In Part 1, Chapter 1, London uses personification when describing the Northland wilderness to evoke the cruelty of nature and create a foreboding mood:
Dark spruce forest frowned on either side of the frozen waterway. The trees […] seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter […] cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
The clearest instance of personification comes at the beginning of this passage; London describes the forest as “frowning,” immediately evoking a sense of hostility and danger and suggesting that the forest bears its inhabitants ill will. The image of trees leaning toward one another gives the impression that they are looming high above the comparatively small and insignificant men below, watching them like indifferent gods as they struggle to survive in the icy wilderness. The double capitalization of the word “Wild” at the end of the passage is also an instance of personification, as it turns the word “wild” into a proper noun, suggesting a name or a title. But even while London personifies nature, he emphasizes its profound inhumanity; it is beyond caring or feeling, so “lone and cold” that it is incapable even of sadness, infallible and eternal. If the Wild is a god, it is not of the comforting, anthropomorphic sort most people are accustomed to, but rather something lying beyond human understanding—remote, cold, and alien.
This passage, which comes at the very beginning of the book, sets the stage for themes explored later in the novel, such as the relationship between humans and nature, the uncaringness of the natural world, and the way that one’s environment can shape one’s personality, an idea often referred to as environmental determinism. These themes are common in literary Naturalism, a movement to which White Fang is generally considered to belong.
Literary Naturalism arose in the late 19th century and continued into the early 20th century, when White Fang was published. The movement was heavily influenced by the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in the 1850s, which resulted in a paradigm shift in the way people viewed the relationship between themselves and nature. Darwin proposed the idea that species—including humans—evolved from other species, and that this resulted from the process of natural selection, sometimes referred to as “survival of the fittest”—the idea that only the strongest animals survive to reproduce and pass on their traits to future generations. Whereas before evolutionary theory nature had generally been viewed as comfortable and unchanging, Darwin’s ideas revealed a new face of nature: one that was violent and cruel, killing off the weak and forcing all living things to struggle and fight one another for survival. By personifying nature as cruel and uncaring, London reflects these ideas and foreshadows the way that White Fang will need to struggle for his survival throughout the novel.
