The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was written at a time when America was in the pangs of industrialization. The working-class immigrants had finite employment alternatives besides factory jobs, which were featured by adverse working conditions. The author wanted to reveal these conditions to Americans with the objective of appealing to the audience’s emotions to prompt reforms. While the novel is rich in demonstrating actual events, it can be viewed as fictional. For instance, Sinclair uses a fictional immigrant family as tool for nonfictional anecdotes.
When the novel was published, the readers were provoked, albeit not as the author intended. The audience was more concerned with the quality of food in lieu of the detrimental labor practices and brutal treatment of animals that the author wanted to expose. The title of the novel illustrates the barbaric nature of Packingtown where Jurgis’s family sought opportunities, but instead, they are dumped in a chaotic environment which demands a perpetual struggle for survival. Like a jungle, Packingtown, although urban was unrelenting and wildly unforgiving.
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Sinclair, in his writing, assumed that the reading public would stop perceiving immigrants as foreigners. He insisted that their values of hard work, solidarity, family and honesty were similar to that of the Americans. He also assumed that readers would place themselves in the shoes of Jurgis’s family and virtually experience the impacts of greed and competition. Nay, the author presumed that criticizing the social and sanitary conditions in the stockyards of Chicago would spark reforms.
Notably, Sinclair abuses the plot of the novel as a weapon to apathetically drive the socialist agenda in the mind of the reader while discarding the good writing convention in favor of puerile drivel. He demonizes capitalism with hyperbole comparatively like when a reader regards his embellished descriptions of the advantages of socialism, especially with his assumption that none of the evils of capitalism apply to the socialist economic system. Arguably, his lazy style of writing, in the eyes of a reader of a different school of thought makes socialist seem unreasonable and dramatic.
Sinclair’s main target audience was legislators and government officials. He demonstrated the unsanitary meat-packing procedures and the terrifying and grotesque conditions that both workers and animals lived in. For that matter, new laws were passed that instigated inspection of factories and regulation of food production, presently knowns as FDA. Secondly, Sinclair’s audience was the American public in general. This is featured in his writing when he criticizes the savage and inhumane social structure of that time. While concluding his book, it becomes apparent that Sinclair is a huge fan of socialism and that his work was not to provoke reforms but rather, to make a political statement.
With regard to his synthesis of realism and anti-sentimentalism, The Jungle is clearly an objective depiction of the typical immigrant family at that time. He cleverly avoids the use of blatant semantics to coerce the reader to concur with his opinions. Just like the FDA emanated from his works, the novel requires the reader to take the objective illustration and interpret the story as they please.
References
The Jungle. In Upton Sinclair . The Literature Network. Retrieved from http://www.online-literature.com/upton_sinclair/jungle/14/
