The Jungle 1906: Toils on

At every ebb and flow of the narrative circumstances just get worse and worse for our friends in Packingtown. The Jungle brutally details the hardships to the point where it is almost as difficult to go on reading as it is for poor Jurgis to carry his ailing wife and child through the snow before dawn in order to make sure they both get to work on time without dying first. Well, maybe not that difficult. I fear for poor Ona; she has been getting sicker and sicker as the family has become more desperate. After giving birth it has been hinted that she will never be healthy again and it is no wonder given that the food sold to them has no nutrition and her daily conditions are strenuous and ill-temperatured. This book describes why poor people look, act, feel, and even smell the way that they do. Bad things are happening to these people. These bad things are the direct result of American businessmen. These men made their income by cheating immigrants, the most vulnerable population, into working themselves to death.

It is easy to blame a man for his own state of wealth. If he is rich, he earned it. If he is poor he didn’t work hard enough. This is especially easy to decide if the man is uneducated, sickly, or mean. He may look dirty and his smell may make one wince as they walk by. The off-putting state of this man must be his own fault, the result of the many choices he has made throughout his life which has brought him to where he is today. Right? This is what has been labeled the “Fundamental Attribution Error,” which consequently, had to be renamed because research showed that this was not actually a universal phenomenon. It is in fact limited to western, individualistic cultures (i.e. America). It is basically placing blame on a person rather than a circumstance. Interestingly enough, the attribution effect (one of its other new labels is the correspondence bias) shows its face when a person tries to explain another person’s behavior. It is not present when we explain our own behavior. We understand our own misfortunates but blame others for theirs. These early to middle chapters of the Jungle lay out for the reader how poverty IS the fault of the circumstance, NOT the fault of the man. The reader understands the pain of poverty as they are forced to live it with the family. It is agonizing to go through it and impossible not to become empathetic. The worst part is the feeling of how unfair it all is, which, I believe is exactly what Sinclair wanted to evoke in his reader, a sense of injustice. It is obvious how reading this would encourage support for social justice because in order to support social justice you first must know that is injustice exists.

Sinclair provides us with vivid evidence of injustice as he compares the labor system to slavery. “Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it was under the system of chattel slavery. Things that were quite unspeakable went on there in the packing houses all the time, and were taken for granted by everybody; only they did not show, as in old slavery times, because there was no difference in color between the master and slave.” (pg. 150).

Injustice (just as much today as it was over 100 years ago when the novel was written) thrives in places where is it hidden, where the majority doesn’t know that it is happening. This is why literature is so important. Newspapers can be ignored, media serves its own interests (which rarely, if ever, include the interests of any marginalized population) but great fiction has an uncanny way of speaking the truth. A popular book will spread like a virus infecting the reader with passion. And passion is difficult to ignore. Those vagabonds on the street start to have faces, and names and stories. Opening the eyes of the public by inciting their emotions is perhaps the best way to illicit social change. I am again reminded of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. President Lincoln greeted her at the White House by asking, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" Sinclair did not start civil war with his book but situations did improve for laborers and American’s in general. Children no longer work, conditions must now be safe and healthy and there are laws to protect people from being cheated out of their money. But this country still has a long way to go. People still get sick and die because they cannot afford healthcare, people lose their homes because they cannot pay their bills, and people still live from pay check to pay check.

Jurgis, was bed-ridden for a few months due to an ankle injury and Sinclair compared his feeling of helplessness to an ancient Greek myth, “It was for all the world the old story of Prometheus bound.” (pg. 162). Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to man. Just as fire means heat and life to man, Jurgis’ wages provided life to his family. There is a further comparison as well. Prometheus was punished by Zeus by being bound to a rock while a great eagle ate his liver every day only to have it grow back to be eaten again the next day. This story parallels the life of a worker. You toil all day (the liver is eaten) and then, when you have no more strength left (the bird has taken the last bite of the liver) you must return and do the same the next day and the next with no hope of the cycle ending (the liver returns just to be eaten again). I don’t think that the bird in the myth being an eagle went unnoticed by our author either. It is the great strong eagle, America’s favorite representation of itself that is doing the eating. This is America eating itself to survive. But America doesn’t feast on powerful gods like Prometheus; it feeds on those that go unnoticed.

(Painting up top is Pieter Paul Rubens, 1611-12. Prometheus Bound)