Popular Culture Review - Volume 26, Number 2 - Summer 2015
The Call of the Colonial: Jack London’s Martin Eden
Philip CastilleA
J
ack London’s novel Martin Eden was not a commercial success when
it appeared in 1909, perhaps because it was before its time. Now it
identity. Martin Eden maintains a place alongside notable early twentiethcentury British and American autobiographical novels of the emerging male
artist— among them D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Theodore Dreiser’s The ‘Genius,’
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of
Paradise, and William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes. Showing its originality, Martin
Eden predates all of these Künstlerromane -- novels that draw on biographical
detail to portray the young artist. Further, Martin Eden
novels to challenge the Horatio Alger myth, standing alongside turn-of-thecentury novels by Dreiser, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, and Harold
Frederic. These works and others undercut this rags-to-riches story and share
a fascination with failure. Martin Eden
social-climbing poor white male who rises to commercial “success” only to selfdestruct. Indeed, Martin Eden is the template for the modern American male
protagonist who vaults upward but falls to pieces; notable instances of this
genre are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Norman Mailer’s The American
Dream. After years of self-education and feverish apprentice writing, young
Martin Eden soars from the slums to celebrity status as a bestselling author.
But he falls victim to a severely split consciousness that puts him at war with
himself. In an existential panic Martin abandons art and the city altogether. He
answers the call of the colonial by seeking to reinvent himself as an adventurer
in the South Seas. But on his voyage to Tahiti he gives up his quest and drops
overboard in mid-ocean. This is his weary end, the last in a series of selfdefeating choices during his identity crisis.
London’s novel is told by an omniscient narrator, who introduces us to a
jaunty, unemployed sailor from Oakland who is “almost twenty-one” years old
(London, Martin Eden
an upper-class man, Arthur Morse, from being mugged. For his bravery, Martin
is rewarded with a dinner invitation to the Morse mansion in Oakland. Martin
does not realize that he is meant to provide the evening’s entertainment, telling
A
University of Houston-Victoria
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