Workers' Rights in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
by Social Issues in Literature/ Greenhaven Press
Chapter 1:Background on Upton Sinclair
1. The Life of Upton Sinclair by William A. Blood Worth (p. 20-30)
William A. Bloodworth, "Upton Sinclair," Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 9: American Novelists, 1910-1945, Belmont, CA: Gale, 1981, pp.25-32. Reproduced by permission of Gale, a part of Cengage Learning.
Intro
Upton Sinclair's main concerns: politics and economics
His ideas of literature- (written 90 novels in 6 decades) about Social Justice
Wrote both fiction and nonfiction
For Sinclair, purpose of literature was the betterment of human conditions
A Muckraker (writer who exposes corruption), a propagandist, interpreter of Socialism and critic of capitalism a novelist, a journalistic chronicler of his times rather than an enduring artist >>Favored Content> than Form
Since WWII, his literary reputation has declined
"Yet The Jungle (1906) is one of the best known and most historically significant of American Novels, and Sinclair himself remains an important figure in American political and cultural history."
Always a Localist
The Jungle (1906) and Oil! (1927) were particularly his most significant works
It is important to study the works of authors but it is also equally important to study the authors entire career and "noting in it the interrelationships among his life, his times, and his writings."
Sinclair was an Idealist, a visionary- his distinguishing single-minded intensity a unifying feature
He agrees (with English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) "that writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world or at least should be, and who seldom doubted that his ideas and words would, if heeded, produce a better world."
Beyond his surface attitudes lies contradictions and tensions
-a person genteel and conservative upbringing became a literary radical
-a novelist wrote for/about working class (champion of the oppressed), many of his works have elitist tendencies
-"he was a 19th century ideals of initially romantic and even Nietzschean [after the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche] trait who chose to confront the hard facts of twentieth-century industrial life."
-"his sense of certainty has led him astray at times and prevented him from creating complex modern works of fiction, but he probably had a larger and more concrete influence on American life than most other novelists of the twentieth century."
Early Years
name: Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.
childhood/adolescence base: genteel cultural influences, poverty, idealism, ambition
"...grew up in Baltimore and NYC as only son of ne'er-do-well salesman from a respected Virginia family. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy Baltimore family that presented a decided contrast to the shabby existence provided by his father."
Attended City College of New York [CCNY] and took courses (music, contemporary politics, Romantic poetry) at Colombia University after beginning his writing career for writing short boys' adventure stories for Street and Smith, the leading American publisher of pulp fiction and dime novels at the time
He abandoned his career as a pulp writer to take up on serious literature after he studied under George Edward Woodberry, a Romantic Poetry Professor at Colombia University
His early attempts at real literary efforts (between 1900-1904) were based on Romantic Idealism as the central subject
Springtime and Harvest (1901), Prince Hagen (1903), The Overman (1907, written in 1902-1903), The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903), A Captain of Industry (1907, written in 1903)
These works read today would "...seem immature and pretentious, but they clearly show Sinclair groping toward a discovery of socialism."
-"This discovery began with romantic idealism, passed through an exuberant fascination with Nietzsche and the possibilities of self, and emerged in a recognition that spirit and idealism have few chances in a world of corruption and oppresion."
Sinclair's significant step toward socialism was the Writing of Manassas (1904), "a novel of the Civil War in which a young Southerner, Alan Montaguem the son of a plantation owner, becomes a proponent of Abolition." Prior to writing this novel, "Sinclair had begun to learn about the socialist movement from prominent socialists in New York"
-"His writing an abolitionist novel suggested that he had broken with his own Southern roots an was now prepared to adopt a radical stance toward social problems.
"Manassas is the best of his early novels, and its theme of idealistic opposition to an unjust society is the theme of Upton Sinclair"
The Jungle
The idea of writing The Jungle was born by the convincing editor of a radical paper to challenge Sinclair to write a novel of the treatment of "wage slaves" of industry.
In the fall of 1904, "Upton Sinclair spent two months in the packing-plant district of Chicago, the scene of an unsuccessful strike against the packers several months earlier."
-he talked with workers, and visited the packing plants both as an official tourist and, in disguise, as a worker. He saw enough corruption, filth, and poverty to make The Jungle a gripping, emotionally wrenching novel.
The Jungle is neither purely fictional nor is it purely non-fictional.
it lies "...between pure fiction and muckraking journalism on a formalistic scale,... between determinism [the concepts that events are inevitable] and reform on a ideological scale..."
Brief Summary of The Jungle:
" It is the story of oppressive industrial conditions as they affect a Lithuanian family that comes to Chicago expecting to achieve the American dream. Instead, their life becomes a nightmare of toil, poverty, and death. Jurgis Rudkus, the leader of the family and Sinclair's version of the proletarian{a member of the working class (not necessarily employed); "workers of the world--unite!"} hero, not only sees his father, wife, and son die, but he is also brutalized by working conditions in the Chicago packing houses and exploited by corrupt politics fashioned by the "Beef Trust." The grim details of life in Packingtown, all drawn from Sinclair's own firsthand knowledge, are communicated with a raw stylistic energy quite appropriate to Sinclair's equally raw and violent subject matter.
The structure of the novel is complicated by Sinclair's attempt first to show how heartbreaking life could be for the industrial proletariat and then to depict socialism as the obvious way to improve that life. After Jurgis is reduced to extreme forms of degradation, becoming a hobo, a criminal, and even a strike- breaking scab, he stumbles into a socialist lecture. The lecture transforms his view of the world; he is virtually born again, But once this occurs, his role as protagonist in the narrative disappears, and the last few chapters of the novel are given over to socialist argument and analysis which Jurgis hears but does not generate. Instead, the statements, chiefly optimistic projections of a new world in the making, come from the mouths of articulate, educated, and even wealthy socialists. In the socialist ending of The Jungle-in contrast to the naturalistic narrative preceding it- the working class loses its voice."
"In spite of these problems, The Jungle had, and still has, inestimable value as a powerful story depicting conditions and people that do not often appear in the pages of American literature. It both questions the American dream of success and demands that that dream be more inclusive and more rigorously transformed into economic reality."
Aftermath of The Jungle
"For Sinclair himself, The Jungle virtually guarranteed that the rest of his career would be anticlimatic.
The success of novel (the pure food and sanitary meat processing via Theodore Roosevelt FDA reform) was difficult for Sinclair to swallow: the workers' rights have gone unreformed.
His reponse to working class problem:
-set up Helicon Nall (in NJ) for a communal living experiment but it burned down in 1907.
-wrote The Industrial Republic (1907), a NF attempt to explain that socialism can be achieved by "a process as natural...as that by which a chick breaks out of its shell." (had the feeling of benevolent but naive spirit POV of pre-WWI American socialism)
-seeking answers to personal problems, he lived in several utopian communities
-wrote The Metropolis (1908)- muckraking novel about upper-class NY society
-wrote The Moneychangers (1908)- almost libelous story of high finance based on affairs of [business tycoon] J.P. Morgan
-both were of poor quality due to his maddening rant of hatred of wealth, corruption, and loose morals that triumphs over his literary skills
-wrote Samuel the Seeker (1910)- story about a young man who tries different religions and ideologies before finally choosing socialism, "even though socialism leaves him unconscious and bleeding, the victim of police brutality, at the end of the novel"
-wrote Love's Pilgrimage (1911)- describing painful circumstances of his first marrage to ex-wife Meta Fuller. Written as personal justification for his divorce which Sinclair gets in 1913. "A neo-feminist work arguing for the personal and intellectual needs of married women and showing candidly how one specific marriage, an initially idealistic union, had come apart under various pressures, including Sinclair's own confused and prudish attitudes toward sexuality"
-wrote Sylvia (1913)- b/c he was interested in subject of verenreal disease
-wrote Sylvia's Marriage (1914)- a story which Virginia belle who marries for social status only to find that her upper-class husband is a carrier of gonorrhea
Return to Workers' Rights
These events (noted in the above list) brought back together Sinclair's shattered life
-married Mary Craig Kimbrough, (a Southern belle with socialist sympathies)
-moved to California for permanent residence (1914)
-Outbreak of industrial violence--> massacre of striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, he became involved again with the workers' rights by writing about them The Jungle style.
-King Coal (1917), was his first attempt to dramatize conditions of coal mines in the west. wrote a letter to John D. Rockerfeller
Other important things noted
-Sinclair proved himself to be a flexible radical socialist. He parted ways temporarily with the Socialist party of America because the party was against intervention; he felt that America needed to end the German militarism, a threat to world peace.
He also grew critical of the American military's support of the suppression of the Bolshevik revolution. The war (WWI) and the political dilemma of American socialists during the war became the central concern of Jimmie Higgins (1919)
-In the 1920s, Sinclair was one of the few that niether turned conservative nor joined the Communist party (an advocate of the revolution). He printed his own books and distributed them, avoiding an unhealthy influence of big business on commercial publishing. (1917 to 1940s, he published his own works with the exception of his major works which were published by New York publishers).
-wrote 100% (1920) and They Call Me Carpenter (1922)- novels of limited appeal that focus on false patriotism and violence among the middle-class political reactionaries who, according to Sinclair, unwittingly acted out of scenarios arranged by big business.
-wrote The Profits of Religion (1918)-Sinclair calls "death hand", foil to "Invisible hand" at work in laissez-faire economics (Adam Smith's idea)
-wrote The Brass Check (1920)-dealing with journalism
-wrote The Goose-Step (1923)-dealing with education
-wrote Mammonart (1925)-dealing with art and literature
-wrote Oil! (1927)-showed how he was a novelist still focused on workers' rights and reform
-wrote Boston (1928)-ditto to one above
Sidetracked by Politics
After his remarkable achievements with Oil! and Boston, Sinclair's career faltered for some dozen years.
-produced weak muckraking novels such as Mountain City (1930) and Roman Holiday (1931).
-sidetracked with writing of genuinely realistic fiction focusing on class conflict and economic justice
ex: wrote a book on mental telepathy Mental Radio (1930) and a novel The Wet Parade (1931), pleading moralistically for the retention of the Prohibition.
-Chief decline was in the involvement of electoral politics.
1934, following I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty (1933), Sinclair became Dem candidate for Gov of CA.
His campaign is called EPIC (End Poverty In California) campaign.
Unsuccessful in elected in being gov. but may have influenced the FDR administration to pay more heed to left-wing demands.
His experience in CA politics is reflected in his novel Co-op (1936).
-wrote The Flivver King (1937) novelistic interpretation of Henry Ford: book attacks his employee practices and makes a case for the United Auto Workers
Later Years and Death
By 1950, he entered his 8th decade and had written dozens of books. Had a semi-retirement in 1950s but still worked on books.
-wrote Another Pamela (1950) modern version of Samuel Rickardon's Pamela (1740-1742)- a rural CA girl must first resist then reform the promiscuous nephew of her wealthy employer.
-wrote What Didymus Did (1954)- a fantasy in which a divinely inspired reformer unsuccessfully tries to transform human nature in Los Angeles- "Suggests that Sinclair had finally grown skeptical about the limits of reform"
-wrote The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962)- which adds several chapters to American Outpost, the autobiography which Sinclair had published in 1932, an important information about the Progressive Era as well as Sinclair himself.
Sinclair died in 1968
Many of the obituaries were generous.
Some noted one of his ironies of his career: "that such an essentially gentle person, a man who exuded genteel innocence and probity in his personal life and who dabbled in such quaint matters as spiritualism and vegetarianism, could have written some of the most socially combative works in American fiction.
-wrote No Pasaran! (1937) short, quickly written story about the Spanish Civil War.
-wrote Little Steel (1938) story in which the steel industry wants to keep unions out of their industry
-wrote Lanny Budd Series (1913-1950) Central character-Lanny Budd in eleven long, wide-ranging historical novels
No comments:
Post a Comment