An Analysis Of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Author Upton Sinclair published the novel The Jungle in 1906. In his novel, Sinclair wrote of a Lithuanian immigrant family who moved to Chicago in the early twentieth century, who was struggling to make ends meet. The author explained how immigrants in this time era experienced difficulties adapting to the new society of America, and its conditions. Sinclair’s novel described how immigrants’ lives, experiences, and choices were effected by social class, racism, and sexism. He produced very strong examples, some more significant than others, which illustrated how immigrants were effected. During the winter, poor immigrants would often sleep in four-room flats in old tenements. These tenements were located in what Sinclair referred to

Businesses did whatever they could do to food to produce as much of it as cheaply as possible, adding chemicals to make it taste or look better. Sinclair described how every part of the animal was used, saying that companies used “everything of the pig except the squeal.” This included using the rotten meats, selling them to the public as “Number Three Grade” meats.10 Those who were unfortunate enough to eat the meat were poisoned, including one of the immigrant children in the novel, Kristoforas, who died from a poisoned sausage. Sausage was probably the most dangerous of the meats, because they were the moldy cuts Europe had sold to America, because no one there wanted them, and they were “doused with borax and glycerine” to remove any odor or foul taste. The meats would be in piles on the floor where the dirt laid, the roof leaked, the workers spit, and the rats crawled.12 Workers put poisoned bread by the meat piles to kill off the rats, so in the pile there were the dead rats and their dung.12 All of this including the poisoned bread would become part of the sausages. Not only were the meats bad, but the other foods the immigrant family would buy were doctored with chemicals. Sinclair described the pale-blue milk the immigrant family bought was watered down and was "doctored with formaldehyde,” and that other foods such as tea, coffee, sugar and flour had also been altered. The canned peas they

Social class was slightly more significant than racism and sexism, because the amount of money an immigrant had determined the way they lived, the food they ate, and what work they had to do. Sinclair explained how there were two different social classes, one was “the capitalist class, with its enormous fortunes,” and the other was “proletariat, bound into slavery by unseen chains.” The overall objective of the novel was to convince the reader into becoming a Socialist, where one could fix the terrible conditions of that time