Reading The Jungle and Pondering Its Imagery
August 21, 2024
In case you never read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906)—or if you have forgotten it since reading it in high school—this novel is not a story about Mowgli, Shere Khan, and the “bear” necessities. No indeed. The Jungle is a canonical example of an American protest novel—ostensibly about labor conditions—but reading it turned enough congressional stomachs to lead (unintentionally on Sinclair’s part) to federal regulations of the food processing industry, including the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Lest you think a novel written 117 years ago has little relevance today, there continue to be reports of poor working conditions in the meat packing industry as well as plenty of recurring health scares related to food animals (BSE, swine flu, etc.). Book club members drew connections to our March 2024 book, Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), which updates Sinclair’s warning cry for the age of chemical usage and hormonal injections in food animals.
The cover of first edition of the novel printed in 1906, shown in Figure 1, features a sketch of a factory but gives little indication that the novel will describe the terrible food and safety conditions inside the meat packing industry, or the abominable labor conditions in which many people worked. Since then, other publishers have used a wide variety of cover images to promote the novel and entice readers. A search on Google Images turns up over a dozen different designs, many of which depict factories or butchers working in a slaughterhouse. I want to call attention to just three covers to illustrate how each cover emphasizes different aspects of the story.
The Bantam Classic edition published in 1981 (reissued in 2003) features on the cover an unnamed painting by S. G. McCutcheon, shown in Figure 2. Judging by the cover, we are set for a love story between two immigrants. There is no indication that the story will be about inhumane labor conditions, unsanitary food processing, or the fatal consequences of unregulated capitalism.
The Doubleday Canada cover of the novel, shown in Figure 3, depicts rows of pig carcasses hanging from the line, with the body of a worker strung up along with the hogs. This captures the way in which the laborers in the packinghouses were analogous to the hogs they slaughtered, as Jurgis eventually realizes: “What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him, and that was what they wanted from the workingman” (p. 337).
The final cover image I’ll share is from the second edition of the Norton Critical Edition, shown in Figure 4. Here a stream of cattle is being herded by workers into a factory from which tall smokestacks protrude. In the smoke rising from the stacks are the ghostly images of cows and pigs, and possibly a person (in the far-left stack). I think this is the most sophisticated of the cover images because it expresses the way in which cattle and human are similar in the way they are treated by the packers, while being subtler than the Doubleday cover.
Just as many of the cover images evoke comparison between human and animal, so too does the imagery that Sinclair uses in his prose. Sinclair is not subtle in his use of simile and metaphor to draw the reader’s attention to the characters’ plights. The poverty-stricken denizens of Chicago’s slums and meatpacking district are “like rats in a trap” (p. 66), while the men working as hoisters who ran along the rafters while ducking crossbeams became conditioned to stooping “so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees” (p. 98). The meatpackers like Jurgis and the other poor characters in the novel are represented as mechanomorphic animals living by instinct, acting in fixed patterns of action, in response to environmental stimulus (Garrard, p. 140), such as when Jurgis battles through snow each day in the winter on his way to work and then home again, “fling[ing] himself into it, plunging like a wounded buffalo, puffing and snorting in rage” (p. 113). Moreover, the meatpackers’ mechanomorphism is made explicit through metaphor when they are described not only as beasts of burden—“Two years [Jurgis] had been yoked like a horse to ahalf-ton truck in Durham’s dark cellars” (p. 120)—but also as “wonderful machines” (p. 56). The workers were “cogs in the great packing machine; and [winter] was the time for the renovating of it, and the replacing of damaged parts” (p. 78). The injured or infirm laborers—those with “weakened constitutions” or “those whom tuberculosis had been dragging down”—were culled from the herd and replaced by new laborers (p. 78). Sinclair’s use of the trope of the survival of the fittest is intentional.
Beyond attending to figurative language and imagery, ecocritics might approach The Jungle in a variety of ways, including discussing representations of environmental injustice, animal rights, urban crowding, and the contrast between the country and the city. Steven Rosendale (2002) takes an ecocritical approach by examining what he refers to as “the class character of environmental impairment” that permeates the novel. Lawrence Buell refers to The Jungle as a precursor to contemporary “toxic discourse,” which is his term for writing that uses images of toxicity in place, space, and body to foster environmental awareness. Others such as Alana Fletcher categorize The Jungle as a type of “ghetto pastoral” after Michael Denning’s use of the term.
Resources
Buell, Lawrence. “Toxic Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 639–665.
Denning, Michael. “‘The Tenement Thinking’: Ghetto Pastoral.” The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Verso, 1997. 230–258.
Fletcher, Alana. “Toxic Discourse: Waste Heritage as Ghetto Pastoral.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 39, no. 2, Oct. 2014, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/23041/26731.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism, third edition. Routledge, 2023.
Rosendale, Steven. “In Search of Left Ecology's Usable Past: The Jungle, Social Change, and the Class Character of Environmental Impairment.” The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment, edited by Steven Rosendale. University of Iowa Press, 2002. 59-76.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. [1906] Introduction by Morris Dickstein. Bantam Books, 1981.
Wikipedia. “Federal Meat Inspection Act.” Last updated 20 October 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act.