The Scarlet Plague

Throughout the book, “savage” functions as a motif related to the social changes caused by the plague. London describes one of the grandchildren as “savage-looking,” and Smith takes every opportunity to decry the children as “savages”; he remarks, for example, “You are true savages” (36), after the children dig up a human skeleton for its teeth. 

During the period in which the book was written, “savage” (along with “barbaric” and its derivatives) was still a common way to refer to Indigenous peoples; it also connoted the traits purportedly associated with such peoples—e.g., cruelty and lack of “culture.” For the book’s original readers, “savage” would thus have implied both a standard of life considered to be below that of the industrialized world (e.g., wearing animal skins or living as a hunter-gatherer) and an immorality or amorality supposedly intertwined with such a lifestyle. London’s application of the term to white American children both upholds and subverts such ideas, implying that the lives that Smith’s grandchildren lead do in fact correlate with a kind of “savagery” but detaching this from race or ethnicity by presenting it as a possible fate for all humans. London’s critique of pre-plague society functions similarly, tacitly questioning whether the postapocalyptic world is in fact more “savage” or simply more open in its embrace of violence.