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 seek to be “independent and self-directed” (Stuart, 210) but cannot be is common in many of James’s other works.
“although moral absolutes are notably absent in James, there remains a more limited morality, one specific to a community and to time and place. As the passage suggests, this moral reality is a social moral reality, one that depends for its validity on the mutual understanding and interdependence of the involved community (however small it may be). In essence, James's protagonists seek the freedom to be independent, self-directed individuals, but they discover that this kind of freedom can occur only through what Pippin describes as "an achieved like-mindedness" with the others on whom they must depend.” (Stuart, 210)
James himself seemed to suffer from the same maladies that Marcher suffers from in his book, which makes sense considering what is known about James. He also had trouble with personal attachments in his life even going so far as to say that they were impossible to have in our society. This seems to lend credence to the idea that Marcher is unable to form an attachment that he truly desires because of some idea that he has about a vague feeling of impending danger. Talking about James, Kristin Boudreau writes:
…he had struggled all of his adult life with the difficulty of achieving intimacy with his closest associates. In a world governed by social conventions, James found true contact between individuals often impossible, in spite of his lifelong efforts to cultivate sympathy, to share with his fellow mortals what he called the "inward ache"(Boudreau, 69)
This insight into James parallels what happened to John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle” in that Marcher could not achieve the level of intimacy with May that he wanted to achieve just as James could not in his own life with those around him.
Henry James presents a clear moral statement in his short story “The Beast in the Jungle” which is that you must not be too self-absorbed and too focused on the future in life otherwise you will miss the wonderful things that life has to offer. Kristin Boudreau said that James had this problem in life and that may be one of the reasons why he chose to write about it. Marcher loved May but could not see it until the end when the beast of his own self-absorption devoured him as a result of his missed chance of real love.
Works Cited
James, Henry. “The Beast in the Jungle” The Norton Anthology of American Literature:
Shorter Sixth Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New york: W.W. Norton, 2003. 1556-1586
Beulens, Gert. “In Possession of a Secret: Rhythms of Mastery and Surrender in ‘The
Beast in the Jungle’” The Henry James Review. Johns Hopkins University Press
v. 19.1 (1998): 17-35
Boudreau, Kristin. “Henry James and Inward Aches” The Henry James Review,
Johns Hopkins University Press v. 20.1 (1999): 69-80
Stuart, Christopher J. “Henry James and Modern Moral Life” The Henry James Review
Johns Hopkins University Press v. 22.2 (2001): 209-211
