The Law of Life

Over the course of his career, Jack London worked within genres ranging from journalism to science fiction. Today, however, he is likely best known for adventure stories like The Call of the Wild and White Fang, as well as other pieces set in the far north, including his short story “To Build a Fire.” “The Law of Life” is both a part of this tradition and distinct from it; like other stories in The Children of Frost, it’s unusual not so much in that it takes the Arctic or subarctic for its setting, but rather in that it features a protagonist indigenous to the region. Of course, the extent to which London depicts Koskoosh and his tribe accurately is debatable. The cultural practice on which the story is premised—the voluntary suicide of an aging tribe member—is one associated with the Inuit, but the region in which the story is set was historically inhabited by subarctic tribes like the Gwich’in and Hän. Perhaps more importantly, there is considerable disagreement as to whether the Inuit or other Arctic peoples widely practiced this kind of abandonment or self-sacrifice; at the very least, it does not seem to have been mandated in the way that London describes.

However, while it’s possible that Western biases partially shaped “The Law of Life,” its depiction of Koskoosh’s fate as tribal “law” is also a reflection of the work’s naturalistic bent (Paragraph 11). Like many naturalist writers, London was deeply influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and in particular by his suggestion that evolution worked through natural selection: the tendency of those organisms best suited to their environment to survive long enough to reproduce, and consequently to pass on and perpetuate the traits that made their success possible. “The Law of Life” refers to this idea more or less explicitly when Koskoosh concludes that a person’s only “task” in life is to contribute to the survival of the human race by having children (Paragraph 11). That said, London also extends questions about the long-term prospects of a species or group beyond the strictly biological matter of reproduction; as he depicts it, the point of the law requiring elder suicide is to safeguard the tribe as a whole by ensuring they are not slowed down by or forced to expend precious resources on someone who can no longer contribute to the community.

In this sense, “the Law of Life” is at least as much about London’s own culture as it is about Koskoosh’s. Throughout the late-19th and early-20th centuries, there were multiple attempts to apply Darwinian thought to the most pressing social problems of the day: the rise in inequality that resulted from industrialization, the brutality of Western imperialism, the effects of urbanization, etc. In practice, this often involved attempts to justify class and racial hierarchies via “Social Darwinism”—the idea that “survival of the fittest” applied as much to human society as it did to the natural world. Although London himself was a socialist, his views on certain issues had a social Darwinist slant (he was, for instance, a proponent of eugenics), and “The Law of Life” is in some sense a defense of practices that prioritize the survival of the young and healthy over the old and frail. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that London frames the decision to leave Koskoosh behind not so much in terms of the way things ought to be, but simply as the way they have to be. This fatalistic attitude is once again characteristic of naturalism, which generally viewed human action as the product of forces beyond individual control.