Industrialism In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Once found, Jurgis is shocked to find the conditions of the family. Weak as she is, Ona has gone into premature labor and is dying. After enlisting the help of a midwife, Jurgis spends his night drinking, trying to forget his struggles and the pain he is experiencing. Returning home early in the morning, Jurgis finds that the baby had died, and Ona was not far behind. Racing into the bedroom, Jurgis speaks to Ona one last time before she dies, leaving him no one left to care about in the world except his son.

The reformist nature of the times is effectively captured through Sinclair’s descriptions of the meatpacking industry and its unfair treatment of workers in a dramatized way that differentiates it from other muckraker texts (Bielakowski). It documents America’s industrial and immigrant experience through Jurgis and his family, like the incredibly low wages to the hazardous conditions in the factories, while also calling for social welfare and unionization. Considering the highly competitive economic society that has persisted, and still persists, The Jungle has yet to lose its

But life takes a turn for the worse when Jurgis sprains his ankle and is out of work for months, causing his relatives to abandon the family and his job to be given to someone else without pay. Eventually, he has to work in the fertilizer plant - the most dangerous place - and his wife is forced to sleep with her boss while he is gone. When Jurgis finds that she is pregnant, he attacks the boss and is thrown in jail. He comes out to find his wife dying of premature birth along with the child. After he gets injured again, he becomes a beggar on the streets of Chicago.

When Jurgis is told what happened to his wife, he quickly becomes triggered. He marches up to where Ona works and, “beats Ona’s boss Connor. Connor has raped Jurgis’s wife Ona”( Mark Bracher 147). After a few weeks, Ona realizes she is pregnant. Later in her pregnancy she becomes very ill.

Upton Sinclair wrote the Jungle in 1906 during the time of progressivism to portray the horrors of the labor conditions and non existing sanitary conditions of the meat packing industry. Jurgis and his family, immigrants from Lithuania, came to America expecting a prosperous life. The family dreamed of coming to America for a better life full of success and opportunity but as they began working in the stockyards they were exposed to the terrible quality of life experienced by the factory workers. The Jungle tells the story of a family of immigrants coming to America to gain freedom and portrays the dehumanization of the stockyards through the political corruption, inhumane child labor practices, and the horrific working conditions. Jurgis

Food demonstrate how the meatpackers do not bother with selling their products in terrible conditions, moreover, the workers are found looking for something to eat in the dumps. (Shmoop.com) This example clearly demonstrates how capitalism during this era was present in the novel, it reveals how the owners took control of their factories without the control of the government. Even more the novel’s tittle symbolizes the ambitious nature of capitalism; Packingtown is a crude image of a Darwinian jungle,

He then got out and kept drinking, although was told by this girl that she could no longer let him stay because of his smell (Sinclair 233). He was homeless and still a drinker for some weeks since he couldn’t get over Ona's death. Although he then realized he had children to take care of, thanks to Elizbetea (Ona's step mother). Elizbeta had found him out in the streets starving since she was asking her neighbors for some pennies for she had no help from Ona or him (sinclair 229). The reasons why Elizbeta wasn’t working was because she was to old and knew too much about what was happening to the meat.

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair is renowned source of political fiction that pioneered the movement of food safety in the United States. The Jungle was first published in a socialist newspaper in 1905 and then later adapted into a novel in 1906 after popular demand. Sinclair initially wrote the exposé as a way to change the unfortunate circumstances of immigrant laborers, whose working conditions that were believed to be unacceptable for any laborer in the industry. Sinclair leaves short references of his political opinions in the novel in various locations throughout the text “As if political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable!” (Sinclair 31). Written as an indirect attack at the labor industry, the real driving force behind the popularity of the novel was that many readers could not fathom the truth behind the meat industry.

But while The Jungle has long been associated with food production (and its disgustingness), the book is actually a much broader critique of early twentieth-century business and labor practices in the rapidly growing cities of the United States. By the time The Jungle was published at the turn of the century, the massive flow of poorer European immigrants into the United States over the previous half-century had changed the demographics of American cities. Many of these immigrants lived in overcrowded, run-down tenement buildings with no access to clean water or proper sewage systems (source). Having come to

Marxist's process of commodification is very evident in The Wizard of Oz where both the Woodman and Scarecrow embody workers who are compelled to surrender to the capitalists' social mandatory array of conventional life by losing their personalities in being governed by socioeconomic circumstances or the social infrastructure where the subordination to capitalism's rules is a necessity and is understood in monetary values. For instance, Oz won't help Dorothy and her companions since "everyone must pay for everything he gets" (66). By the end of the story, we clearly know that Oz is a humbug and he made use of them by employing their private matter's to subordinate to his capitalism logic. In this logic, Dorothy and her company can be re-conceptualized