The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page B

seven weeks in Packingtown and to some extent sharing the life of the meatpacker, he wanted, among other ambitions, not only to do justice to the suffering he had seen and heard about, but to render it in a fashion that was neither condescending nor falsified by either middle-class gentility or restrained literary convention. Sinclair makes explicit his aim to elevate the hardships of the common workingman, a subject generally outside the purview of literature, to dignify it with the seriousness that had generally been reserved for the suffering of the great and mighty. Describing the feelings of defeat experienced by Jurgis’s family, Sinclair writes:
    But it is not likely that he [a poet Sinclair has just quoted] had reference to the kind of anguish that comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating-unredeemed by the slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets—thedetails of it cannot be told in polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to excite sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family found their home alive with vermin ... ? (p. 81).
    Sinclair also eschewed the sentimentality that often shaped novelistic representations of the poor. In order to arouse compassion and encourage social reform, writers such as Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among many others, portrayed the poor as excessively virtuous. These novelists seemed convinced that their middle-class readers would be moved to sympathize with the plight of the poor only if they approved of their moral character. In stark contrast, Sinclair wanted to arouse not sympathy, and certainly not pity, but indignation and outrage. He refuses to sentimentalize his characters; indeed, he sometimes goes to the opposite extreme, as when Jurgis takes work as a scab. The suffering of Sinclair’s characters is not unjust because they are virtuous; it is unjust because it serves a system that exploits the many for the profit of the few.
    At the same time, Sinclair is interested in showing that virtue is a luxury that the poor can’t afford. While striving to dignify their suffering, he wants also to explore the ways in which poverty robs individuals of the life of the mind, of spiritual comfort, and of the consolations of intimacy and emotional bonds. In the course of the first half of the novel, Jurgis becomes increasingly despondent; he is unable, for example, to respond to or even think about what might be the cause of Ona’s anguish and her frantic weeping. (It is provoked, we discover with Jurgis, by her sexual exploitation at work.) The narrator observes, “It was only because he was so numb and beaten himself that Jurgis did not worry more about this. But he never thought of it, except when he was dragged to it—he lived like a dumb beast of burden, knowing only the moment in which he was” (p. 147).
    Indeed, not only thought but also, it seems, feeling or any semblance of interior life seem to be denied the protagonist. When Jurgis does experience moments of interior awareness, as when the sound of church bells—heard from his jail cell—brings back to him memories of Christmas in Lithuania, his recollections and feelings become instruments of torture. Thinking does not alleviate his torment, but intensifies it. It is better, the text suggests, not to think; better to acclimate to the insensate state that a grueling life demands.
    Some readers have taken the view that if Sinclair had given Jurgis more of an interior life by way of richer, fuller responses to his experiences, he would have aroused greater empathy and made us more interested in his fate. Perhaps Sinclair felt that there was more truth and force in showing how the combination of brutal labor and crushing poverty stultifies the mind. But it