A vulnerable predator: the wolf as a symbol of the natural environment in the works of Ernest Thompson Seton, Jack London and Cormac McCarthy
Abstrakt
This chapter studies a wolf as a symbol of the natural environment in the works of three American authors. The significance of the wolf motif in American culture is clear from the frequent occurrence of this animal species in American writings and in the discussion that its mere existence in the world have provoked both in past and nowadays (Robisch 7).
The literature and mythology were up to 1930's, when the first empirical field studies started, the only sources of information on the wolf (Robisch 8, 28). While literary representation might seem harmless, the consequence may be an extermination of the whole species.
All the texts discussed in this paper are frequently labelled as "nature writing". The analysis is focused on the means of description of the wolf, both its physicality and behaviour, and on the depiction of the nature present in the text in terms of ecocritical principles based on the work of Lawrence Buell.
This chapter also employs the topic of vulnerability, as not only humans are "vulnerable to the natural environment" (Mackenzie 1) but the natural environment is vulnerable to human actions. The centre of this study is Cormac McCarthy's novel The Crossing published in 1994.
Reading The Crossing alongside Jack London's novels Call of the Wild (1903) and Wild Fang (1906) and Ernest Thompson Seton's short stories "Lobo, the King of Currumpaw", "Badlands Billy, the Wolf that Won", and "The Winnipeg Wolf" demonstrates a significant turnabout in perspective from seeing a wolf and nature as hostile and almost demonic presence towards understanding it as vulnerable and fragile and realizing humanity's accountability for their treatment of the environment. This analysis emphasizes the environmental and ethical orientation of The Crossing.