Jack London’s pastoral trilogy composed of his late writing career, Burning Daylight (1910), The Valley of the Moon (VM, 1913), The Little Lady of the Big House (1915) indicates his third transition in literary creation. As Sun Fengrui pointed out, VM could be a moderate method in dealing with social evils instead of radical social critique in his previous works (Sun 2008:86). However, as a writer righteous and loyal to his epoch, Jack London has been striving for justice as well as truth with his pen. His reflections on the crisis of spiritual ecology of capitalist society deserves interpretation and entails further study.
Ecological crisis not only has resided in natural and social fields, but invades into the spiritual realm of human. Spiritual crisis or spiritual emergency is recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a distinct psychological disorder that involves a
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London and Charmian’s life experiences have provided an prototype for this novel, which adds autobiographical hue to it. Narrated in the fantastic, artless and autobiographical way, VM, a symbol of an ecological paradise which entails abundant ecological thoughts of the author, though it is held by some critics that the portrait of land in such a detailed manner has ruined the artistic style of VM(Sinclair 134). Nevertheless, as a writer who regards thoughts more important than forms in his writing, London here does not mean to depict land only for style’s sake but rather to emphasize his ecological thoughts. Therefore, instead of focusing on his artistic forms, this chapter counts more on ecological values from London’s land depiction. London has seen the internal relation between land deterioration and humankind’s spiritual