The Jungle: Naturalism, Irony, and Socialist Ideology

Introduction: Beyond Muckraking

Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle is perhaps best known for its historical and journalistic contributions, because the book opened the public's eyes to the horrors of the American meatpacking industry and its appalling health and safety standards. However, Sinclair's novel also represents an aesthetic and ideological advancement that is often overlooked in favor of the book's more dramatic accounts of life inside a slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant. In the novel, Jurgis Rudkus travels from naive belief in the American Dream to a jaded yet hopeful acceptance of the possibility offered by socialist agitation, and his entire journey is relayed in a naturalistic language that seeks to uncover the larger structures of power and oppression that instigate the specific injustices of the novel. By examining Rudkus's journey in the context of an aesthetic movement designed to capture, as clearly as possible, the objective naturalistic reality behind experience, one can see how the same attention to detail that makes The Jungle such an important work of muckraking journalism also makes it an artistic and ideological advancement.

Naturalistic Style and Narrative Irony

The first true hint that Jurgis's experience in America is not going to be what he expected comes near the end of the second chapter, when he and his wife are looking over their new home, and it is the novel's particular narrative style that makes these hints so effective. Sinclair's style is that particular kind of literary naturalism that arose at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: he focuses on describing the naturalistic details of the scene without going into such extreme detail that the narration strays into aestheticism. Instead, he connects these naturalistic details to larger cultural factors in order to make a particular ideological statement while couching it in terms of objective description. While Sinclair's goal is quite clearly agitation and "the crushing defeat of […] arrogant plutocrat[s] by the power of the common people," his case is particularly effective because he makes it by offering detailed, objective descriptions of what goes on in the packing district and the effect this has on the lives of its residents (Sinclair 263). As will be seen, Jurgis's ideological transformation is made possible by the combination of naturalistic description and ironic narration that defines Sinclair's style, and which makes the eventual ideological turn all the more believable.

The Packing District Scene: Irony in Action

In the scene where Jurgis and his wife Ona survey Chicago's packing district, the narrator describes "a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys," where "they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it up again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America" (Sinclair 27). Jurgis and Ona see no irony in viewing the replacement of soil with garbage as a process characteristic of America, and thus the chapter ends with an even more ironic description of the way they actually perceive their dirty, dangerous surroundings. The narrator states that:

"To the two who stood watching while the darkness swallowed it up, it seemed a dream of wonder, with its tale of human energy, of things being done, of employment for thousands upon thousands of men, of opportunity and freedom, of life and love and joy. When they came away, arm in arm, Jurgis was saying, 'Tomorrow I shall go there and get a job!'" (Sinclair 27)

From the beginning, Sinclair's narration and description inform the audience of the trajectory Jurgis's life is going to take, but the novel sustains a running irony: despite all of their hardships, the characters never doubt that they will fail until the moment they actually do. When Jurgis and Ona see the garbage and exploitation of the packing district for the first time, they do not recoil in horror but rather excite themselves at the prospect of being part of this system. Jurgis's perspective will change completely by the end of the novel, and it is a testament to Sinclair's particular style that this change appears believable and even natural.

Conclusion: Artistic and Ideological Triumph

The credit Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle receives for its historical and journalistic contributions to America often overshadows the deeper artistic and ideological work the book conducts, likely because celebrating America's tradition of muckraking journalism is somewhat less controversial than praising an explicitly pro-socialist, anti-capitalist book. Nevertheless, the novel contains an important ideological message in the form of its critique of capitalism and support for socialism, and it effectively conveys this message by participating in the naturalistic style that was emerging at the time. Sinclair describes scenes with almost dispassionate detail, only to imbue them with a sense of tragic irony by having his characters miss the objective truth relayed by the narrator. The effect is to make the bleak reality of the story seem all the more believable, which in turn grants the novel's conclusion extra legitimacy, because the turn from capitalism to socialism feels entirely natural in light of the book's previous descriptions and narrations. By examining Jurgis's ideological trajectory as it relates to Sinclair's description and narration, it becomes clear that The Jungle represents an artistic and ideological triumph as much as a historical or journalistic one.

Works Cited

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Forgotten Books, 2008. Print.