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Jack LondonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Content Warning: This section discusses a pandemic and death. The source text includes ableist and racist language, which this guide reproduces only in quotations.
Though the novella’s central conflict pits humanity against nature, it is not much of a conflict. Rather, London presents human beings as quickly and entirely overwhelmed by the Scarlet Plague, which thwarted human effort and will while facilitating societal collapse. That some people live on merely underscores nature’s power, as their survival itself hinges on natural processes.
London emphasizes the extent of nature’s power by depicting the plague’s impact on a modern industrialized society and, more specifically, on the most privileged members of that society. As a professor, Smith led a life insulated from hardship, but this changed with the arrival of the plague. Smith, and society as a whole, were plunged into a desperate struggle for survival, but attempts to avert disaster proved no match for nature’s raw power. Human beings were helpless in the face of the plague; the boarders at UC Berkeley quarantined themselves but ultimately could not remain uncontaminated, and even scientists were unable to keep up with the disease’s progress.
The plague ended up destroying the entire human race except for a small band of survivors, whose survival is attributed to inherent immunity. In other words, they survived not because of anything they have done but because of the evolutionary principle of survival of the fittest. The same principle applies broadly to the kind of lives that the survivors lead. By the narrative present, the characters are at the mercy of the wilderness around them. Hare-Lip and Hoo-Hoo must obtain lunch for the family by fishing, and Edwin and Smith must avoid dangerous animals as they make their way through the forest. The grandsons act as goatherders, dependent on the behavior patterns of animals for their livelihood as they try to eke out a barren existence. Though food is abundant, securing it requires resilience, creativity, and ingenuity—traits honed, London suggests, by a hardscrabble, working-class life. Thus, the people who fare best in the postapocalyptic world are those who have gone through a kind of evolutionary adaptation, proving once again nature’s guiding hand in human affairs.
To be sure, the novella forecasts that humanity will eventually recover from the plague, rebuilding the kinds of societies that existed before the collapse. In this way, there is a constant and recurrent struggle between humankind and nature. However, humanity’s very attempts to dominate nature often backfire (Smith, at one point, notes that the effort to eradicate weeds has simply made them more resilient). The struggle is thus an uneven one in which nature always has the upper hand.
The Scarlet Plague implies that history adheres to repeated patterns involving the growth, collapse, and rebirth of human societies. This cyclical nature in turn implies that “civilization” (which London’s readers would have understood to mean something like their own Western industrialized society) is precarious: It can be easily lost, and the process of recovering it is long and hard.
The beginning of the book presents a scene that London’s readers would have associated with either prehistoric history or “primitive” hunter-gatherer societies. However, it soon emerges that it is actually a scene from the US’s future. This drives home the point that even the wealthiest and most powerful civilizations ultimately fail. The cyclical nature of history is made explicit in some of Smith’s dialog, as when he states, “Just as the old civilization passed, so will the new” (126). Such remarks challenge the Enlightenment view of human history as one of continuous progress, potentially culminating in a utopian society. For London, history has no “end goal”—or even any end at all. The series of cycles is unending and purposeless: As Smith says, “It may take fifty thousand years to build, but it will pass. All things pass” (126).
Even before describing the plague’s devastation, London implicitly calls into question the idea that human societies undergo steady, linear progress. Writing at a time when “big business” dominated the US economy, London prophesies a future world governed by wealthy magnates who have become a new aristocratic class, with the presidency transforming into an appointed rather than elected office. Economic inequality is at an extreme, with much of the population living in “slums” and “labor-ghettoes.” Although Smith praises this society as giving rise to high culture, it is far from clear that this represents “progress” when coupled with decaying democracy and rampant oppression.
Indeed, London suggests that the plague, rather than causing societal collapse, merely brought to the surface seeds of decline that were already present. London sees the oppression of the lower classes as leading to an explosive revolution in which those classes rise up and enact revenge on the ruling class. Smith alludes to this possibility while describing the looters: “In the midst of our civilization […] we had bred a race of barbarians […] and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon us” (77). This process is also shown in the fortunes of Bill and Vesta, whose roles as ruler and ruled were reversed after the plague. London implies that societies will thus continue to rise and fall at least as long as social stratification endures.
Given the power of the natural world, the book emphasizes that human beings must adapt themselves to changing conditions in order to survive. By describing a devastating plague that caught people unaware, London implies the need for preparedness and familiarity with practical skills.
Smith’s character arc embodies this idea. Before the plague, he was a college professor with servants who cooked and did household chores. When the plague came, he was forced to acquire survival skills and perform unaccustomed actions. He initially isolated himself in quarantine, doing his own cooking. When he joined others in a collective lockdown at his college, he was appointed to a committee for defense, faced threats from violent prowlers, and helped dig for a water pipe. Smith even used violence when necessary, shooting a prowler and later risking his own life to defend a couple from looters. His survival skills were further put to the test when he became one of the lone survivors of the plague. He learned to tame horses and other animals for their service and companionship and gathered a variety of food for nourishment. Later, Smith took steps to ensure the human race’s survival by marrying and having children. When addressing his grandchildren decades later, he uses the beach as his classroom, teaching them basic math and giving them life lessons about the plague. Through all of this, London implies that Smith’s ability to adapt—not merely his physical immunity to the disease—has enabled him to survive while most around him perished.
Nevertheless, there are limits to Smith’s adaptability. He notes, for example, that Bill’s greater familiarity with manual labor enabled him to build a forge and work iron—skills that Smith never acquired. Similarly, Smith’s grandchildren are implied to be better adapted to the rough conditions around them than Smith himself. Born into the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle, they have developed in response to its demands. London implies that nature and evolution play a role in effecting such adaptation. For instance, the description of Edwin on page 17 suggests that nature has fine-tuned his entire body to fit his wilderness environment. Thus, for London, survival is partly a matter of conscious effort and partly the work of nature.
Smith’s embedded narrative, which constitutes the bulk of the novella, demonstrates the importance of storytelling in preserving and conveying knowledge, especially in a dystopian situation where most vestiges of the past have been destroyed.
London establishes early in the narrative that the future is marked by forgetfulness of the past, due in part to the loss of literacy. Smith’s story is prompted by Hare-Lip’s request to “[t]ell [him and his brothers] about the Red Death” (37). Smith’s response underscores the unusualness of the request, which pleases him precisely because so few people are interested in hearing his story now. In telling his story, Smith functions as a rare conduit to the past, demonstrating the role of oral history in creating community and transmitting knowledge. Besides functioning as a form of literature, Smith’s account is filled with information about bacteriology, numbers, and technology that could be useful to the children. With its description of life before, during, and after the plague, it has the potential to help the children understand where they came from, what life is about, and how they could shape their future.
However, while the children listen to the story and offer questions and comments on it, they do not take in its central lessons. Hoo-Hoo, for example, responds to Smith’s warnings against “superstition” by announcing his plans to become a “medicine-man.” Even Edwin takes the “wrong” lesson to heart, declaring an interest in using gunpowder to recreate a kind of class hierarchy rather than heeding Smith’s comment that such hierarchies inevitably collapse. In its final moments, the story therefore casts doubt on storytelling’s ability to overcome humanity’s desire for domination on the one hand and the pressures of environment on the other.
By Jack London