A lovely picture of snow-covered mountains of Alaska, with a cover image of the Content Bash Annotated Edition of Daughter of the Snows by Jack London

A Daughter of the Snows by Jack London

July 11, 2024 Daniel

Trigger warning! This is a kinda racist book with themes rooted in white supremacy. If such cringe will dampen your enjoyment of this book, maybe you shouldn’t read it. But if you’re curious to learn about Jack London’s weird brand of eugenics then go ahead and read the book!

Depending on whom you ask, Jack London’s 1902 book A Daughter of the Snows is his first full-length novel, with apologies to the novella Cruise of the Dazzler. Originally published by Grosset & Dunlap, it tells the story of a young Stanford-educated woman named Frona Welse who travels to the Yukon after alienating her wealthy family.

A Daughter of the Snows was not nearly as successful — neither critically nor commercially — as Call of the Wild, which was published the following year in 1903, but it certainly helped London’s reputation as a creator of individualistic and independent-minded protagonists. Despite its overt racism, this book can still be seen as ahead of its time with its college-educated female lead who doesn’t exactly suffer fools gladly. Indeed, the socialist London himself was a bundle of contradictions: he held racist views despite being raised by a Black woman, and he supported women’s suffrage because he knew they would vote for the prohibition that he expected to cure his alcoholism, so it’s kinda curious that he would go out of his way to create a Strong Female Character so early in his career and so early in the 20th century.

Anyway, Frona is no dainty southern lady, and she doesn’t automatically defer to traditional gender norms in the Yukon. Her staunch independence is made clear throughout this book and she finds herself almost remarkably at ease and comfortable with the harsh elements of the Klondike wilderness. She rows her own canoe, travels dangerous ground by foot, and performs a heroic rescue that shows off her physical strength when there is an ice break on the river.

As far as Frona is concerned, she out-mans the masculine men of Dawson City, so much so that she ends up losing respect for the dude she once saw as her ideal portrait of a brave (white) man, and gravitates toward another dude whose own strength (and superiority) was not immediate obvious to her.

Jack London puts his social Darwinism leanings on full display in A Daughter of the Snows, with this belief that a (wo)man surviving and enduring Arctic environments is proof positive of superiority over those who could not. Frona Welse is a very early example of an action heroine in American media, and London deserves credit for creating such a compelling figure in a book that goes pretty far out of its way to question to gender norms. However, the novel is flawed and lacks the tight efficiency of London’s best work, and the embracing of certain racial ideologies is cringe at best.

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