The Vanishing Love
-----Book report of Martin Eden * The Introduction of Marin Eden
Martin Eden, semiautobiographical novel by Jack London, published in 1909. The title character, Martin Eden, becomes a writer, hoping to acquire the respectability sought by his society-girl sweetheart, Ruth Morse. She spurns him, however, when his writing is rejected by several magazines and when he is falsely accused of being a socialist. Interestingly, Ruth tries to win him back after he achieves fame, but Eden realizes her love for him but not for the fame and fortune is false. Financially successful and robbed of connection to his own class, aware that his quest for bourgeois respectability was hollow, and devastated by the suicide of his mentor, Eden travels to the South Seas, where he jumps from the ship and drowns. So, the whole story is ended up with Martin’s suicide.
The reason why I said that Martin Eden is another Jack London, or the book is a semiautobiographical novel, is that when Jack London wrote Martin Eden at age 33, he had already achieved international acclaim with The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf and White Fang. However, London quickly became disillusioned with his fame and set sail through the South Pacific on a self-designed ketch called the Snark. On the grueling two-year voyage—as he struggled with tiredness and bowel diseases—he wrote Martin Eden, filling its pages with his frustrations, adolescent gang fights and struggles for artistic recognition. The character of Ruth Morse was modeled on Mabel Applegarth — the first love of London's life.

* The main characters of this book （only mention the two in my report）
Martin Eden--A former sailor from a working-class background, who falls in love with the young, bourgeois Ruth and educates himself to become a writer, aiming to win her hand in marriage.
Ruth Morse--The young, bourgeois university student who captivates Eden while tutoring him in English. Though initially both attracted and repelled by his working-class background, she eventually decides that she loves him. They become engaged, with the condition that they cannot marry until her parents approve of his financial and social status.

* The Vanishing Love
Vanishing love is always a disillusionary expression and the love between Ruth and Eden truly be there when they fell in love with each other, but turn vanishing by the comments from Ruth’s family and the Eden’s down and out. Nothing can stop the trend, though Ruth loved him for his talent and wisdom, there is no lack of struggling and sufferings. Both of them suffered a lot in the love. And finally, Ruth cannot resist the prejudice and leaved Eden while Eden found his true love was always an ideal one when Ruth was back.
Ruth was his psychological support all the time. With the help of Ruth, Eden learned reading, writing and challenging the world he was not familiar with. She was the instructor, the friend, the lover of Martin, and she was also the witness of a hard-working young man’s growth. They had established a relationship of loyalty, dependence and mutual-believing during the days of their playing and studying together. And that became the eternal light of life in Martin’s heart that was on the way of his dream. Without Ruth, the dream lacked its power and became meaningless.
Like an abandoned child, Martin Eden lost his ambition and agility to everything including writing, sociality and living. Contrary to Martin’s further succeeded and his brighter fortune, his antipathy and repulsion against bourgeoisie became stronger and stronger. Their fatuity, superficiality and hypocrisy disgusted him. Those who had mocked him now turned to compliment him; those who had kept away from him now turned to get any chance to chat with him; those who had looked down upon him as homeless rat now turned to respect him as a prescient saint. These changes made him clearly recognize the ugly nature of pubic people. He once said,“I have not changed, though my sudden apparent appreciation in value compels me constantly to reassure myself on that point. I am personally of the same value that I was when nobody wanted me. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don’t want me for myself, for myself is the same old self they did not want. Then they must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I! Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition I have received. That recognition is not I. It resides in the minds of others.”
Finally, Ruth came back to him, but it was to too late. However, he was not that vigorous and vivid Martin Eden any more. There only remained despair and disappointment, crumblings and coldness, pain and pessimism. He was collapsed by the cruel reality. When Ruth told him that her love on him had never changed, Martin replied calmly:
“The publication of what I had written, and the public notice I received, wrought a change in the fibre of your love. Martin Eden, with his work all performed, you would not marry. Your love for him was not strong enough to enable you to marry him. But your love is now strong enough, and I cannot avoid the conclusion that its strength arises from the publication and the public notice. In your case I do not mention royalties, though I am certain that they apply to the change wrought in your mother and father. Of course, all this is not flattering to me. But worst of all, it makes me question love, sacred love.”
He knew, now, that he had not really loved her. It was an idealized Ruth he had loved, an ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love-poems. The real bourgeois Ruth, “with all the bourgeois failings and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind”, he had never loved. Martin is completely discouraged, felt thorough vanishing. His belief broke down and all the money, the fame and the future were worth nothing to him.
So, with the vanishment of Martin Eden, the love vanished completely and quietly, with the reader’s tears and the lovers’ pity.