John Marcher believes that he’s unique, as he’s convinced that he’s fated to experience a life-altering event. Because he assumes that no one can understand him, he hides his authentic self in public. However, he eventually learns that he revealed his secret long ago to a woman named May Bartram. Marcher continues to believe in his own uniqueness, but he also likes that May knows his secret; in fact, he sometimes wishes that everyone could. Then, at the end of the novella, Marcher encounters a grieving man and, through him, recognizes his own repressed emotions. The two of them understand each other, which means that Marcher’s experience hasn’t been unique. Marcher’s desire to be understood, and the fact that he was understood (both by May and by the man), ironically proves that his life wasn’t unique at all. In fact, many human experiences are universal—and yearning for connection with others, as Marcher does, is a natural part of life.
Before Marcher encounters May, he believes that no one can understand him. Because his fate is disturbing and potentially dangerous, he avoids sharing it with anyone, since knowing his fate would burden or endanger them. Marcher assumes that no one can understand his experience, so he keeps his feelings secret. Since Marcher is trying to avoid connecting with anyone, he has to avoid appearing as unique as he feels. He cultivates polite manners and wears a figurative “mask” in public, distancing himself from others by hiding his authentic self. Although Marcher thinks his life is unique, he has to hide any sign of uniqueness, which ensures that no one will get close enough to him to understand him.
But it turns out that Marcher did want at least one person to understand him. After a run-in with May Bartram at her great-aunt’s estate, Marcher learns that 10 years earlier, he told May about his fate. Interestingly, Marcher has no memory of telling her and can’t explain why he did so, let alone why he forgot. The fact that he repressed this memory suggests that his divulgence was an unplanned impulse, one he maybe regretted. However, Marcher ends up enjoying the fact that May knows about his fate, which suggests that he does want someone to understand him. Marcher is able to be himself around May, and when he’s with her, he feels “spared” from his lonely burden. Still, Marcher continues to believe that his experience is so unique that it has to be hidden. Part of the reason he appreciates May is that even though she knows the truth, she sees him from an outsider’s perspective and can evaluate how effective his “mask” is. Even better, she affirms Marcher’s uniqueness by taking his fate seriously and waiting for it alongside him.
Later, readers learn that Marcher’s impulse to tell May his secret may have revealed his innermost desire: even though he thinks outsiders can’t understand him, he wishes that they could. As Marcher and May are guarding his secret, they still speak openly about Marcher’s fate, assuming that no one can understand what they’re saying. It’s possible that Marcher believes his secret is best hidden in the open, but it’s also possible that he subconsciously wishes someone would hear and understand his secret. Alternatively, he might speak openly to confirm his fear that no one can understand him, even if he wants them to. After May dies of a blood disorder, Marcher wishes that he could tell everyone the true nature of his friendship with May. Since he and May are unmarried, no one understands the depth of his grief. In fact, Marcher even considers telling everyone his secret. He ultimately doesn’t, but his hesitation suggests that he wasn’t content with having only May understand him—he wants to be understood by everyone, even though he doesn’t think that’s possible.
Eventually, Marcher learns that his experience was never unique—both because he wanted to be understood by and connect with others (the same as anyone else would) and because he was understood. After May dies, Marcher realizes that she understood him better than he understood himself. May knew that Marcher’s fate was to die without experiencing love, and she also knew that he was capable of loving her, an emotion that he’d repressed. Not only did May understand Marcher, but she shared at least part of his experience, since she waited for his fate alongside him. This means that Marcher’s experience wasn’t unique, and that May understood Marcher even better than he understood himself. While Marcher is mourning at May’s grave, he encounters another mourner. With a glance, the mourner shows his grief to Marcher, possibly because he recognizes Marcher’s sorrow and wants to prove that his is deeper. The encounter proves both that Marcher’s desire to be understood is universal—the man wants a witness to his grief—and that Marcher can be understood, even by a stranger. The man recognizes that Marcher is grieving and might even recognize that Marcher never fully loved the woman he grieves, which is why the man wants to prove his devotion. Marcher’s experience isn’t unique, even if his fate is; the mourner understands Marcher instantly, and both Marcher and the mourner clearly crave connection with others.
Marcher’s desire for connection proves that he’s just like everyone else. Wanting to connect with others is a common human experience—one that Marcher, May, and the mourner all share. Although Marcher’s fate might be unique and unnatural, his trajectory throughout the novella is anything but: he believes that others can’t understand him, he wants to be understood, and finally, he realizes that he is understood. Marcher believed strongly in his own uniqueness, but his innermost desires were standard, understandable, and even universal.
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Understanding and Connection Quotes in The Beast in the Jungle
There came in fact a moment when Marcher felt a positive pang. It was vain to pretend she was an old friend, for all the communities were wanting, in spite of which it was as an old friend that he saw she would have suited him. He had new ones enough—was surrounded with them for instance on the stage of the other house; as a new one he probably wouldn’t have so much as noticed her. He would have liked to invent something, get her to make-believe with him that some passage of a romantic or critical kind had originally occurred. He was really almost reaching out in imagination—as against time—for something that would do, and saying to himself that if it didn’t come this sketch of a fresh start would show for quite awkwardly bungled. They would separate, and now for no second or no third chance. They would have tried and not succeeded.
Above all she was in the secret of the difference between the forms he went through—those of his little office under Government, those of caring for his modest patrimony, for his library, for his garden in the country, for the people in London whose invitations he accepted and repaid—and the detachment that reigned beneath them and that made of all behaviour, all that could in the least be called behaviour, a long act of dissimulation. What it had come to was that he wore a mask painted with the social simper, out of the eye-holes of which there looked eyes of an expression not in the least matching the other features. This the stupid world, even after years, had never more than half discovered. It was only May Bartram who had, and she achieved, by an art indescribable, the feat of at once—or perhaps it was only alternately—meeting the eyes from in front and mingling her own vision, as from over his shoulder, with their peep through the apertures.
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—?”
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?
There were moments as the weeks went by when he would have liked, by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the intimacy of his loss, in order that it might be questioned and his retort, to the relief of his spirit, so recorded; but the moments of an irritation more helpless followed fast on these, the moments during which, turning things over with a good conscience but with a bare horizon, he found himself wondering if he oughtn’t to have begun, so to speak, further back.
[…]
He couldn’t have made known she was watching him, for that would have published the superstition of the Beast. This was what closed his mouth now—now that the Jungle had been thrashed to vacancy and that the Beast had stolen away. It sounded too foolish and too flat.
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?
