Jack London
Martin Eden

THE REVIEW

Love is a controversial and, at the same time, miraculous feeling... capable of making people want to become better.

But here, perhaps, love is just an excuse to tell a completely different story. Because the reader understands immediately, from the very first chance encounter between the young sailor Martin Eden and the delicate Ruth Morse, that it is a relationship that can never work...

He, twenty, has sailed the southern seas, visited distant cities, loved incredibly sensual women, known the tragedy of illness and the inevitability of death; he is handsome, intelligent, and has the strong and romantic temperament typical of the hero of nineteenth-century naturalist novels (of which London is an extraordinary producer); she is a young university student who knows no other reality than what she has learned from academic texts; for this reason, her cultural sensitivity is heavily conditioned by pure notionalism, making her bland, a victim of prejudices and respectability, perfectly embodying what American bourgeoisie had become at the end of the 19th century, which, having abandoned the drive for ambition and the lust for success, lulls itself into an indolent apathy. The setting is that of late 1800s San Francisco, a city mixing ethnicities, a theater of adventurous existences and, at the same time, harsh realities of poverty and exploitation.

The illusion of love becomes the opportunity to tell a story of tenacious desire for redemption and social elevation, in which London combines Darwin's lesson with Spencer's vision, utopian socialism with the suggestions of the Nietzschean Superman; a struggle against the prejudices of bourgeois society, driven by a thirst for revenge against the world that transforms the young sailor into an avid and insatiable devourer of scientific, philosophical, and poetic texts and, subsequently, into a revolutionary writer at the mercy of the publishing industry.

Martin Eden's is a story of success and failure together, with paradoxical and tragic irony. Social ascent proves to be illusory, a progressive regression, ultimately self-destructive. The accelerated educational stages distance Eden from the social context of his origin, that subproletariat with which he can no longer share values and habits, but do not allow him to accept the stiff bourgeois conformism, based on hypocritical relationships.

"...and at the instant he knew, he ceased to know".