The Sea-Wolf

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1904

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Themes

Division of Labor as Inherently Inequitable

One of the first things Humphrey reveals about himself is his relief at a certain division of labor between men. Instead of having to learn a myriad of skills, Humphrey can board a ship and have someone else take him to a far place: “I remember thinking how comfortable it was, this division of labor” (1-2). Humphrey enjoys the freedom innate to his inherited social class. He has benefactors who supplied his passive income, allowing him to write about art and literature at his leisure.

Larsen’s introductory question for both Humphrey and Maud asks after how they feed themselves, how they make money, and what job they work. In fact, Larsen’s main motivation for keeping Humphrey aboard the Ghost—and thereby instigating the novel’s entire plot—is to teach him a lesson on the realities of Humphrey’s idealized division of labor. Rather than being a peaceful, respectable demonstration of how separate spheres of knowledge can work in a society, class-based division of labor produces unequal distributions of resources, wealth, food availability, and career advancement.

Life on the Ghost, first as a cabin boy and later as mate to Larsen, introduces Humphrey into a working-class environment heretofore alien to him. The necessity of each man working hard to keep the Ghost from disaster is impressed upon him from the first day; furthermore, Humphrey is struck by how uncannily feuds, resentments, rivalries, and plots dissipate when the ship struggles against natural elements; the travail requires each and every crew member to do their part, producing a unity. During a storm while the boats are out seal hunting, Larsen tells Humphrey: “Expect all hell to break loose [...] but don’t mind it. Yours is to do your own work and to have Cooky stand by the foresheet” (127). On the Ghost, Humphrey participates in physical work unlike any he would have ever encountered on land.

Larsen continues to encourage Humphrey to more critically consider how his seemingly benign social class affects those less privileged: “You never made anything in your own sweat [...] You are one with a crowd of men who have made what they call a government, who are masters of all the other men, and who eat the food the other men get and would like to eat themselves” (41). The concept of class-based labor division perpetuates an unequal society that, at its root, wants men like Larsen, Leach, and Johnson to be stuck in a never-ending cycle of work so that Humphrey’s class may live more leisurely.

By the end of the narrative, Humphrey has assimilated into the society of seafaring men completely in that he is able to repair the Ghost single-handedly. What is significant is that the practical knowledge Humphrey learned aboard the Ghost is paired with book knowledge that both he and Maud remember. Rather than promoting a division of labor that excludes specificity, Humphrey’s repair of the Ghost marks the necessity for a balance between book-learning and practical knowledge.

The Privileged Insularity of Classism

Humphrey exudes a classism, representing the middle class sentiments in which he has lived his entire life previous to the Ghost. This kind of life—and this unexamined, privileged prejudice—separates him from the crew. Immediately after being rescued from nearly drowning in San Francisco Bay, and before he even knows what ship he is on, Humphrey’s interactions with Mugridge in the kitchen are rife with classism. Humphrey’s language in narrating his interaction with Mugridge is condescending, demeaning, and prideful; he assumes that Mugridge must come from a line of servile workers. Not only does he paint this in a negative light as if to render Mugridge’s working class background villainous, but he condemns Mugridge for wanting to make money where he can. Humphrey makes these judgments without considering Mugridge’s likely poverty.

The novel’s exploration of classism continues between Humphrey and Mugridge, as Mugridge animatedly expresses his disgust for gentlemen, the upper classes, and social classes in general. Humphrey, acknowledging the extraordinarily poor luck Mugridge has faced in his life, is finally at a place where he can express sympathy for the man: “What chance had he to be anything else than what he was?” (97). Mugridge repeatedly argues that Humphrey was born lucky and that he himself, born into squalor and poverty, has carried the burden of misfortune his entire life.

As the Ghost is its own self-contained world, there is undoubtedly classism between the ranks of men, indicating the inevitability of separation based on perceived social value; it is a microcosm of society on land. Larsen, Humphrey as mate, and occasionally the hunters are the upper class, enjoy prepared meals in a comfortable cabin. In contrast, the sailors are decisively inferior and live in scraped quarters in steerage, made to bend themselves to the harder tasks of sailing. When Maud comes on board, she is instantly incorporated into the upper class based on her gender and her appearance of wealth.

Maud herself comes to represent the middle- and upper-class idealization of a woman. Humphrey often notes Maud’s incredible fragility and physical weakness but celebrates her wittiness and intelligence. The contrast between Maud’s femininity and the femininity perceived in lower social classes is exemplified in Humphrey’s thoughts on building the hut on Endeavor Island: “There was something heroic about this gently bred woman enduring our terrible hardship and with her pittance of strength bending to the tasks of a peasant woman” (222). Her involvement in physical labor is presented as “heroic,” whereas there were countless women worldwide in lower classes undertaking more strenuous tasks daily.

Death and the Immortality of the Soul

Larsen shares several heated philosophical discussions with both Humphrey and Maud, but in the end, they tend to center around the question of whether the soul is immortal and, if so, what this immortality implies about the purpose of life. Larsen is a stubborn intellectual, unable to entertain the ideas that Maud and Humphrey present to him, instead doggedly upholding his cynical and materialist worldview.

For Larsen, the idea of the soul’s immortality is absurd. It requires full belief in salvation, religion, and the continuation of the soul after death. However, if Larsen were to embrace all these requirements, then having an immortal soul would call into question his experience of life. The indifference of nature, the unpredictability of chance, the brutality of living beings—all of these things undermine the idea that there is any governing order to the world. Furthermore, Larsen spends time expanding on his theory of fear as a justification for the soul’s mortality: If the body feels fear or if a person is threatened with death and fights to stay alive, then the soul must not be immortal. Otherwise, maintains Larsen, the individual would not be afraid of death. An immortal soul diminishes death and, by extension, fear of death.

Humphrey and Maud both reveal their Christian leanings by arguing for the immortality of the soul regardless of the fear that Larsen inflicts on them. As Humphrey falls in love with Maud, he finds that love motivates him to stay alive more than fear ever did, because this aliveness entails a desire to assume responsibility for Maud’s safety and happiness. These two competing perspectives on the soul are never fully reconciled in London’s writing: To the very moment of his death, Larsen actively refuses to believe in the continuation of his soul beyond bodily death. Meanwhile, Maud and Humphrey follow their own beliefs, giving Larsen a burial at sea and considering his soul as having passed on intact.