The Scarlet Plague

A different, more personal kind of tension enters the narrative in the book’s final chapters. They start out with Smith describing how he wandered the landscape in complete loneliness aside from some animal companions. London creates the sense that the entire history of the world was starting again from scratch, with Smith as a new Edenic human being amid a calm and bountiful nature.

However, traces of human society remained and led to conflict. After three years, Smith finally discovered a group of survivors, and London highlights the emotion of this moment. However, only Smith was emotionally moved by the encounter; the other man, Bill, showed a coldness and cruelty that are soon established as characteristic. At late point, a love triangle developed that was inflected by the class structure of pre-plague society and thus functions as social critique. Bill embodies the revenge of the working class. London, a champion of the working class in many of his writings, implies here that the oppression of this class has the potential to wreak havoc on society. Like the looters and arsonists who took to the streets in the plague’s wake, Bill found societal collapse liberating—an opportunity to replace the old hierarchy with one in which he was on top. 

This depiction of the destruction of one system of oppression giving way to another contributes to the novella’s ideas about The Cyclical Nature of History and Civilization, but it also reflects London’s suggestion that the elite class produced by capitalism lacks The Resilience and Adaptability Required for Survival in a postapocalyptic world. Smith portrays Vesta as representing the pinnacle of culture under an economically prosperous, capitalist, and industrial society. However, this culture not only came at the expense of the suffering of the masses but also proved useless in the post-plague world, where Vesta was reduced to performing manual labor like everyone else. The doomed nature of her relationship with Smith underscores the point; the two characters who embody “civilization” produced no children with each other but rather with representatives of the working classes, whose “brute strength” dominated, in pseudoscientific fashion, any tendency toward cultural refinement in subsequent generations (London, it is worth noting, was interested in eugenics). 

In this sense, London presents a nightmare version of the Garden of Eden, with Bill and Vesta as a new Adam and Eve starting off history on a note of cruelty and oppression. That Smith was unable to effect any change and rescue Vesta reflects a fatalistic view that “there is no justice in the universe” (104). Indeed, throughout Smith’s account of the plague, he implies that civilization is a thin veneer overlaying self-interest; as described in Chapter 4, for example, even members of Smith’s own social group were willing to turn out the sick and dying for a chance to save themselves. Yet again, however, London suggests that the truth may be bleaker than Smith realizes, with even “civilization” operating according to “barbaric” rules. Smith’s narration reveals that Bill was not Vesta’s first unchosen partner; her prior marriage was an economic arrangement between quasi-aristocratic families, which raises the question of how much her current situation differed from her former one. In capitalist and postapocalyptic societies alike, London suggests, women are essentially treated as commodities.  

Such critiques of pre-plague society complicate the ending of The Scarlet Plague, which hints at a renewal of civilization. Various male survivors seek out the few female survivors to marry and start families. Of the resulting children and grandchildren, most resemble Bill, but Edwin is consistently aligned with Smith, suggesting hope for the culture and society that the latter represents. However, given that that society contained the seeds of its own destruction, it seems inevitable that the cycle of civilizational growth and collapse will merely continue. In fact, Smith himself says as much, and London imbues his concluding speech with mythic resonance by using quasi-biblical language and cadences. The final pages of the book contextualize this process with reference to the laws of nature; the arrival of the horses on the shore serves as a reminder that species are always changing and adapting. London leaves readers with the final image (echoing the book’s beginning) of Smith and Edwin: the eternal duo of old age and youth, always setting off on the road of life together and driving history forward, for better or worse.