If I could do this piece over again, I would write more about what was so appealing about Bill Totts to Freddie Drummond. I really left that part out and it was a big part of what I wanted my paper to be about. I guess I didn't know how to get that across. I also should have written more about the arrogance that it must have taken to believe that it was so simple to cross over from one side to other.
Stereotypical Classes
In Jack London’s “South of the Slot”, one man had the rare opportunity to lead two completely opposite lives. Freddie Drummond was not only able to live his own life of high society in the presence of formally educated people, but he was also able to live the life of “Big” Bill Totts, the uneducated blue-collar working man who lived south of the slot. “The Slot was the metaphor that expressed the class cleavage of Society, and no man crossed this metaphor, back and forth, more successfully than Freddie Drummond” (526).
Freddie Drummond was a sociology professor at the University of California in San Francisco. He was the typical middle-upper class man of his time. He was easy mannered, reserved, and extraordinarily polite. He was clean and simple. His counter-part, Bill Totts, was quite the opposite. He was a “man’s man.” He smoked, drank, fought and cursed. Drummond became Bill Totts, initially, to help him write books about the working class folk. His first attempts to fit in to the working class were disastrous. He tried to act like himself, Freddie Drummond, and was greeted with serious beating by his fellow factory workers. They found his politeness and inexperience unusual and suspicious. It was after his second attempt at working south of the slot that he realized that he needed to change. Thus, Bill Totts was born.
Drummond created a man in himself that epitomized the blue-collar class. In the beginning, he struggled to become Bill Totts. Drummond had been brought up with what he considered class. He went to college and was a strapping football player in his day. He was clever and controlled. He had kind eyes and was trusting of others. He looked further ahead in his life than tomorrow’s dinner or the weekend’s plans. He saw things clearly. All of these things were expected of him in the society in which he lived. Drummond looked down on the lower class people on San Francisco. He considered their causes to be barbaric. He even looked down on their food. He did not dance; he never talked about his work outside of the university; he didn’t have many friends. He had no true respect for women and saw them merely as distractions, meant only for marriage material. He sought marriage for financial and status purposes. Though he was fond of the woman he chose, Catherine Van Vorst, he did not love her. He was appalled at the thought of “sleeping around” and philandering. While Drummond seemed kind and sincere, the motives behind his actions were quite underhanded. His entire life was the stereotype of high society. It was difficult for him at first to look past his upbringing and “stoop” to the level of his new self, Bill Totts.
Bill Totts was a very simple man. He was well liked by both men and women. He was a big supporter of the woman’s right to work. In fact, he slept with several working women. He was flirtatious, and delightful. He loved to dance and have a good time. When he decided it was time to marry, it was because he had fallen in love with a woman, Mary Condon. His main concerns in life were getting dinner on the table for that week. He would worry about the next week when it got there. Whenever there was trouble anywhere, “Big” Bill Totts (as he came to be known) was at the front of it. He sought to lend a helping hand to those who couldn’t help themselves, whether he was invited to help or not. He developed an amazing peace-making ability. He was the kind of man that everyone liked, because everyone felt like he was like them. He was the stereotypical working class man.
It is truly fascinating how Drummond was able to actually be two different people. While he had trouble in the beginning converting himself into Totts, he eventually had to fight off the urge to do so. In the end, he lost that battle. Perhaps if he had been better liked in his original life, or if he had not been so well liked in his new life he would have had an easier time returning to his normal life. London really showed in this story which life he favored. He had a difficult time in the beginning of his life, he was a wonderful person to write a story like this because he was one of the few people who had the opportunity to see life on both sides of the slot.
Works Cited
London, Jack. “South of the Slot.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature Fifth Edition. Vol. C. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. 524-36.
