The Nature of Classes in Martin Eden, Essay Example

The gap between social classes and the complexity of transferring from one class to another one has been a topic of agile interest for more than a century, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution worldwide that split all nations into the poor, working class, and the bourgeois, upper class. The main differences that marked the classes were absence of literacy and ethics in the working class representatives, the shallow survival instincts deriving from hard toil etc. The upper class was seen as aristocracy, with delicate manners and good education, aesthetic tastes and artistic skills. However, it was not always so; there were many artists and talented people coming from the working class, and there were huge numbers of illiterate, ill-bred and notorious representatives of the bourgeoisie. The peculiarities of each other’s perception and image, the struggle of working people for recognition, and the multiple barriers and misunderstanding they faced on the way to fame have become the major topics of many authors of the beginning of the 20^th century, Jack London included.

His novel Martin Eden is very much concerned with the topic of class inequality and false perceptions existing about each class. In reality, the notions of knowledge, wisdom, talent and beauty were often substituted by power and money, and not all representative of high class could boast some contributions or achievements. Jack London was himself from a poor, working family, and he struggled all his life for literary recognition, failing many times because of his working class background. London was a socialist, so the topic of class inequality and injustice was very close to him personally. The work Martin Eden served as a partly autobiographical work that helped London identify the reasons for his disappointment with fame, glory and wealth that he obtained by becoming a recognized, loved writer. There are several recurrent themes in Martin Eden, but the one considered in the present work closely is the nature of social classes, the way they are depicted and researched through the prism of the main character’s perception.

From the very beginning of the novel the reader is made to understand that Martin Eden is an unusual representative of his class, though he has the appearance of an ordinary worker, a rude, huge, and awkward sailor. However, even such a person is capable of the artistic perception, of the sensible feelings and unrivaled imagination. The reader may be surprised by the description the author gives to Martin Eden from the very start:

“Under the muscled body of his he was a mass of quivering sensibilities. At the slightest impact of the outside world upon his consciousness, his thoughts, sympathies and emotions leapt and played like lambent flame” (London 6).

This fragment makes the reader realize that he is an unusual character, and he is capable of much more than an ordinary representative of the sailing profession, a fighter and a drunkard, as the sailors of that time were usually portrayed and known. However, as the next moment comes, and Ruth comes into the room where Martin is talking with her brother Arthur, the true place of Martin is revealed to both the reader and Martin. Ruth starts to talk in a literate, beautiful and artistic manner, with the usage of words he has never heard, and he feels embarrassed and surprised for the first time in his life. He is stroke by the sudden feeling of sympathy towards Ruth, but he realizes that he cannot even talk to her. Despite the fact that he has a rich, impressive and beautiful inner world, he is simply unable to share it with Ruth because of his illiteracy: this is seen in the fact that “all of this no hint had crept into his speech” (London 10).

The revelation of the gap between the class to which he belongs and from which Ruth comes becomes clear for Martin Eden on his way from the party to which he was invited by Arthur and where he obtained a possibility to participate in the meeting of the upper class, mannered and educated people. He feels the difference at once, and it pressed him in every detail of the interior, in the behavior of guests, from the inside as well: “the array of knives and forks frightened him”, he thinks that “between halts and stumbles…locomotion seemed impossible” (London 17). Hence, Martin clearly feels he is from the outside world, and he is unable to feel comfortable, realizing that he cannot speak the way the rest does, eat as carefully as they can etc. – this is why he thinks that “he did not deserve such fortune” as Ruth (London 30).

Indeed, he was perceived by the elite as a weird, exotic entertainment, which can be seen from the characteristic Arthur gave to him before the dinner to his family, calling him a “wild man”, though an “interesting wild man” (London 19).  Martin felt the inferiority to all people surrounding him at the dinner, which was felt in his inner effort not to say “yes, sir” or “no, sir” to the present men not to reveal that confession of inferiority sticking to his inner working class self. The opinion that Ruth voiced about Martin as a “whiff of ozone” was the supporting argument for the lack of serious attitude to him; Martin Eden was nothing but a small glance to the dark side of existence, which is illiteracy, hard toil and deprivation in which millions of people lived at that time.

Self-diminishing thoughts and awareness of his inferiority finally bring Martin Eden to the rejection of his working class and the beginning of his passionate pursuit of knowledge which he thinks of as the indispensible, and the only precondition of belonging to the upper class. He envies the university boys who he himself considers vicious, but at the same time admits that their heads are filled with precious knowledge, which makes them better than he is. He thinks about himself as unworthy anything concerning Ruth – “he was not fit to carry water for her – he knew that” (London 30). This is what brings Martin to striving to gain success, fame and wealth, and (which is more important) literacy, in order to be worth to be with Ruth and to become her life partner.

Martin Eden takes a different glance at the life he leads with his exhausted, faceless, orking family. He even tries to establish more loving and careful relationships with his sister, and sees that she is no more capable of being humane because her soul is crippled with toil, poverty and suffering. However, this becomes the starting point of his way to knowledge – wondering where it will bring him, Eden starts to learn, eagerly and restlessly trying to get the most of books, lectures and classes. He feels that as soon as he learns to speak as well as Ruth and the whole Morse family can, he will become the part of them, and nobody will doubt that he is a worthy member of their society.

His rejection of the class crawls into his personality, and Martin becomes a critical, tough man who does not want to admit his belonging to the working background. An example of his cruel denial can be seen in the meeting with Lizzie, a working class girl who was in love with him; Ruth admits that the girl is truly pretty and the only thing she lacks is the ability to carry herself. The reply of Eden is that Lizzie has to be taught to speak, as Ruth would never understand what she is saying (London 117). This meeting and Martin’s opinion are parallel to the panic wish of Martin to be clean; he perceives the working class as dirt, so he wants to clean himself in order to be fit for the upper class.

However, together with realizing how well he progresses in his studies, Martin Eden also starts to understand how shallow his rejection is, and how kind and true his family may be to him, while the upper class is down-to-earth and empty, knowing only the grammar rules to speak well, and doing nothing more. The way he is rejected by the Morse family as an improper fit for their daughter strikes him, and the way his poor sister helps him not starve to death impresses him much. As they meet at Broadway and Gertrude sees that Martin is starving, she gives him a five-dollar note presenting it as a present for his birthday. The thoughts of Martin wander around the fact how much that small sum of money matters both for him and her: “that bit of gold meant food, life, and light in his body and brain, power to go on writing” (London 316). These simple truths are a shock for Martin who works too hard to be able to feel happiness about the coming success.

One more revelation that Martin makes when he moves closer to the upper class and distances from his working background is the fact that Ruth and other rich people do not get the gist of poverty, and do not feel it is a problem of modernity, the evil with which they need to fight. When Martin reads his novel to Ruth, she feels touched by it, but not in the manner that Eden expected. The novel is about a poor woman, and Ruth feels aesthetically unpleased by the subject he takes. She asks why Martin did not take a nicer subject, and calls the poor woman’s image nasty (London 140). This is one of the moments that brings Martin Eden back to earth, understanding how far he is from becoming a bourgeois in soul and thinking of how poverty can be nasty. The truth that comes to his mind is that Ruth is a limited, shallow girl who just does not want to see the world as it is, calling working class “a dark side” of life, and sharing the opinion of other bourgeoisie representatives that poverty is just and unpleasant aspect of life. Here the discrepancy between false ideals Martin has created for himself, and the cruel reality of bourgeois coldness and indifferences comes to the fore and starts the destructive way through Eden’s soul.

The nature of social classes comes to the mind of Martin Eden more and more, as he gains popularity and becomes rich. He is not happy about the success, because it is only now he understands how mistaken he was in the goal he pursued. Becoming literate (even more literate than necessary), he understands that the bourgeois etiquette, beautiful speech and manners are only the cover of stupid, shallow creatures with who he has nothing in common; now that he is literate, he cannot adore them as he understands them too well. What he sees is enough to realize that he has become a part of their dirty community, which was not the cleanness to which he had longed, but was dirtier than the dirtiest worker.

This is where self-destruction begins for Martin. He feels disgust towards himself upon reading the work “Ephemera” that he published after Brissenden’s death. The work was published, but the pompous words dedicated to it were horrible; however, Eden had no wish and force to get angry – “his blood was too congealed to accelerate to the swift tidal flow of indignation” (London 399). This became the final point in the collapse of his personality; realizing how detached he became from the working class because of his blind pursuit of recognition by the bourgeoisie, and finding no place for himself in the newly obtained community of rich, famous but shallow people, Eden feels that he loses himself in the duality he has to face. He does not feel the satisfaction from the work he did because he tried too hard. He has no more targets to follow, and he cannot stand the recognition about which he dreamt during cold and hungry nights. He decides to trick the public and to leave.

By committing suicide, Martin shows how hard it was to him to change a social class, and how hard it actually was to go through the successful change, as he was a working class man by nature. Becoming literate, he understood that there was nothing in bourgeoisie to which he could long, as literacy gave wisdom but not status. The wisdom he obtained from studies opened the truth to him; Eden understood that not the class but the person decided their way in life, so having left one class and being morally and psychically unable to join another one, he lost his place in life. In addition, the fame that came to Eden after too much effort and struggle was too much of him. The suicide of the main hero was partly a story of London who also came from the working class and tried too hard, then losing the sense and taste of recognition. However, even on the background of the sad ending with Eden’s suicide, one can see that the novel is a true revelation for those who associate wealth with wit, and who pursue false ideals to be tragically disappointed and disenchanted in the end.

Works Cited

London, Jack. Martin Eden. Elibron.com, 2000.