Theme in The Beast in the Jungle

Beast in the Jungle by Henry James is about a man named John Marcher who accomplishes nothing in his life because of his conviction that something catastrophic is likely to happen to him. Because of his sense of foreboding, he does not seek out marriage or love, and tries to isolate himself from others. Finally, he realizes that the great, catastrophic event he feared is his unlived life. The irony is that Marcher is right, but not in the way that he suspected. Marcher believed that he was destined to experience a sweeping, compelling fate that was so terrible he should try to isolate himself away from 'normal' human beings, but his terrible fate -- the 'beast in the jungle' is a very ordinary one, namely that he ignores the love of the one woman who really cared about him. "The Beast in the Jungle…It wasn't a thing of a monstrous order; not a fate rare and distinguished; not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and immortalized; it had only the stamp of the common doom" (James 26). Living without egoism and fear is the only solution to avoiding the Beast in the Jungle, according to James.

The short story is structured as a tale of unrequited love. May Bartram apparently loves John Marcher and continues to have a relationship with him, even though there is no hope that he will return her affections. Marcher presents himself to the world as a self-sacrificing person, and his sense of 'specialness' colors his entire existence. However, Marcher is, in fact, a consummate egotist, and is pathologically obsessed with the fact that he is special. This false sense of 'specialness' gives his life meaning. Marcher does not perceive his blindness -- until it is too late. Once he loses this sense of specialness he looks upon the world with different eyes. "He was simply now one of them himself -- he was in the dust, without a peg for the sense of difference; and there were hours when, before the temples of gods and the sepulchers of kings, his spirit turned for nobleness of association to the barely discriminated slab in the London suburb," where May was buried (James 32).

The feminist theorist Eve Sedgwick has stated that the idea that May loves John but is continually rebuffed is presented as a metaphor for John's lack of desire for women in general. The reader learns little of May, and she is presented as an elliptical and vague figure who conveniently dies. John only loves May when she is comfortably unavailable for him, suggesting that the 'Beast in the Jungle' may not simply be an unlived life but also an aversion to traditional sexual relationships. "The moral point in the story is not only that May should have desired John Marcher but that John Marcher should have desired May Barton" writes Sedgwick (Sedgwick 163). Questions about James' own sexuality and his lack of attachment have caused other theorists to suggest that Marcher is a stand-in for James, or a symbolic representation of an artist who only observes rather than engages in life.

Even in Sedgwick's iconoclastic, homoerotic reading, however, it is possible to argue that the moral of The Beast in the Jungle is the same: living in fear of disaster leads to a life without love, whether life is spent separating one's self from others because of fear of losing them, or fear of social censure. The story takes the form of a psychological narrative more than a conventional marriage plot: since it is about a man opting out of conventional social norms, rather than engaging in them. It features Marcher deciding to ignore May's obliquely expressed interest, a few dinners enjoyed by the two of them, and then her eventual demise. Marcher's "imaginative concrete image" of the beast, a metaphor made real, is the most dramatic aspect of the novel (Gottschalk 43).