Lost and Unseen Love as the Beast in Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle

Lost and Unseen Love as The Beast in Henry James' The Beast in the

Jungle

The story of "The Beast in the Jungle" by Henry James has a real

message that is pervasive throughout the story, which is that by

spending all your time worrying about what will happen in the future

you miss what is happening to you now, this being represented in the

story by lost love. John Marcher represents what can happen when you

spend all your time worrying about what is going to happen to you, as

opposed to what is happening to you. May Bertram obviously loves him

and he does not see it and realize that he loves her also until it is

too late because he was continually worrying about the overwhelming

feeling of apprehension. "It isn't a question of what I want, God

knows I don't want anything. It's only a question of the apprehension

that haunts me-that I live with day by day" (1562) This apprehension

and feeling of impending danger is May's time running out with him

worrying about something else while neglecting the one person who he

has ever truly loved.

This theme of not looking at what you have is prevalent in the entire

story. Marcher is always looking over his shoulder waiting for this

bad thing to happen to him never realizing that if he stopped looking

to the future and worrying about the future so much that the

"thing"(1562) would never have been able trouble him. Gert Beulens

says:

John Marcher is the benighted author of his own sorry fate. Unable to

see that it is up to him to bring about the major event for which he

secretly feels destined, he never musters the courage to act and ends

up a miserable failure. May Bartram, with whom he has shared his

secret, is perceptive enough to see the nature of his problem, yet she

cannot impart her insight to the obtusely self-absorbed Marcher during

her lifetime. Only after May's death does Marcher come to realize her

importance to him and see that she loved him. Too late, he understands

that he should have acted by returning the passion she felt for him.

Thus summarized, the story is a romantic tale with a palatable moral.

If only the hero had been less self-preoccupied, he would have

responded to the love of this warm and selfless woman. Or, with a

slightly different emphasis, if only the hero had not dreamed in such

lofty terms of a strikingly rare destiny, he would have embraced the

worthwhile opportunities offered by common reality. (Beulen, 17)

This is also prevalent in James's other works, this idea that people