The Jungle

Part muckraking exposé, part naturalist novel, part socialist polemic, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) tells the fictional tale of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who comes to Chicago with his family at the turn of the twentieth century hoping to find a good job and a decent wage. Instead, Jurgis and his family find themselves repeatedly victimized by an exploitative capitalist system. They desperately toil in the dangerous meatpacking industry, struggling to earn enough to survive. All their efforts fail, however, and Jurgis watches his father, wife, and son die in quick succession. In the final chapters of the novel, Jurgis gains a small but promising triumph when he discovers in socialism an incisive critique of the capitalist system and a practical means for affecting social change. This conversion to socialism also transforms Jurgis's gender identity, enabling him to reclaim and reshape the manhood stripped from him in the fiercely competitive working-class “jungle” of urban-industrial America.

When he first arrives in America, Jurgis is a paragon of masculine strength and health, exemplifying an ethic of selfmade, independent manhood. Strong and hardworking, he is steadfastly optimistic that he can provide for his family. He responds to all hardships with the defiant refrain “I will work harder,” but his faith proves to be tragically naive. Jurgis's manhood is imperiled as poverty and dangerous jobs rob him of both his physical strength and his identity as worker, breadwinner, and family protector. His wife, Ona, and the young children in their family are all eventually forced to work so that they can eke out a meager existence. A greater blow is that Jurgis cannot protect the women of his family from sexual exploitation; Ona submits to the advances of her boss in order to retain her job, and her cousin Marija turns to prostitution to escape poverty. After the death of his son, Jurgis abandons the remaining members of the family and becomes, in turn, an animalistic tramp, a petty thug, a political lackey, and a scab (a nonunion worker who replaces a union worker during a strike). This submission to, and complicity with, the corrupt capitalist system momentarily improves Jurgis's material situation, but only by exacting from him his self-respect.

Sinclair's tale of Jurgis's material and moral demise suggested that individualism and competition—ideals of manliness encouraged by market capitalism—actually emasculate men by depriving them of ways to resist capitalist exploitation. Jurgis ultimately rediscovers and revitalizes his manhood through socialism and working-class political activism, which offer him ways to critique the system and restore his masculine identity. Socialism empowers Jurgis to “no longer be the sport of circumstances” and become “a man, with a will and a purpose.” While this radically inflected ethic of manhood was not the norm in America in the early twentieth century, Sinclair's socialist novel drew upon and distilled pervasive anxieties about the demise of an ethos of manhood rooted in hard work, economic independence, and entrepreneurship in what was becoming an increasingly bureaucratic, corporate economy.