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Mood
Definition of Motif
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the central themes of a book... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Fog:
Throughout the novel, fog is a motif that represents immersion in the present moment. It also represents an orientation toward doing things rather than just thinking about them.
In Chapter 1, Humphrey expresses his gratitude that he isn’t the one sailing the Martinez, but rather a passenger, free to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the fog rather than worry about its effects on the ferry’s passage:
I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labor which made it unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and navigation in order to visit my friend […] It was good that men should be specialists, I mused […] I concentrated on a few particular things, such as, for instance, the analysis of Poe’s place in American literature.
Humphrey’s place outside of the fog represents his lack of knowledge about navigation and weather, as well as his place in society as an intellectual. As a literary critic, thinking about things is his profession; he doesn’t work with his hands as a sailor does. Further, he has very little life experience—he lives at home with his mother and sisters, and although he has thought a lot about love in theory, he by his own admission has never experienced love or sex in practice. His thoughts about “division of labor” also betray an ignorance about the lives of working people. He doesn’t question whether it is right that he should live a life of leisure while others, like the captain of the Martinez, do exhausting manual labor. He assumes that they do so because they want to, not because they need to make money to survive.
In Chapter 25, after Humphrey has been on board the Ghost for some time, Wolf pushes the crew to go seal-hunting in dangerous conditions because he wants to out-hunt his brother, Death Larsen, who is the captain of another seal-hunting ship. He steers the Ghost into a thick fog bank in pursuit of the seals:
The sun was blotted out, there was no sky, even our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon was such as tear-blinded eyes may see. […] Then I looked at Wolf Larsen, but there was nothing subjective about his state of consciousness. His whole concern was the immediate, objective present.
Here, the crew of the Ghost is completely immersed in the fog, reflecting the fact that they are all completely focused on action in this moment. They are in a dangerous situation; they must be completely alert to their surroundings and ready to act if something goes wrong.
In Chapter 27, Humphrey describes gleaming droplets of water from the fog sitting on Maud’s hair as he is watching her sleep first thing in the morning:
The top [blanket] I had drawn over her face to shelter it from the night, so I could see nothing but […] her light-brown hair, escaped from the covering and jeweled with moisture from the air.
Humphrey and Maud’s immersion in the fog in this moment represents how Humphrey’s love for Maud has transformed him into someone who acts decisively. He has become an active participant in his life—no longer theorizing about love with pen and paper, he is experiencing it firsthand, bravely escaping from Wolf Larsen’s abuse to save the woman he loves. Further, his characterization of the fog as looking like jewels or crystals (which are usually associated with wealth and luxury) suggests that he now recognizes the value of action and hard work.
Related Themes:
Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Primitive vs. Civilized:
Throughout the novel, Jack London uses the contrast between the primitive and the civilized as a motif to explore questions about human nature. Wolf Larsen represents the primitive side of human nature, while Maud and Humphrey represent the civilized. For example, in Chapter 8, Humphrey describes Wolf in the following terms:
Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen is mad, or half-mad at least, what of his strange moods and vagaries. Other times I take him for a great man, a genius who has never arrived. And finally, I am convinced that he is the perfect type of the primitive man, born a thousand years or generations too late and an anachronism in this culminating century of civilization. He is certainly an individualist of the most pronounced type.
The primitive, like Wolf Larsen, is represented in the novel as powerful, cruel, selfish, and individualistic. It is connected with the body—physical strength (which Wolf possesses in spades) and sexuality both fall into this category. To Humphrey, the primitive is both dangerous and somewhat pure; Wolf, for example, never received a formal education, and his way of looking at the world is direct and confident, which Humphrey admires. The primitive is the source of Wolf’s power. Humphrey describes it as an animal strength in him that is “savage, ferocious, alive in itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of motion, the elemental stuff out of which many forms of life have been molded.” This “essence of life” is the same as Wolf’s “yeast” and draws on nature itself to give Wolf his power.
At the beginning of the novel, Humphrey is represented as being disconnected from his primitive self. He looks at the world through a purely intellectual lens, is very physically weak, is cut off from his sexuality. However, once he boards the Ghost and is surrounded by the sea, which represents the primal side of human nature, he slowly begins to reconnect with his primitive self. He grows stronger physically, learns how to work with his hands, and finds himself discovering his sexuality through his attraction to Maud. He describes this transformation in Chapter 27:
Idealist and romanticist that I was and always had been in spite for my analytical nature, yet I had failed till now to grasp the physical characteristics of love. The love of man and woman, I had always held, was a sublimated something related to spirit […] The bonds of the flesh had little place in my cosmos of love. But I was learning the sweet lesson for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed itself, through the flesh.
Here Humphrey is expressing the transformation he has experienced on board the Ghost. His primitive side has not supplanted his romantic and intellectual side; rather, he’s found a way to strike a balance between the two, seeing the ways in which his ideals can be “transmuted […] through the flesh.” Humphrey also looked down on physical labor at the beginning of the book, but by the end, he sees how being strong and physically capable can in turn strengthen the spirit. Humphrey’s journey represents a reconciliation of the primitive and the civilized.
Related Themes:
Chapter 22
Explanation and Analysis—The Speech of Eyes:
Throughout the novel, eyes are a motif that represent the characters’ unconscious, instinctual selves. Eyes are used to communicate nonverbally, a language that both Maud and Wolf are adept in. Humphrey refers to this as “the speech of eyes.”
In Chapter 22, Humphrey points out to Maud that she has a habit of speaking through her eyes:
"I know,—I can see it—you have, among other ways, been used to managing people with your eyes, letting your moral courage speak out through them, as it were. You have already managed me with your eyes, commanded me with them.”
And in Chapter 23, he describes Wolf doing something similar, communicating his attraction to Maud nonverbally, through his eyes:
It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation. Ordinarily gray and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and golden, and all a-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or welled up till the full orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance. Perhaps it was to this that the golden color was due; but golden his eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time luring and compelling, and speaking a demand and clamor of the blood which no woman, much less Maud Brewster, could misunderstand.
In both passages, eyes are represented as windows into the characters’ emotions and desires. Maud uses her eyes to “manage” people to do what she wants; Wolf, similarly, attempts to use his eyes to compel Maud to fulfill his desire for her. Earlier in the novel, Wolf’s eyes are also compared to the surrounding ocean. Humphrey describes them as “that baffling protean gray which is never twice the same; which runs through many shades and colorings like intershot silk in sunshine,” using imagery to liken his eyes to ocean water changing in the light of the sun. Since the ocean represents the primitive in The Sea-Wolf, Humphrey’s comparison of Wolf’s eyes to the sea suggests that his eyes are a window into his primal self.
In Chapter 35, after Maud and Humphrey have started to fall in love, Humphrey marvels at the way that he and Maud can speak to one another beneath the surface level of speech, using their eyes. While they’re flirting, he reflects on his own inexperience in “the speech of eyes”:
And yet, through the five minutes of banter which followed, there was a serious something underneath the fun which I could not but relate to the strange and fleeting expression I had caught in her eyes. What was it? Could it be that our eyes were speaking beyond the will of our speech? […] Had she seen the clamor in [my eyes] and understood? And had her eyes spoken to me? What else could that expression have meant—that dancing, tremulous light? And yet it could not be. It was impossible. Besides, I was not skilled in the speech of eyes.
Humphrey’s new ability to communicate in “the speech of eyes,” a language he hadn’t been “skilled” in before, represents the way he has connected with his primitive self while working on board the Ghost. While previously he had only been able to connect with Maud on an intellectual level, now he can connect with her on a physical and instinctual level.
Chapter 23
Explanation and Analysis—The Speech of Eyes:
Throughout the novel, eyes are a motif that represent the characters’ unconscious, instinctual selves. Eyes are used to communicate nonverbally, a language that both Maud and Wolf are adept in. Humphrey refers to this as “the speech of eyes.”
In Chapter 22, Humphrey points out to Maud that she has a habit of speaking through her eyes:
"I know,—I can see it—you have, among other ways, been used to managing people with your eyes, letting your moral courage speak out through them, as it were. You have already managed me with your eyes, commanded me with them.”
And in Chapter 23, he describes Wolf doing something similar, communicating his attraction to Maud nonverbally, through his eyes:
It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation. Ordinarily gray and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and golden, and all a-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or welled up till the full orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance. Perhaps it was to this that the golden color was due; but golden his eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time luring and compelling, and speaking a demand and clamor of the blood which no woman, much less Maud Brewster, could misunderstand.
In both passages, eyes are represented as windows into the characters’ emotions and desires. Maud uses her eyes to “manage” people to do what she wants; Wolf, similarly, attempts to use his eyes to compel Maud to fulfill his desire for her. Earlier in the novel, Wolf’s eyes are also compared to the surrounding ocean. Humphrey describes them as “that baffling protean gray which is never twice the same; which runs through many shades and colorings like intershot silk in sunshine,” using imagery to liken his eyes to ocean water changing in the light of the sun. Since the ocean represents the primitive in The Sea-Wolf, Humphrey’s comparison of Wolf’s eyes to the sea suggests that his eyes are a window into his primal self.
In Chapter 35, after Maud and Humphrey have started to fall in love, Humphrey marvels at the way that he and Maud can speak to one another beneath the surface level of speech, using their eyes. While they’re flirting, he reflects on his own inexperience in “the speech of eyes”:
And yet, through the five minutes of banter which followed, there was a serious something underneath the fun which I could not but relate to the strange and fleeting expression I had caught in her eyes. What was it? Could it be that our eyes were speaking beyond the will of our speech? […] Had she seen the clamor in [my eyes] and understood? And had her eyes spoken to me? What else could that expression have meant—that dancing, tremulous light? And yet it could not be. It was impossible. Besides, I was not skilled in the speech of eyes.
Humphrey’s new ability to communicate in “the speech of eyes,” a language he hadn’t been “skilled” in before, represents the way he has connected with his primitive self while working on board the Ghost. While previously he had only been able to connect with Maud on an intellectual level, now he can connect with her on a physical and instinctual level.
Chapter 25
Explanation and Analysis—Fog:
Throughout the novel, fog is a motif that represents immersion in the present moment. It also represents an orientation toward doing things rather than just thinking about them.
In Chapter 1, Humphrey expresses his gratitude that he isn’t the one sailing the Martinez, but rather a passenger, free to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the fog rather than worry about its effects on the ferry’s passage:
I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labor which made it unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and navigation in order to visit my friend […] It was good that men should be specialists, I mused […] I concentrated on a few particular things, such as, for instance, the analysis of Poe’s place in American literature.
Humphrey’s place outside of the fog represents his lack of knowledge about navigation and weather, as well as his place in society as an intellectual. As a literary critic, thinking about things is his profession; he doesn’t work with his hands as a sailor does. Further, he has very little life experience—he lives at home with his mother and sisters, and although he has thought a lot about love in theory, he by his own admission has never experienced love or sex in practice. His thoughts about “division of labor” also betray an ignorance about the lives of working people. He doesn’t question whether it is right that he should live a life of leisure while others, like the captain of the Martinez, do exhausting manual labor. He assumes that they do so because they want to, not because they need to make money to survive.
In Chapter 25, after Humphrey has been on board the Ghost for some time, Wolf pushes the crew to go seal-hunting in dangerous conditions because he wants to out-hunt his brother, Death Larsen, who is the captain of another seal-hunting ship. He steers the Ghost into a thick fog bank in pursuit of the seals:
The sun was blotted out, there was no sky, even our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon was such as tear-blinded eyes may see. […] Then I looked at Wolf Larsen, but there was nothing subjective about his state of consciousness. His whole concern was the immediate, objective present.
Here, the crew of the Ghost is completely immersed in the fog, reflecting the fact that they are all completely focused on action in this moment. They are in a dangerous situation; they must be completely alert to their surroundings and ready to act if something goes wrong.
In Chapter 27, Humphrey describes gleaming droplets of water from the fog sitting on Maud’s hair as he is watching her sleep first thing in the morning:
The top [blanket] I had drawn over her face to shelter it from the night, so I could see nothing but […] her light-brown hair, escaped from the covering and jeweled with moisture from the air.
Humphrey and Maud’s immersion in the fog in this moment represents how Humphrey’s love for Maud has transformed him into someone who acts decisively. He has become an active participant in his life—no longer theorizing about love with pen and paper, he is experiencing it firsthand, bravely escaping from Wolf Larsen’s abuse to save the woman he loves. Further, his characterization of the fog as looking like jewels or crystals (which are usually associated with wealth and luxury) suggests that he now recognizes the value of action and hard work.
Related Themes:
Chapter 27
Explanation and Analysis—Primitive vs. Civilized:
Throughout the novel, Jack London uses the contrast between the primitive and the civilized as a motif to explore questions about human nature. Wolf Larsen represents the primitive side of human nature, while Maud and Humphrey represent the civilized. For example, in Chapter 8, Humphrey describes Wolf in the following terms:
Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen is mad, or half-mad at least, what of his strange moods and vagaries. Other times I take him for a great man, a genius who has never arrived. And finally, I am convinced that he is the perfect type of the primitive man, born a thousand years or generations too late and an anachronism in this culminating century of civilization. He is certainly an individualist of the most pronounced type.
The primitive, like Wolf Larsen, is represented in the novel as powerful, cruel, selfish, and individualistic. It is connected with the body—physical strength (which Wolf possesses in spades) and sexuality both fall into this category. To Humphrey, the primitive is both dangerous and somewhat pure; Wolf, for example, never received a formal education, and his way of looking at the world is direct and confident, which Humphrey admires. The primitive is the source of Wolf’s power. Humphrey describes it as an animal strength in him that is “savage, ferocious, alive in itself, the essence of life in that it is the potency of motion, the elemental stuff out of which many forms of life have been molded.” This “essence of life” is the same as Wolf’s “yeast” and draws on nature itself to give Wolf his power.
At the beginning of the novel, Humphrey is represented as being disconnected from his primitive self. He looks at the world through a purely intellectual lens, is very physically weak, is cut off from his sexuality. However, once he boards the Ghost and is surrounded by the sea, which represents the primal side of human nature, he slowly begins to reconnect with his primitive self. He grows stronger physically, learns how to work with his hands, and finds himself discovering his sexuality through his attraction to Maud. He describes this transformation in Chapter 27:
Idealist and romanticist that I was and always had been in spite for my analytical nature, yet I had failed till now to grasp the physical characteristics of love. The love of man and woman, I had always held, was a sublimated something related to spirit […] The bonds of the flesh had little place in my cosmos of love. But I was learning the sweet lesson for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed itself, through the flesh.
Here Humphrey is expressing the transformation he has experienced on board the Ghost. His primitive side has not supplanted his romantic and intellectual side; rather, he’s found a way to strike a balance between the two, seeing the ways in which his ideals can be “transmuted […] through the flesh.” Humphrey also looked down on physical labor at the beginning of the book, but by the end, he sees how being strong and physically capable can in turn strengthen the spirit. Humphrey’s journey represents a reconciliation of the primitive and the civilized.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Fog:
Throughout the novel, fog is a motif that represents immersion in the present moment. It also represents an orientation toward doing things rather than just thinking about them.
In Chapter 1, Humphrey expresses his gratitude that he isn’t the one sailing the Martinez, but rather a passenger, free to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the fog rather than worry about its effects on the ferry’s passage:
I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labor which made it unnecessary for me to study fogs, winds, tides, and navigation in order to visit my friend […] It was good that men should be specialists, I mused […] I concentrated on a few particular things, such as, for instance, the analysis of Poe’s place in American literature.
Humphrey’s place outside of the fog represents his lack of knowledge about navigation and weather, as well as his place in society as an intellectual. As a literary critic, thinking about things is his profession; he doesn’t work with his hands as a sailor does. Further, he has very little life experience—he lives at home with his mother and sisters, and although he has thought a lot about love in theory, he by his own admission has never experienced love or sex in practice. His thoughts about “division of labor” also betray an ignorance about the lives of working people. He doesn’t question whether it is right that he should live a life of leisure while others, like the captain of the Martinez, do exhausting manual labor. He assumes that they do so because they want to, not because they need to make money to survive.
In Chapter 25, after Humphrey has been on board the Ghost for some time, Wolf pushes the crew to go seal-hunting in dangerous conditions because he wants to out-hunt his brother, Death Larsen, who is the captain of another seal-hunting ship. He steers the Ghost into a thick fog bank in pursuit of the seals:
The sun was blotted out, there was no sky, even our mastheads were lost to view, and our horizon was such as tear-blinded eyes may see. […] Then I looked at Wolf Larsen, but there was nothing subjective about his state of consciousness. His whole concern was the immediate, objective present.
Here, the crew of the Ghost is completely immersed in the fog, reflecting the fact that they are all completely focused on action in this moment. They are in a dangerous situation; they must be completely alert to their surroundings and ready to act if something goes wrong.
In Chapter 27, Humphrey describes gleaming droplets of water from the fog sitting on Maud’s hair as he is watching her sleep first thing in the morning:
The top [blanket] I had drawn over her face to shelter it from the night, so I could see nothing but […] her light-brown hair, escaped from the covering and jeweled with moisture from the air.
Humphrey and Maud’s immersion in the fog in this moment represents how Humphrey’s love for Maud has transformed him into someone who acts decisively. He has become an active participant in his life—no longer theorizing about love with pen and paper, he is experiencing it firsthand, bravely escaping from Wolf Larsen’s abuse to save the woman he loves. Further, his characterization of the fog as looking like jewels or crystals (which are usually associated with wealth and luxury) suggests that he now recognizes the value of action and hard work.
Related Themes:
Chapter 35
Explanation and Analysis—The Speech of Eyes:
Throughout the novel, eyes are a motif that represent the characters’ unconscious, instinctual selves. Eyes are used to communicate nonverbally, a language that both Maud and Wolf are adept in. Humphrey refers to this as “the speech of eyes.”
In Chapter 22, Humphrey points out to Maud that she has a habit of speaking through her eyes:
"I know,—I can see it—you have, among other ways, been used to managing people with your eyes, letting your moral courage speak out through them, as it were. You have already managed me with your eyes, commanded me with them.”
And in Chapter 23, he describes Wolf doing something similar, communicating his attraction to Maud nonverbally, through his eyes:
It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation. Ordinarily gray and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and golden, and all a-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or welled up till the full orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance. Perhaps it was to this that the golden color was due; but golden his eyes were, enticing and masterful, at the same time luring and compelling, and speaking a demand and clamor of the blood which no woman, much less Maud Brewster, could misunderstand.
In both passages, eyes are represented as windows into the characters’ emotions and desires. Maud uses her eyes to “manage” people to do what she wants; Wolf, similarly, attempts to use his eyes to compel Maud to fulfill his desire for her. Earlier in the novel, Wolf’s eyes are also compared to the surrounding ocean. Humphrey describes them as “that baffling protean gray which is never twice the same; which runs through many shades and colorings like intershot silk in sunshine,” using imagery to liken his eyes to ocean water changing in the light of the sun. Since the ocean represents the primitive in The Sea-Wolf, Humphrey’s comparison of Wolf’s eyes to the sea suggests that his eyes are a window into his primal self.
In Chapter 35, after Maud and Humphrey have started to fall in love, Humphrey marvels at the way that he and Maud can speak to one another beneath the surface level of speech, using their eyes. While they’re flirting, he reflects on his own inexperience in “the speech of eyes”:
And yet, through the five minutes of banter which followed, there was a serious something underneath the fun which I could not but relate to the strange and fleeting expression I had caught in her eyes. What was it? Could it be that our eyes were speaking beyond the will of our speech? […] Had she seen the clamor in [my eyes] and understood? And had her eyes spoken to me? What else could that expression have meant—that dancing, tremulous light? And yet it could not be. It was impossible. Besides, I was not skilled in the speech of eyes.
Humphrey’s new ability to communicate in “the speech of eyes,” a language he hadn’t been “skilled” in before, represents the way he has connected with his primitive self while working on board the Ghost. While previously he had only been able to connect with Maud on an intellectual level, now he can connect with her on a physical and instinctual level.
