Sherin M. Johnson
Guest Lecturer, St Cyril’s College, Adoor. Email: sherinmjohnson1994@gmail
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
Abstract
Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague published in 1912 emerged out to be one of the first in the genre of the apocalyptic fictions featuring a universal plague that nearly wipes out humanity. Stories about contagious diseases mainly existed from a long time back ranging from Thebes in Oedipus Rex to New York in Angels in America. Tracing the long tradition of the literary topos of plague in literature, the present paper envisages to present a post- apocalyptic reading of Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague which gains unprecedented relevance at a time when the world is battling with Covid-19 pandemic.
Keywords: post -apocalyptic, plague, contagious, pandemic
Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague published in 1912 emerged out to be one of the first in the genre of the apocalyptic fictions featuring a universal plague that nearly wipes out humanity. Stories about contagious diseases mainly existed from a long time back ranging from Thebesin Oedipus Rex to New York in Angels in America. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) is considered to be the prototype in apocalyptic literature, the first ever work to predict the extinction of the human race through a devastating pandemic. Mary Shelley was the first writer to foreshadow the extinction of the human race through a devastating pandemic. Shelley’s powerful apocalyptic vision imagined the creation of a monster through combining body parts in Frankenstein; her The Last Man was her grand prophecy to the world where she imagined the depopulation and dismemberment of civilization itself. As the pestilence devastates almost the entire world and finally comes to Europe, there was nowhere left to go; there existed no refuge on earth devoid of this final terror. The Scarlet Plague is part of a long literary legacy of pandemic fiction wherein the literary topos of plague forms a consistent theme in literature. Boccaccio wrote The Decameron in the wake of the plague outbreak in Florence in 1348 to guide Italians on how to maintain mental well being in times of epidemics and isolation. In the Bible, the plague was depicted as one of God’s punishments for sins. This causal relationship between plague and sin is seen also in Greek literary texts, such as Homer’s Iliad and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Later medieval writings such as The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio and The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer emphasized human behavior.The fear of contagion increased vices such as avarice, greed, and corruption, which paradoxically led to infection and thus to both moral and physical death.
Jack London was partly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death published in 1842.The Masque of the Red Death is set in a medieval world plagued by a contagious disease that kills instantly. Poe’s Red Death became the pandemic in Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, which on contraction caused the whole body to be turned scarlet within hours followed by death. The plague hit the world in 2073 and wiped out everyone disregarding any distinctions of nation class, gender or religion. One of the few survivors, James Howard Smith, tells his incredulous and near-savage grandsons how the pandemic spread in the world and about the reactions of the people to contagion and death. Even though it was published more than a century ago, The Scarlet Plague is unique in its power of contemporaneity as it allows modern readers to reflect on the global fear of pandemics, a fear that becomes so alive amidst the Corona virus outbreak of 2019. Contrary to other species of apocalyptic fiction, where the enemy can be alien invaders, chemical warfare or earthquakes, the enemy in contagion narratives is human beings itself, the touch and breath of fellow beings and in course of time the mere existence of other human beings proves out to be fatal .
A prolific writer of short stories and novels, Jack London was also the pioneer and innovator in the genre of science fiction whose classic works include The Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Scarlet plague. Being a passionate advocate of socialism and eugenics, his works often contain scathing critiques against capitalism and war like the dystopian novel The Iron Heel, The People of the Abyss and The War of the Classes. His concerns regarding Asian Immigration described as “the yellow peril” found expression in his short story The Unparalleled Invasion wherein a biological warfare is launched against China by western countries to control its population and protect European colonies in Asia from Chinese immigration.
London continues with the long tradition of pandemic novels in The Scarlet Plague yet significantly differs from them inits deep contemplation on the recent scientific discoveries by 20th century bacteriologists. In particular, the author focused his attention on behavioral responses to a pandemic, showing the emergence of fear, irrationality, and selfishness in a previously civilized and modern society. The popular misconceptions regarding epidemics as supernatural events occurring as a result of divine punishments were shattered. Recent discoveries in the field had explained them as caused by germs that infect humans and epidemiologists and public health experts had shed light on the mechanisms of disease transmission, including suggestions of general preventive measures to limit pandemics . Despite these advancements in the scientific field, however, in London’s time, the general public’s fear of the invisible terror of contagions remained high.
When the novel begins in the year 2073, James Smith is one of the survivors of the scarlet plague who is now living as a shepherd dressed in primitive clothes “about his chest and shoulders hung a single, mangy garment of goat-skin” ( London 1) and living like an animal. He narrates the story of the scarlet plague to his grandsons who “spoke in monosyllables and short jerky sentences that was more gibberish than a language” (1). Distressed by their primitivism, the former professor laments as he looks across the land that was once San Francisco “where four million people distorted themselves, the wild wolves roam today, and the savage of progeny of our loins, with prehistoric weapons defend themselves against the fanged despoilers. Think of it! And all because of the Scarlet Death” (4).James Smith echoes Jack London’s argument on the decline and fall of humankind when he says “The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night era again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.” (6).
After the plague hit, civilization fell apart and the few survivors scattered in a primitive world had to fight for survival, echoing Darwinian theories: “Civilization was crumbling, and it was each for himself” (12). As had some earlier writers, London raised a harsh critique against the society that is seen as the ultimate cause of the world’s destruction. In particular, in London’s opinion, capitalism led to the rise in population and to overcrowding and overcrowding led to plague. Medicine and scientific progress were defeated by plague, as testified by the heroic death of bacteriologists who “were killed in their laboratories even as they studied the germ of the Scarlet Death. … As fast as they perished, others stepped forth and took their places” (16).
As the human race in London’s world was dying, the earth was being devastated by fires and conflagration. “The pandemic was perceived as the end of the world, the Apocalypse. Not only did the people fear their own death but they also had the terrible feeling of being at the end of the world, the cities were being destroyed by fire; the people were fleeing away in hysteria” (Riva 15).The stop in communication with the rest of the world was regarded by many as hopeless sign of death: “It was amazing, astounding, and this loss of communication with the world. It was exactly as if the world had ceased, been blotted out” (23). The Scarlet Plague published right before the World War gives also a warning about the cost of world war and the cost of living in a world. “Ten thousand years of culture and civilization passed in the twinkling of an eye” (12). James has decided it to be his life’s mission to archive those ten thousand years, to store all the books he could find, even though he is the only man alive who knows how to read. The novel’s final chapter expresses his optimism when he explains to his grandsons, who unfortunately cannot fathom any of this “In them is great wisdom… Someday men will read again”(52).
Through The Scarlet Plague, London shows how pandemics bring forth the deep rooted fears of humans and the modification of human behavior through that process. The pandemic breaks the social barriers and ultimately leads to the collapse of human civilization itself and the topos of plague is used to criticize the then contemporary social structure. Finally, London’s novel reflects on the function of media during pandemics. “In London’s novel, newspapers, wires, and phone calls were the only tools for obtaining information on epidemic spread. Today, the main sources of information on pandemics are widely available and include the mass media, such as television, radio, and print media such as magazines and newspapers; the Internet appears to be only partly used and mainly limited to younger age groups. The role of media seems to be positive but in modern times, the media are generally accused of exaggerating the risks of an epidemic and contributing to public misunderstandings of public health research evidence” (Riva 56).
The infectious motif becomes a critical element in understanding the significance of horror in human societies as horrible acts, whether natural or man made; produce a kind of cultural sickness that must be isolated, analyzed, and disarmed. It also serves as a metaphorical tool for writers and artists to come to terms with the dark forces and cataclysmic events pertaining to each age. The horrors of the two world wars followed by the first nuclear cataclysms have led to a realization that unpredictable events could triumph over technology and civilization and science and culture could contribute to man’s decay. This is the critical point that infectious horror in the post-World War II tries to address. In the wake of Covid- 19 pandemic, Jack London’s novel gains unprecedented relevance and authority in dealing with this profound crisis in a united and humanitarian way. We can hope that confronting our contagious fears in fiction will allow us to manage them better in real life.
References:
London, Jack. The Scarlet Plague. London: Bibliolis, 2010.
Crawford R. Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1914.
Cooke J. Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film.Hound mills (UK): Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Riva, Michele Augusto. “Pandemic Fear and Literature: Observations from Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague”. Emerging Infectious Diseases, Volume 20, Number 10. October 2014: 53-57.
Sherin M. Johnson works as a Guest Lecturer in St Cyril’s College, Adoor affiliated to University of Kerala. Her areas of interest are Women’s travel writings, Post colonialism, Gender Studies and Ecocriticsm.