Popular Culture Review
feminized bays and furrows of glittering French Polynesia. Instead, Martin’s
the triumphant new imperial self he once projected in the eager “empery of his
mind” (56).
and fertility mirrored Jack London’s excited response to Hawai’i during the
Snark voyage, when he wrote much of Martin Eden. However,
the consolidation of western masculinity that both Jack London and Martin
a psychological distance, even in the imperial age of steamships like the
Mariposa. Unlike the narrative of mastery that London created out of his
disillusionment. These conditions worsened after he sailed out of Polynesia
Martin’s dissolution of selfhood began in Oakland and accelerated on the
Martin sinks to his death, he is still a perfect physical specimen, “a man in a
the physical degeneration he had scorned earlier in the Snark voyage as the
“wreckage of races” he observed in the tropics (Snark 103). Balmy images of
the South Seas that Jack recalled and preserved in Martin Eden’s imagination
were replaced in London’s writings by a chaotic picture of the sweltering
to California from the Solomons in deteriorating health and worsening drug
addiction. He was destined to live only a few more years as he succumbed
Thus, it was in the gloomy equatorial jungle that the depleted urban traveler
encountered the terrifying dissolution of the body that was spared Martin
Eden, the sunken white statue.
Works Cited
Anderson, Lisa. “Justice to Ruth Morse: The Devolution of a Character in
Martin Eden.” The Call: The Magazine of the Jack London Society 10.1-2
(2008): 11-