Northland Stories Read Free Page B

encounter between white and red, whose fates have been linked, this myth suggests, long before the recent incursion of the likes of the Malemute Kid, Mason, and Mackenzie.
    These relations between white men and red women have enormous import for our understanding of London’s Northland as a single evolving conceptual field extending beyond individual stories and even beyond individual collections of stories. Although it is intriguing to speculate about his ordering of tales within particular volumes—why “The White Silence” precedes “The Son of the Wolf” in The Son of the Wolf, for example—we therefore need to consider how miscegenation (sanctioned by whites but feared by native men) operates more broadly throughout these tales to establish for London an imaginary kinship based on a rediscovered patriarchal order.
    London’s progressive search for patriarchy takes place in three stages that roughly correspond to his first three volumes of stories. Throughout The Son of the Wolf (1900) he represents white men ravishing Indian brides. The next volume, The God of His Fathers (1901), focuses on the strength of these red “daughters of the soil” as mates, while simultaneously exploring the role of white women as mothers (but not wives). In his third Northland collection, Children of the Frost (1902), London finally directs his attention to tribal elders, the royal fathers who are originally responsible for setting totemic law even as they have become increasingly victimized by the rapacious sons of the Wolf.
    Does London’s primary identification between white men and the domineering Wolf make him a blatant racist? His interest in giving some voice to the “Raven” who bestow the designation “Wolf” on their more aggressive foes would suggest otherwise. Most recent discussions of turn-of-the-century theories of race assume Anglo-Saxon supremacy was modeled either on conquest and exploitation of the colonized subject, or else, a bit more improbably, on the isolationist’s dread of racial contamination altogether. But once we take London’s initial representation of “Wolf” and “Raven” clans seriously, his rendering of interracial marriage throughout his Northland suggests a third, more intricate set of possibilities in keeping with early-twentieth-century ethnographers and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Émile Durkheim. These writers found in totemism one way to theorize about the religious foundations of secular society. Like these thinkers, albeit less systematically, London discovered how primitivism in general and totemism in particular could help make some sense of the rapid social changes brought about by a bewildering modernity. These changes more immediately and personally for London concerned his own status in the social order as an ambitious working-class Nobody with no cultural capital trying to make a name for himself in publishing—to imagine his place, establish a field of kinship, as an author.
    Most commentary on these early Klondike tales has tended to shy away from race altogether to concentrate on London’s heroic representations of manhood—virtues such as valor, loyalty, and steadfastness displayed by the Malemute Kid and his comrades. These moral attributes constitute what London calls “the code of the Yukon”: how men in the wild and in the absence of civil law interact with one another. Assumed as unchanging universal constants, or a bit more pointedly as prime components of London’s literary naturalism, these manly characteristics take on an inert, static quality. But focusing on totemism allows us to historicize such concepts by reading them in relation to the question of race. By so merging race and manhood in relation to totemic law—equating the sons of the Wolf with white men who sustain their clan by taking red women —London in effect manages to revise, if not