Postbellum America, 1866-1913 |
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All American
General
Characters
Setting
Packingtown outside Chicago, Illinois (1, 2) Plot
Chapter 1: Jurgis
and Ona marry (flashback) 3: Jurgis
tours meat-packing plant 4: Jurgis
goes to work in plant, and family buys house 5: Marija
loses job 9: Jurgis
becomes U.S. citizen 10: son
Antanas born to Jurgis and Ona; Ona begins to experience “womb trouble” 11: Jurgis
injures his ankle 14: Jurgis
turns to alcohol 15: Ona reveals
her boss has has raped her, and Jurgis attacks him 16: Jurgis
arrested; “his soul grew blacker” 18: Jurgis
learns his family has lost the house 19: Jurgis
learns his baby has died; Ona dies 20: Jurgis
learns he has been blacklisted; he finds a job with Harvester, but his
department closes 21: Jurgis
goes to work in steel mill; Antanas drowns 22: Jurgis
decides to “fight” and becomes tramp 23: Jurgis
returns to city and injures arm 24: Jurgis
meets wealthy Freddie Jones 25: Jurgis
attacks bartender and goes to jail, where he meets Jack Duane again; Jurgis
commits robbery and gets involved in politics 26: Jurgis
attacks Connor again and returns to jail, but gets out on bail 27: Jurgis
finds Marija, who has become a prostitute 28: Jurgis
hears Marxist speaker 31: Jurgis hears speaker promise success for Socialists Themes
Economics: capitalism (3, 7, 9, 12, 16, 17,
23), trusts (25, 29), socialism (28+) Food: contents (7, 9, 11, 14) Genre: realism (7), naturalism (7, 11,
15, 16, 18, 22) Individual: potency and will (1, 2, 11, 22),
crime (16, 17), soul (1, 27) Working Conditions: competition (1, 2, 5), opportunity (2), wages (4), pace (5), unions (5, 8), child labor (6, 13), danger (9, 13), weather (10, 11), hours (10) Living
Conditions: smell
(2), sound (2), lodgings (2), unsanitary conditions (2), swindles (4),
interest (6), temperatures (7, 10), alcholism (7, 14, 19), flies (10),
marriage (12, 14, 16) Journalism: reporter (2), statistics (3,
23), expose (9; see “Living Conditions” and “Working Conditions”), newspapers
(21, 23, 26, 27, 29) Style: metaphor (7), allusion (10, 13), personification (14) ResourcesErnest Poole, “The
Meat Strike,” Independent (July 18, 1904): 179-84. Louis Filler, The
Muckrakers: Crusaders for American Liberalism, 157-70. Carl S. Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination Updated March 15, 2002
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The Jungle
By Mark Canada
Upton Sinclair created a sensation with the publication of his muckraking novel The Jungle (1905; 1906), a gritty and grisly depiction of the meat-packing industry at the turn of the century. President Theodore Roosevelt, in fact, was so moved by the book that he ordered an investigation and later championed legislation designed to clean up the industry. Indeed, the novel is still known mainly for its graphic descriptions of meat processing, descriptions that make explicit mention of poison, rat feces, and even human remains. Sinclair wrote The Jungle with other intentions, however, and much of its enduring literary value lies not in its lurid descriptions, but in its style, themes, and impact. A literary anomaly in many ways, The Jungle manages to combine not only fact and fiction, but also naturalism and optimism. Finally, perhaps more than any other American novel, it brought about immediate, tangible social change. Composition and Publication Sinclair had already published a handful of novels, including a Civil War narrative called Manassas, when Fred D. Warren, editor of the Socialist publication Appeal to Reason, took notice of the writer. “Warren was so impressed,” Ronald Gottesman explains in his introduction to The Jungle, “that he suggested Sinclair apply his talents to an expose of the conditions of wage slaves in an industrial setting” (xv). Warren gave Sinclair an advance of $500 in exchange for the rights to serial publication of the resulting work. In the closing months of 1904, Sinclair spent several weeks in Chicago, where he collected material for his work. “He talked with workers and visited the packing plants both as an official tourist and, in disguise, as a worker,” biographer William A. Bloodworth explains. “He saw enough corruption, filth, and poverty to make The Jungle a gripping, emotionally wrenching novel” (27). As the title of one book has suggested, it was the “Era of the Muckrakers”—investigative journalists who exposed corruption and other societal wrongs in postbellum America. In the same year that Sinclair was conducting his research on the meat-packing industry, Ida Tarbell published The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), and Lincoln Steffens came out with The Shame of the Cities. In fact, Sinclair was not even the first person to bring to light the unseemly side of the meat industry. As Gottesman points out, government investigations already had uncovered the distribution of meat not fit for consumption, and journalistic exposes predating The Jungle by at least two years had appeared in several publications (xv-xvi). Sinclair made his aims for The Jungle clear in a note he wrote for Appeal to Reason. Summarizing what he had written or projected for the novel, he wrote: “It will set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profits” (qtd. in Gottesman xvii). He promised that Socialism would be “imminent” in the novel, announced that the work would resemble Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and alluded to several juicy details that would make for good reading (qtd. in Gottesman xvii). “As I said, I will write this book to be read,” he wrote (qtd. in Gottesman xvii). The novel debuted in Appeal to Reason on February 25, 1905, and ran until November 4 of the same year; however, Sinclair, who had been composing the novel as it appeared serially, did not provide an ending. “With the final appearance of The Jungle in the Appeal,” Gottesman writes, “notice is given that the balance of The Jungle will be mailed to anyone who requests it on a postcard” (xx). Sinclair, of course, eventually did complete the novel, but then struggled to find a publisher. “Five publishers, including Macmillan, turned down the manuscript before Doubleday, Page accepted it,” Gottesman explains. “Even so, it was taken only after an independent investigation corroborated Sinclair’s allegations” (xxi). As Gottesman has shown, the novel angered some readers, at
least one of whom accused Sinclair of “libel,” but it also impressed some of
the most important people of the age, including Socialist politician Eugene
Debs, writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, future British prime minister Winston
Churchill, and President Theodore Roosevelt (xxii). After his encounter with
the book, Roosevelt initiated a government investigation of the meat-packing
industry. A report substantiated
Sinclair’s story, and Roosevelt helped provide for the passage of the Pure
Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act, which became law in 1906. Themes and Style The Jungle is remembered mainly for its graphic descriptions
of the living and working conditions of people working in the meat-packing
industry, as well as the unsanitary conditions under which the meat was
packed for consumption by the masses.
Of the pools of “stinking green water” in the neighborhood, for
example, Sinclair writes: In these pools the children played, and rolled about in the mud of the streets; here and there one noticed them digging in it, after trophies which they had stumbled on. One wondered about this, as also about the swarms of flies which hung about the scene, literally blackening the air, and the strange, fetid odour which assailed one’s nostrils, a ghastly odour, of all the dead things of the universe. (36) In some cases, Sinclair was able to show that horrid working conditions in the meat-packing plants also meant unsanitary or disgusting consequences for consumers. He explains, for instance, that some workers “fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!” (121). Sinclair also pointed up questionable or downright illegal business and political practices, noting for instance that “for the inspection of meat to be sold in the city and State the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three henchmen of the local political machine!” (116). Indeed, although it is technically a novel because the story itself is fiction, The Jungle is a marvel of investigative journalism. In Chapter 3, for instance, Sinclair cleverly paints the awesome statistics of the meat-packing industry through the guise of a tour that Jurgis and his fellow immigrants take through a plant. Here they hear the squeals of the pigs and witness their bloody destruction (44). They also see the government inspector, who “was apparently not haunted by a fear that the hog might get by him before he had finished his testing” (46). At other times, Sinclair simply weaves his descriptions of living and working conditions into the context of the narrative. In Chapter 10, for instance, he moves from an account of the family’s financial struggles into a description of their living conditions during spring and summer (123-124). For all of its striking descriptions, however, The Jungle is more than a riveting expose. It is the story of people and their struggles to survive these conditions. Through its account of the main character, Jurgis Rudkus, it pits the potency and confidence of the individual against the forces of society. On the one hand, Jurgis espouses the American belief that he can achieve anything through sheer force of will. Faced with challenges, Jurgis proclaims: “‘I will work harder’” (23). Indeed, while he is still young, he “could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten” (27). He dismisses complaints about people who have waited for months to secure jobs (27), and he takes no interests in unions (71-72). Eventually, however, he encounters unscrupulous business people, horrible living and working conditions, and dishonest advertising (91). After he has lost his job, his house, and even his family, Jurgis does know defeat. Sinclair writes: It might be true, then, after all, what others had told him about life, that the best powers of a man might not be equal to it! It might be true that, strive as he would, toil as he would, he might fail, and go down and be destroyed! . . . It was true, it was true—that here in this huge city, with its stores of heaped-up wealth, human creatures might be hunted down and destroyed by the wild-beast powers of nature, just as truly as ever they were in the days of the cavemen! (140) In this passage and others, Sinclair seems to write as a naturalist depicting the overwhelming natural and social forces that ultimately crush many humans. In one instance, he seems to echo the theory of Social Darwinism that had so fascinated Theodore Dreiser. Of the workers in Packingtown, Sinclair writes: “All the year round they had been serving as cogs in the great packing machine, and now was the time for the renovating of it and the replacement of the damaged parts” (96). Eventually, these forces not only make his life miserable, but also destroy his marriage (187) and cause him to turn to crime (193). Indeed, Sinclair argues openly that the economic system of the United States has turned many men to beasts. Describing the scene in Jurgis’s jail, he writes: They could tell the whole hateful story of it, set forth the inner soul of a city in which justice and honour, women’s bodies and men’s souls, were for sale in the market place, and human beings writhed and fought and fell upon each other like wolves in a pit; in which lusts were raging fires and men were fuel, and humanity was festering and stewing and wallowing in its own corruption. Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in gaol was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars. (199) As Gottesman argues, however, Sinclair deviated from the naturalists in providing a source of hope. As his disappointments mount, he changes his mind about unions. “Their one chance for life was in union,” Sinclair writes, “and so the struggle became a crusade” (110). Later, he hears a Socialist deliver a stirring lecture and feels that “in the mighty upheavel that had taken place in his soul a new man had been born” (368). Jurgis eventually decides that Socialism will be his savior and a force equal to the forces that have oppressed him for so long. In the closing chapters of the novel, naturalism and Social Darwinism give way to Socialist propaganda and promise. Paraphrasing a Socialist speaker in the novel, Sinclair writes: Life was a struggle for existence, and the strong overcame the weak, and in turn were overcome by the strongest. Those who lost in the struggle were generally exterminated; but now and then they had been known to save themselves by combination—which was a new and higher kind of strength. (388) After hearing this speaker, Jurgis even encounters a copy of Appeal to Reason, the real Socialist periodical in which The Jungle appeared in serialized form. In the closing chapter, Jurgis hears a speaker discuss a recent election and promise great things for the Socialists. The novel ends on the triumphant call “CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” (412). Works CitedBloodworth, William A. “Upton Sinclair.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Gottesman, Ronald. Introduction. The Jungle. New York: Penguin, 1985. vii-xxxii. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Penguin, 1985. |