The Jungle

When Jurgis first arrives in America, his dreams of upward mobility are best illustrated by the kind of family life he envisions himself having. His own family is large and blended, comprising Ona, his father, Ona’s half-siblings, her cousin, and her stepmother and step-uncle. This kind of extended household, though common, was not the ideal in turn-of-the-century America; over the course of the 1800s, the nuclear family—two parents and their children—had come to be seen as normal and even sacrosanct. In The Jungle, this romanticization is evident in the placard advertising houses for sale: “The centre of the placard was occupied by a house, brilliantly painted, new, and dazzling. […] Underneath this, in one corner, was a picture of a husband and wife in loving embrace; in the opposite corner was a cradle” (49).

For a working-class family like Jurgis’s, this vision of family life is financially unrealistic, but that doesn’t stop him from aspiring to it. In buying his own home and insisting—at first—that Ona not look for work, Jurgis emulates the largely middle-class notion of “separate spheres”—an ideology that cast the man of the house as an ambitious and hard-working breadwinner, and his wife as a homemaker devoted to preserving the tranquility and moral sanctity of the household. 

Many scholars argue that the idea of separate spheres and the broader idealization of the nuclear family were intertwined with industrialization and the rise of modern capitalism. Marxist theory, for example, maintains that the nuclear family reflects and reinforces the economic status quo by mirroring its hierarchies—like husband over wife—atomizing society in a way that inhibits class solidarity and facilitating the preservation of private property across generations. The Jungle occasionally gestures at these and similar ideas, particularly in its final few chapters. Here, for instance, is Schliemann’s critique of marriage as a capitalist institution: “Marriage and prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man’s exploitation of the sex pleasure. The difference between them was a difference of class. If a woman had money she might dictate her own terms: equality, a life contract, and the legitimacy—that is, the property rights—of her children” (373).

Schliemann’s attitude, however, does not seem to be the novel’s own. In fact, a major thread in Sinclair’s critique of capitalism is that it precludes the idealized family life depicted in the placard: Tamoszius and Marija never save enough money to marry, Ona is forced to find a job and eventually dies as a result of it, and Jurgis abandons what remains of his family after the loss of his son. In other words, The Jungle combines its socialist message about class with relatively conservative views on gender and family life. This is particularly clear in the attention Sinclair devotes to the sexual exploitation of women under capitalism. To be sure, neither Ona nor Marija wants to have the extramarital sex they are forced to take part in. Sinclair, however, frames their plight not so much in terms of their lack of agency as in capitalism’s perversion of natural, chaste, “decent” femininity: “[T]here was no place a girl could go in Packingtown, if she was particular about things of this sort; there was no place in it where a prostitute could not get along better than a decent girl” (120). 

From start to finish, The Jungle is deeply skeptical of the American system of law and government. Although Jurgis knows little about democracy before coming to the United States, he’s aware of the basic promise the country extends to immigrants: “In that country, rich or poor, a man was free, it was said” (24). However, Jurgis’s own experiences give the lie to this almost immediately. The lives of the working-class are heavily circumscribed by the companies they work for. Moreover, those same companies have captured the political and legal systems: “[Unlike in Russia], the officials who ruled [America], and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the one got the office which bought the most votes” (104).

The problem, however, goes deeper than simple corruption. Sinclair suggests that the primary goal of government is not to protect its citizens as a whole but to preserve the property rights of the capitalist owner class. Assuming one accepts Sinclair’s critique of capitalism, the government isn’t really defending “rights" at all but rather an “ancient force and modern fraud” (373). Because the capitalist class turns a profit by paying their workers less than the value of their labor, their wealth is in a sense stolen from the people producing it. Likewise, in seeking to uphold an unjust and undemocratic status quo, the government is operating illegitimately—not with any real consent from those it governs but via the threat of violence.

This becomes particularly obvious during Jurgis’s many run-ins with the law. Historically, the police in their modern form emerged at the same time an industrial working-class did, largely as a way of controlling them and suppressing unrest. In the most dramatic cases, the police played a key role in breaking strikes. Sinclair details several more mundane instances of the police using violence to keep the working classes in line. During the Chapter 26 strike, for example, a group of starving workers get hold of an escaped steer and begin butchering it, only for the police to arrive, “leaping from the truck and cracking at every head they saw” (310). In many cases, the mere threat of violence is enough to maintain order. It is clear from the following passage, for instance, that Jurgis understands the police’s attitude towards him to be antagonistic, regardless of whether or not he is doing anything illegal at the time: “Everywhere that he turned were prison bars, and hostile eyes following him; the well-fed sleek policemen, from whose glances he shrank, and who seemed to grip their clubs more tightly when they saw him” (261).

This critique of the U.S. legal and political systems provides important context for the novel’s final chapter, in which the Socialist Party enjoys unexpected success at the polls. Although the tone of the novel’s conclusion is generally triumphant, it also includes a word of caution, reminding readers that these successes will likely inspire fierce pushback from the political establishment. In fact, The Jungle as a whole casts doubt on whether the working classes can achieve meaningful reform through the electoral process, hinting that the American system of government is inherently opposed to working-class interests and must ultimately be rebuilt from scratch. As Ostrinski tells Jurgis, elected Socialists’ ultimate purpose, whatever concessions they make while in office, is “the organizing of the working class for the revolution” (353).