the heart of our species, one that is so often clouded by the pursuit of power. It is not just violence, vengeance, hatred, and prejudice that make us human, it is our ability to love, it is empathy, compassion, and it is mercy. The word “brave” runs throughout the play like an ostinato within a symphony, reminding us of the enormous acts of both courage and cowardice we are capable of, forcing us to consider which values are the most important, the most powerful. And indeed, the rarer and braver action is “in virtue than in vengeance.”
Power is therefore strongest not when it is built upon fear, prejudice, and brutality, but upon trust, kindness, and humility. Fear is the weakest foundation on which to build an empire, an observation proven throughout history. It breeds hatred, and with hatred comes the desire for revolution. This is also true with relationships. Relationships based on fear, on distrust, and on domination, namely on corrupted values, are relationships that will inevitably shatter. True loyalty, as we can see in White Fang, comes not through fear but through trust, compassion, and ultimately, love.
So it is our environment that moulds who we are, the way we are treated, our experiences, a view supported by the importance and impact of education. The extent of our impressionability in the early stages of our lives proves that such experiences undoubtedly determine the trajectories of our futures, we need only consider the indoctrination of the young in the dictatorial regimes throughout our history to corroborate this assertion. Indeed, the role of Jim Hall, the criminal Scott’s father wrongly convicts in White Fang, and his pursuit for vengeance at the end of the novel after so many years of brutal and merciless persecution, suggests that if he had been treated with the humanity that White Fang fortunately found in life, his own story would not have ended in tragedy.
Considering Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “will to power”, that humanity is driven by this insatiable pursuit of power, it remains and will always remain inherently important to maintain our reason and morality. Shakespeare showed us in Macbeth just how destructive ambition can be. We must always ask ourselves what it means to be human. Such a question will never cease to captivate the curious. We must constantly analyse our actions, our motives, our desires, the very constitutions of our minds. This is the greatest power of literature.
Writing so soon before the world wars of the 20th century, conflicts that took us so far from humanity we became capable of inconceivable atrocities, Jack London’s message is powerful indeed. And our world is still in turmoil. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that everything can be forgiven, I’m more likely to err on the side of ‘nothing can be forgiven’. It depends upon our understanding of ‘forgiven’. Does it mean that one simply moves on, that one excuses the perpetrator of responsibility, or is there some form of redemption involved? The latter option is more convincing. Not ‘redemption’ in a religious sense, as that would imply some god has a monopoly over justice, that God is necessary for society to have a framework of moral principles, which personally I find a dangerous idea, but heartfelt remorse from the inflictor of the act, a concerted attempt to undo or remedy or ease the damage they caused.
There’s no true objective morality in the Platonic sense, but humanity’s understanding of right and wrong is ultimately a product of those emotions that affect White Fang so deeply, the ability to love, to feel empathy, compassion, mercy. So maybe we cannot truly forgive crimes, but we can at least try to understand. And maybe some criminals cannot be redeemed by society, but at least an attempt can be made to do so.
The Shakespearean advocacy of human mercy, that’s what I took from this novel.
“Every word, every cautious action, on the part of the men, impressed upon him his own terrible ferocity. It was so much added fuel to the flame of his fierceness. There could be but one result, and that was that his ferocity fed upon itself and increased. It was another instance of the plasticity of his clay, of his capacity for being moulded by the pressure of environment.”
