Popular Culture Review
naivety he does not realize that his spiritualized image of Ruth is an illusion,
like the oil painting he examines in the Morse’s parlor, a kind of trompe l’oeil of
of a schooner plowing through heavy seas; but on close inspection Martin
discovers that its clever paint-strokes have deceived him into seeing depth
and movement where there are none. He dismisses it as a “‘trick picture’”
(Martin Eden
Morse home.
Perhaps the image of the ship at sea is a foreshadowing of Martin’s
troubled last voyage. Perhaps it anticipates Martin’s future literary technique
(Martin Eden 284). What is certain is that Martin fails to perceive his own
delusions of upward mobility and American “success” as he projects them
onto Ruth’s wan form, itself a kind of trompe l’oeil. Martin is right in that Ruth
perhaps neurasthenic young woman given to headaches and fainting spells
(Martin Eden 218, 222). The young woman in Oakland on whom London partly
modeled Ruth, Mabel Applegarth, was consumptive and often convalescent
(Stasz, Jack London’s Women 42-43). Martin envisions Ruth as an angel in
white, yet her pallor conceals an urgent feminine need he cannot detect.
she frames him in her female gaze: “in Martin she sees sex itself” (Whitson
broad neck, corded with muscles and scars (Martin Eden, 36, 42, 53, 94, 120,
220, 226). For her it is an unconscious sign of male sexuality. Nothing in her
sheltered life has prepared her for Martin’s allure, symbolized by his “massive,
phallic” throat and neck (DeGuzmán and López 113). Ruth’s eyes wander
down Martin’s statuesque body. She gasps silently at the “wanton thought
that rushed into her mind. It seemed to her that if she could lay her two hands
Martin
Eden, 42-3). Ruth’s tight focus on Martin’s neck concentrates his masculinity
into a powerful fusion of blood and semen—according to Ernest Jones, a
common association in “vampire” dreams (On the Nightmare, 119). Thus, at
kept “innocent about love and sexuality” (Stasz, Jack London’s Women, 43).
Confused by physical needs she did not know she has, Ruth seeks to drink
Martin’s carnal power from his neck like an elixir. She senses that “in his
swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life” (Martin Eden, 106),
a cure for her languor. His sexualized aura “seemed to enter into her body
and course through her veins in a liquid glow, and to set her quivering with its
imparted strength” (Martin Eden, 120). She is warmed by “Martin’s intensity of
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