(150 points)
This sheet must be included at the front of your formal essay. I will not accept any essays without this document fully completed and included at the beginning of the essay (before the title page).
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_20_ My thesis statement is a judgment (or opinion) that is arguable and defensible. (20 points)
_10_ All paragraphs of my essay are fully developed (at least 5 sentences in length) and the essay meets the length requirement. (10 points)
_20_ My topic sentences, which are like mini-thesis statements that control what is discussed in each body paragraph, are easily identifiable by a reader of my essay. (20 points)
My thesis statement is:
Leo Tolstoy’s Master and Man and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild are both stories concerning with the relationship between humanity and the natural world. In both works, individual people and animals confront nature and, because of this confrontation, are forced to learn new things regarding the limits of their capacities as people. In each story, nature is presented as potentially overwhelming and as profoundly dangerous.
My topic sentences are:
- However, similarly to the plight of the characters in Tolstoy, London appears to be primarily interested in the capacity of nature and the natural world to bring about a transformative experience in the inner life of his characters
- Brekhunov appears as a confident and self-motivated individual who moves easily through the world in manner befitting his social status.
- The Call of the Wild represents nature as primitive location and a physical and emotional state which can be entered
Source material component (if applicable):
_20_ If MLA-style documentation is required, I formatted entries using the Rules for Writers text. (20 points)
20_ I carefully presented paraphrased and quoted passages with quotation marks (if applicable) and in-text citations as discussed in class. (20 points)
20_ I used signal phrases when necessary to smoothly introduce my source materials. (20 points)
Name
Name
English
1 May 2022
Comparative Literature Essay
Leo Tolstoy’s Master and Man and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild are both stories concerning with the relationship between humanity and the natural world. In both works, individual people and animals confront nature and, because of this confrontation, are forced to learn new things regarding the limits of their capacities as people. In each story, nature is presented as potentially overwhelming and as profoundly dangerous. At the same time, however, the stories suggest that the natural is a domain in which individuals can exhibit some of their best qualities, such as courage and a capacity for sacrifice. In this sense, while the stories clearly suggest that nature is an overwhelming force, they also show that human qualities are not simply wiped out by it but that they may instead rise above it in the form of a supreme moral sacrifice or become fully immersed in a life based on instinctive freedom.
Master and Man focuses, in one sense exposes, on the exposing the hubris and selfishness of the young landowner Vasili Andreyevich Brekhunov whose desire for profit and unwillingness to understand his own limitations causes his death by the end of the story. However, Anne Dufourmantelle notes that, alongside a moral warning regarding pride, the story is also concerned with a “Christlike gentleness” that transforms Brekhunov’s character and causes him to sacrifice himself to protect a young peasant whom he insists accompany him during a journey into the blizzard that will claim the landowner’s life (65). In this sense, any reading of the story should inevitably foreground both its representation of nature and its depiction of the characters involved, especially Brekhunov as they encounter moral enlightenment.
At the start of Tolstoy’s narrative, Brekhunov appears as a confident and self-motivated individual who moves easily through the world in manner befitting his social status. Tolstoy presents the character as motivated by gain and as keen to further his own interests. He writes, for example, that the journey that forms the focus of the story needs to take place as quickly as possible because Brekhunov “was in a hurry to be off, lest rival buyers from the town should deprive him of this eligible bargain” (1). Tolstoy introduces Brekhunov as someone who is motivated by a need to pursue profit and, to a certain extent, by his role within a system of competition which demands that he act quicker than those around him to maximize his chances of taking advantage of a particular situation. Indeed, John Hagan argues that Brekhunov’s dedication to money at this point in the story effectively means that he functions as an “antichrist” whose behavior is in direct contradiction of one the most important tenets of Christian morality, the impossibility of serving both “God and mammon” (32). Importantly, the opening sections of the story evidently relate this anti-Christian quality of Brekhunov’s life to the social world and to his interaction with other people, whether they are the peasants of whom he takes advantage or other landowners with whom he is in competition.
Throughout the story, Tolstoy juxtaposes this social view of nature. This view is not initially overwhelming, however. Rather, nature appears innocuous at the start of the narrative and simply takes the form of snow falling and of the cold. However, as the story progresses, the snow becomes more and more overwhelming, especially as it is juxtaposed to Brekhunov’s stubborn refusal to remain inside during the blizzard. As Dufoumantelle argues, Tolstoy presents the blizzard as indifferent and uncaring rather than as aggressively overwhelming (65). It is in the nature of snow to cover things and to blanket objects, however rather than taking on characteristics of its own, this snow provides a backdrop for Brekhunov’s moral transformation. In the final moments of Brekhunov’s life, Tolstoy switches between descriptions of the storm and of the character’s own memories as he dies. This culminates in Brekhunov’s final realization that “It seemed to him that he was Nikita, and Nikita he, and that his life was no longer within himself, but within Nikita” (Tolstoy, 61). This thought enables Brekhunov to make his final sacrifice and, in doing so, completes his own redemption. Importantly, therefore, while Tolstoy presents nature as an overwhelming force that precipitates a transformation in his characters, he does so via a storm that slowly encroaches on his characters and causes Brekhunov to achieve higher level of civilization than he had previous attained.
Rather than presenting nature as a force that inexorably encircles and smothers the outside of a protagonist, The Call of the Wild represents nature as primitive location and a physical and emotional state which can be entered. However, unlike Brekhunov at the start of Tolstoy’s story, Jack London makes clear that the natural world is not something that one simply passes through to reach another human settlement, but that it is ultimately an entire state of being whose entrance involves letting go of civilized characteristics. One sees this process throughout the novel via the character of Buck, the dog who initially lives a comfortable life before being sold to become a sled-dog in Alaska and ending the novel as a fully dominant animal who relies primarily on instinct to survive.
According to Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, although The Call of the Wild deals with a non-human protagonist, it should be seen primarily as a “human allegory” which uses the experiences of Buck to demonstrate essential facts about civilization, nature and the undeniably attractive quality of a return to an apparently pre-civilized state of being (237). Throughout London’s novel, nature is presented both as something which is dangerous in terms of its particularities, such as the frozen lake into which several dogs and humans fall and drown, and as overwhelming and abundant in its variety. Towards the end of the novel, for example, London writes of how Buck, Thornton, and his companions
went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any Southland could boast (74).
Through descriptions such as these, London presents nature as cornucopia of different possibilities. While it remains potentially hostile, the natural world is nonetheless a place in which characters can flourish and encounter a huge variety of experience. In contrast to the snow which surrounds and envelops Brekhunov, nature in London’s novel is a vast expanse through which characters move.
However, similarly to the plight of the characters in Tolstoy, London appears to be primarily interested in the capacity of nature and the natural world to bring about a transformative experience in the inner life of his characters. One sees this is novel’s titular “call” which Buck experiences strongly in the novel’s final chapter. London presents this call alongside what appears to be ancestral memory of a more primitive “hairy man” with whom Buck, in a past life, used to live (75). Specifically, London writes that the call which Buck hears from “the depths of the forest […] filled him with a great unrest and strange desires. It caused him to feel a vague, sweet gladness, and he was aware of wild yearnings and stirrings for he knew not what” (76). Most significantly, the effect of nature on Buck causes him to begin to abandon his conscious understanding of his actions and to carry out behaviors that he feels his “impelled” to do based purely on instinct (76).
This focus on instinct and the clear happiness and freedom which it brings to Buck forms an important contrast with Tolstoy’s vision. In the latter, nature functions as an encroaching backdrop which brings about a moral transformation in Brekhunov and which allows him to see a clear and obvious moral purpose in sacrificing himself to save Nikita’s life. In contrast, London writes of how Buck finds himself becoming “a killer, a thing that preyed, living on things that lived” (79). Nature does not make Buck altruistic and does not bring about a Christian moral refinement. Rather its primary purpose is to put him in touch with a far older kind of morality, based on the thrill of natural instinct and on the survival of the fittest.
In conclusion, Master, and Man and The Call of the Wild are contemporaneous works that deal with the relationship between nature and humanity and the relationship between nature and morality. Both works demonstrate the way in which any relationship to nature also involves a relationship to one’s own moral consciousness.
Significantly, while for Tolstoy the humility that emerges from a confrontation with an overpowering nature leads to a moral revelation and to the adoptions of a civilized moral impulse based on sacrifice, for London the influence of nature causes his protagonist to immerse himself further and further into instinct and to move away from any non-natural systems of morality.
Works Cited
Dufourmentalle, Anne. Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living. 1st ed.,
Fordham University Press, 2018, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt201mpcf.
Hagan, John H. “Detail and Meaning in Tolstoy’s ‘Master and Man.’” Criticism (Detroit), vol. 11,
no. 1, Wayne State University Press, 1969, pp. 31–58.
London, Jack, et al. The Call of the Wild : White Fang, and Other Stories. New ed / edited with an
introduction and notes by Earle Labor and Robert C. Leitz., Oxford University Press, 2009.
Tavernier-courbin, Jacqueline. “The Call of the Wild and The Jungle.” The Cambridge
Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: From Howells to London, edited by Donald Pizer, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 236–262.
Tolstoy, Leo. Master and Mand and Other Parables and Tales. London: Everyman, 1910.
