John Marcher has spent his whole life believing that he’s fated for something significant. His friend May Bartram suggests that this fate could be love—she believes love is exciting and world-altering, just as Marcher believes that his fate will be. But May is secretly in love with Marcher, and throughout the novella, her love is quiet and selfless rather than dramatic and life-altering. Marcher, on the other hand, refuses to deepen his relationship with May or commit to her through marriage, seemingly because he’s afraid of either of them getting hurt. Eventually, it’s revealed that Marcher’s fate is to never experience real love or passion. With this ending, the novella suggests that love isn’t defined by wild passion, as May initially professes—instead, love means being vulnerable enough to care for someone and accept that losing them is inevitable. Meanwhile, a fear of being vulnerable can prevent a person from experiencing love at all.
At first, Marcher and May have opposite ideas about love: May believes that love is meaningful enough to be Marcher’s life-altering fate, while Marcher thinks that it’s too mundane to be his fate. When Marcher tells May about his belief that he’s fated for something great, May immediately assumes that his fate is love, because Marcher believes that his fate will change his life substantially. May thinks that love fits the bill, since it’s a kind of “cataclysm.” Marcher disagrees with May’s assessment, since he believes that he’s been in love before, and the experience was relatively dispassionate. It was fun and occasionally “miserable,” but it wasn’t earth-shattering, and it didn’t change Marcher’s life. Like May, Marcher believes he knows what love is, though his definition is the opposite of hers.
However, the way May expresses her love for Marcher implies that the two of them are wrong about what love is. The novella suggests that being in love means supporting the other person and being vulnerable with them—the way May loves Marcher—which isn’t what either one of them initially believes love is. Though May claims love is passionate and earth-shattering, she expresses her love for Marcher with quiet sacrifice. After she meets him, May gives up her relationships with others in order to support Marcher as he waits for his fate. May and Marcher are unmarried and yet spend most of their time together, which leads people to gossip about May. Marcher can escape this scrutiny, presumably because he’s judged less harshly as a man, but May can never appear “ordinary” due to the odd nature of their relationship. Because May is invested in Marcher’s fate and because—as readers later learn—she loves Marcher, May quietly accepts her alienation and maintains their unconventional relationship. Later, May realizes what Marcher’s mysterious fate is and keeps it a secret from Marcher himself, even though it means she can never be happy. As Marcher later discovers, May deduces that Marcher’s fate is to live without ever having experienced anything meaningful, specifically love. She chooses not to tell him this because it would make him unhappy, even though not telling him also makes her unhappy, since she loves Marcher and wants him to love her back.
In the end, Marcher realizes that his own fear of loving selflessly and vulnerably is what fated him to miss out on experiencing love at all. Marcher’s initial assumption that love is dull and dispassionate stems from his inability to allow himself to care for others—likely because he’s afraid that he’ll lose them. Before meeting May, Marcher never discussed his fate with others, and after he meets May, he never considers marrying her because that would mean bringing a woman into his (possibly violent) fate. Later, Marcher even wonders whether May’s death is his fate. Marcher believes that his guardedness and self-imposed isolation is selfless, since no one has to be burdened with his fate. But his fixation on May’s death suggests that the reason he avoids getting close to anyone—or loving them—is that he’s afraid of losing the people he loves.
Near the novella’s end, Marcher learns that May will soon die of a blood disorder, and he’s deeply grieved. However, he’s selfishly upset because May will die without knowing Marcher’s fate and because he’ll have to live without May; he’s less concerned with May’s suffering. But after May dies, Marcher realizes that May loved Marcher “for himself” without any selfishness, and that she made quiet sacrifices for his benefit. Marcher realizes that his fate—the fate that May hid from him—was to live a life without love in it. For Marcher, real love would have been neither earth-shattering nor dispassionate. Instead, it would have meant bearing the burden of knowing and loving May, as she did for him, even though he’d eventually lose her.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Love and Loss ThemeTracker
Love and Loss Quotes in The Beast in the Jungle
“Well, say to wait for—to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves.”
She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery. “Isn’t what you describe perhaps but the expectation—or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people—of falling in love?”
[…]
“The only thing is,” he went on, “that I think if it had been that I should by this time know.”
“Do you mean because you’ve been in love?” And then as he but looked at her in silence: “You’ve been in love, and it hasn’t meant such a cataclysm, hasn’t proved the great affair?”
“Here I am, you see. It hasn’t been overwhelming.”
“Then it hasn’t been love,” said May Bartram.
The real form it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn’t a privilege he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt.
When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed to him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the shadow of a change and the chill of a shock. He immediately began to imagine aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of her peril as the direct menace for himself of personal privation. This indeed gave him one of those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable to him—it showed him that what was still first in his mind was the loss she herself might suffer. “What if she should have to die before knowing, before seeing—?”
[…] they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant. The end, none the less, was that what he had expected failed to come to him. Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes. She gave way at the same instant to a slow fine shudder, and though he remained staring—though he stared in fact but the harder—turned off and regained her chair. It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that.
“Well, you don’t say—?”
She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunk back strangely pale. “I’m afraid I’m too ill.”
[…]
“What then has happened?”
She was once more, with her companion’s help, on her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hat and gloves and had reached the door. Yet he waited for her answer. “What was to,” she said.
What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had began to happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude—that was what he had figured as the Beast in the Jungle, that was what had been in the lap of the gods. He had had her word for it as he left her—what else on earth could she have meant? It wasn’t a thing of a monstrous order; not a fate rare and distinguished; not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and immortalised; it had only the stamp of the common doom. But poor Marcher at this hour judged the common doom sufficient. It would serve his turn, and even as the consummation of infinite waiting he would bend his pride to accept it. […] He had lived by her aid, and to leave her behind would be cruelly, damnably to miss her. What could be more overwhelming than that?
“It has touched you,” she went on. “It has done its office. It has made you all its own.”
“So utterly without my knowing it?”
“So utterly without your knowing it.” His hand, as he leaned to her, was on the arm of her chair, and, dimly smiling always now, she placed her own on it. “It’s enough if I know it.”
“Oh!” he confusedly breathed, as she herself of late so often had done.
“What I long ago said is true. You’ll never know now, and I think you ought to be content. You’ve had it,” said May Bartram.
“But had what?”
“Why what was to have marked you out. The proof of your law. It has acted. I’m too glad,” she then bravely added, “to have been able to see what it’s not.”
That had become for him, and more intensely with time and distance, his one witness of a past glory.
[…]
What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most live. It was as if, being nothing anywhere else for any one, nothing even for himself, he were just everything here, and if not for a crowd of witnesses or indeed for any witness but John Marcher, then by clear right of the register that he could scan like an open page. The open page was the tomb of his friend, and there were the facts of the past, there the truth of his life, there the backward reaches in which he could lose himself.
This brought him close, and his pace, was slow, so that—and all the more as there was a kind of hunger in his look—the two men were for a minute directly confronted. Marcher knew him at once for one of the deeply stricken—a perception so sharp that nothing else in the picture comparatively lived, neither his dress, his age, nor his presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep ravage of the features that he showed. He showed them—that was the point; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that was either a signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to an opposed sorrow. He might already have been aware of our friend, might at some previous hour have noticed in him the smooth habit of the scene, with which the state of his own senses so scantly consorted, and might thereby have been stirred as by an overt discord. […] What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?
The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived.
[…]
The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as he didn’t guess; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the time he left her, had fallen where it was to fall.
Through them, none the less, he tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so that he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened—it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.
