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Mood
Explanation and Analysis:
At the start of the novel, the mood is tense and foreboding. An eerie fog lays over the San Francisco Bay as Humphrey Van Weyden sails to visit his friend in Sausalito, creating an atmosphere of mystery and apprehension. When the two ships, the Martinez and the Ghost, crash into one another due to low visibility, Humphrey describes the Ghost, emerging from the obscurity of the fog, as “a steamboat […] trailing fog-wreaths like seaweed on the snout of Leviathan,” foreshadowing the danger that lies on board the Ghost by comparing the ship to a sea monster emerging from the ocean’s depths.
In Chapter 1, Humphrey gives an eerie description of the women on board the Martinez screaming as the ship goes down, adding to the foreboding mood:
A tangled mass of women, with drawn, white faces and open mouths, is shrieking like a chorus of lost souls […] And I remember that the sounds they made reminded me of the squealing of pigs under the knife of the butcher, and I was struck with horror at the vividness of the analogy. These women, capable of the most sublime emotions, of the greatest sympathies, were open-mouthed and screaming. They wanted to live, they were helpless, like rats in a trap, and they screamed.
This description foreshadows the devaluation of human life displayed by Wolf Larsen on board the Ghost, and the horror Humphrey feels witnessing his callousness. The “tangled mass of women” is echoed later in the novel with Wolf Larsen’s metaphor for life as a “yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute […] but in the end will cease to move.” In their final moments, the group of women is reduced to an undifferentiated “yeast,” their humanity erased as they are taken over by a sheer, blind terror of death. Humphrey compares them to “pigs” and “rats,” suggesting that they are like animals, which foreshadows the novel’s later interest in the primal, animal side of humanity.
After Maud Brewster boards the Ghost, the mood, while still filled with tension and danger, also becomes more romantic, sentimental, and exciting. While previously he had anxiously avoided doing anything to upset Wolf, Maud inspires him to challenge Wolf and make a brave escape from the Ghost. His fear shifts to anger and determination. In Chapter 26, Humphrey describes the change wrought in him by Maud:
I ground my teeth in anger […] I felt a newfound strength. What of my new-found love, I was a giant. I feared nothing. I would work my will through it all, in spite of Wolf Larsen and of my own thirty-five bookish years. All would be well. I would make it well. And so, exalted, upborne by a sense of power, I turned my back on the howling inferno and climbed to the deck.
Whereas before Humphrey was at the whim of Wolf Larsen, he now sees himself as the master of his own destiny, and trusts his willpower to see him and Maud through to safety. The mood has by this point in the novel become exciting and optimistic rather than tense and hopeless.
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