SOURCE: Derrick, Scott. “What a Beating Feels Like: Authorship, Dissolution, and Masculinity in Sinclair's The Jungle.” Studies in American Fiction 23, no. 1 (spring 1995): 85-100.

[In the following essay, Derrick analyzes Sinclair's use of naturalism in order to explicate the gender roles in The Jungle.]

American naturalism owes much of its contemporary power to the success of its efforts to depict a thoroughly decentered subject. The naturalist text typically represents the determining impact of various and sundry social and natural forces on its characters and diminishes the importance of consciousness as the cause of the actions it records. Naturalist style, long criticized for lacking high modernist polish, actually contributes through its rawness to this effect. Rather than presenting themselves as intricate products of careful craftsmen, naturalist fictions such as Sister Carrie or The Sea-Wolf often seem hammered directly into being by a remorseless reality. Such novels ask for interpretation in terms of the broad social, political, and historical contexts favored by contemporary critical practices.

In addition to such broader contexts, however, attention to the figure of the author and to the structure of authoring are crucial to an understanding of the operation of gender in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which contains an unconscious narrative of Sinclair's self-creation as an author. This narrative does not obviate the social, historical, and political content of the text, but it suggests that a complex set of literary dynamics mediates the relation of text and world. These dynamics must be articulated with respect to the specific historical position of the author.

The Jungle is strikingly faithful to some of the most powerful contemporary critical accounts of naturalism, particularly in terms of naturalism's well-known relationship to Darwinian evolutionary thought and its complex genderings. Numerous commentators have argued that Darwinism substantially disrupted inherited patriarchal narratives of the structure of creation. As Christine van Boheemen concisely puts it, Darwin raises the possibility of “a suddenly powerful and prolific Mother Nature dethroning the ancient figure of God the Father.”¹The Origin of Species in many ways conducts an effective dispersal of masculine authority, not only in its stunningly successful promotion of Mother Nature as the engineer of life's forms, but in its own manifold indeterminacies, its imaginative waywardness, its willingness to record and consider even conflicting positions within its own textual borders. In passing into cultural currency, however, Darwinism lent its authority to other constructions of gender, creativity, and selfhood. A potentially feminine “Darwinism”—using Darwin's proper name as a synecdoche for a host of cultural forces that Darwin's work both responded to and altered—generated a host of masculine authorities, among them canonical male naturalist authors like Sinclair, who countered its dispersals with synthesis, who found in its whimsicality and play iron social doctrines which supported aggressive, competitive masculine behaviors.

In Sinclair's The Jungle, “nature” seems characterized by the threatening fecundity one finds in Darwin's vision. Nature in Packingtown is characterized by an anxiety-inducing profusion of life, especially of children. In the first paragraph of the novel, for example, as Marija argues with a carriage driver in two languages, she is pursued by a “swarm of urchins.”² At the wedding of Jurgis and Ona, Sinclair tells us that the number of babies in attendance was “equal to … all guests invited.” In a “collection of cribs and carriages … babies slept, three or four together” (p. 5). Later, Sinclair indicates that even the city dump, a place with “an odor for which there are no polite words,” is “sprinkled over with children” (p. 29). Odors form a part of this profusion, as do the animals. One can smell Packingtown from miles away, with its “elemental odor, raw and crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual, and strong. There were some who drank it in as if it were an intoxicant; there were others who put their handkerchiefs to their faces” (p. 25). The ubiquity of odor is mirrored by the vast number of cattle, described in a way that suggests the vastness and heterogeneity of humanity itself: “as far as the eye can reach there stretches a sea of pens …—so many cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world. Red cattle, black, white, and yellow cattle. … The sound of them here was as of all the barnyards of the universe” (p. 33). The profusion of animals gives rise to a chaos of animal sounds: “The uproar was appalling; … one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold. … There were high squeals and low squeals, grunts and wails of agony” (p. 35).³

The narrative's implicit fear of a world swarming with disreputable life and the sense of being entrapped by it eventually coalesces into a fear of family life, and, within the confines of the family, misogynistic fears of women and their reproductive powers.⁴ Capitalism is to blame for much of the suffering in the novel, yet as the title of the novel implies, Sinclair regards capitalism precisely as an unrisen nature into which humankind can periodically fall, or from which it can be transformed by the application of socialist principles. To the extent that Packingtown has its own “naturalness” associated with physical terrors, its world is metonymically linked to women and their bodies.

Such a link is most evident at the single most wrenching scene in the novel, the death of Ona in childbirth. As the midwife, Madame Haupt, descends from the garret where Ona is dying, we are told that “she had her jacket off, like one of the workers on the killing-beds. Her hands and arms were smeared with blood, and blood was splashed upon her clothing and her face” (p. 184). Though this death is horrific, it also uncovers for Jurgis a previously veiled portion of reality, the hidden, horrible nature of nature. Sinclair tells us that “it was all new to him, raw and horrible—it had fallen upon him like a lightning stroke. When little Antanas was born he had been at work, and had known nothing about it until it was over; and now he was not to be controlled” (p. 175).

Eventually, The Jungle records not just a hatred of social injustice, poverty, and suffering, but an aversion to the body and all of its fluids, smells, and processes. Insofar as the novel reproduces the traditional equation between women and the body, this hatred is finally gynephobic. Prior to childbirth, the frail yet desirable Ona barely has a corporeal presence in the novel. Even at her death, The Jungle displaces its distaste for the female body and its biological processes onto the massive, fleshy figure of Madame Haupt. When Jurgis seeks the midwife, he finds her engaged in the affairs of the flesh, “frying pork and onions”; she seems to be the only immigrant in Packingtown who has enough to eat. Sinclair tells us that “she was a Dutch woman, enormously fat,” and that “she wore a filthy blue wrapper, and her teeth were black” (p. 177). After rubbing her hands with a saucer of “goose-grease” in her kitchen—good luck, Sinclair explains—Madame Haupt goes to minister to Ona. When she emerges, the blood displayed on her person, signifying the horror of childbirth and of the natural, allows Ona to be rescued from the body once more, for one last sentimental scene; when Jurgis finally sees Ona, “she was so shrunken he would scarcely have known her—she was all but a skeleton, and as white as a piece of chalk” (p. 184).

A passage in the original version of The Jungle, published in The Appeal to Reason but edited out of the Doubleday edition, expresses the link between women's bodies and the stockyards themselves. “Cannot anyone in his right senses,” Sinclair's narrator cries, “see that such troubles as Ona's must continue to be the rule so long as women, whom God in his infinite wisdom has condemned to be manufacturing machines, will insist upon having children just as if they were ordinary human creatures?”⁵ The narrator's irony indicates that women have unnaturally been made to labor in the industrial world, in contrast to the natural process of childbirth. But one of The Jungle's anxieties, which here seems to be unconsciously expressed, is that the two are actually the same and that even childbirth, even women, are part of a nature in which reproduction is blind, mechanical repetition.

These repeated crossings of boundaries, between male and female, nature and culture, the workplace and the home, reflect the fundamental incoherence of naturalism itself. As The Jungle descends into its own jungle, the disjunctions and contradictions of naturalist metaphysics translate themselves into a fundamental crisis of selfhood as well, and this latter crisis is reflected in images of bodily disintegration, in the repeated dismemberings and figurative castrations which the narrative records: the loss of fingers; the loss of feet; the loss of ears broken off in the cold; and, most horrible of all, the loss of little Stanislovas to rats. Shut in a dark cellar, he is cornered and eaten.

These fears of bodily disintegration are coterminous in the novel with fears of entrapment, as if a failure to rise from the body equals a life of imprisonment in an enveloping maternal womb that fundamentally undoes the illusion of autonomous masculine selfhood. As the novel progresses, it is increasingly dominated by images of enclosure in small dark spaces: in cellars and stairwells, prison cells and basement workrooms, pits and abysses. These fears, in turn, produce or are produced by a claustrophobic masculine inability to tolerate the emotions of women. After Ona's rape by Connor, her anguish is so intense that Jurgis can “bear it no longer,” and he “sprang at her … shouting into her ear: ‘Stop it, I say! Stop it!’” (p. 144). Jurgis has a similar reaction to her tears during her pregnancy: “She had never been like this before … it was monstrous and unthinkable … the world … ought to kill them at once. … They ought not to marry, to have children …—if he, Jurgis, had known what a woman was like, he would have had his eyes torn out first” (p. 136).

The need to escape the home becomes so overwhelming that Jurgis's unconscious desires uncannily produce the events of the narrative over which, in realist terms, he has no control. A series of scenes in this portion of the novel attests to the strength of Jurgis's desire to free himself from all family entanglements and to gain the masculine freedom of rural life. For example, after Jurgis's imprisonment for his attack on Connor, Ona's rapist, he simply concludes that death would serve his wife best: “the shame of it all would kill her … and it was best that she should die” (p. 151). Jurgis's wish for her death serves as a death sentence, and Ona soon perishes. Immediately after Jurgis is released from prison, he makes a mistake of astounding proportions. Even as he declares his willingness to “do battle” for his family against the world, he heads in the wrong direction on the strength of some bad navigational advice he receives from a child. After miles of journeying westward, a farmer informs him of his mistake (p. 168). Jurgis quickly alters his course, but his legs have betrayed the direction in which he wants the developing narrative to carry him.

Ona's death and his devotion to young Antanas, his Nietzschean superbaby son, temporarily retain him in Chicago, but the narrative places Jurgis in an International Harvester factory, which once again sounds a proleptic note of rural life. And when the Harvester factory closes, he gains employment in a steel mill and uncannily encounters still another foreshadowing of his approaching flight. In one of the novel's most remarkable passages, Jurgis sees the protean molten steel as a kind of life essence, which assumes first a masculine shape, and then a determined and determining objective form. As he watches, the molten steel is a “pillar of white flame, dazzling as the sun … with a whiteness not of earth, scorching the eyeballs” (p. 200). In another place, where the “crashing” and “groaning” of machines seem like “the centre of earth, where the machinery of time was revolving,” this cosmic plasma of molten steel becomes a phallic “great red snake escaped from purgatory” which “writhed and squirmed … until it was cold and black—and then it needed only to be cut and straightened to be ready for a railroad” (p. 201). At this point in the novel, what was formerly protean about Jurgis is similarly “cut and straightened” and unalterable. Several pages later, he will hop a passing freight train and ride these iron rails into the novel's curious rural idyll.⁶

First, however, young Antanas, the last obstacle to the desire of the text, must perish in a death that itself serves as an uncanny foreshadowing of his father's flight. While Jurgis labors in the steel mill, Antanas bursts from a restricting house, plunges into a mudpuddle, and drowns. As a sobbing Marija informs Jurgis, “we just couldn't make him stay in” (p. 205). As a consequence, Jurgis makes his own break for freedom from a familial womb and is soon “peering out with hungry eyes, getting glimpses of meadows and woods and rivers” (p. 207). Once in the country Jurgis repeats Antanas's watery plunge, not in a puddle, but in a “deep pool, sheltered and silent,” where he “splashed about like a very boy in his glee” (p. 208).

The uncanniness of this progress in the context of the rest of the novel is hardly liberating. On the contrary, this pattern of repetition contributes to the decentering of Jurgis's selfhood, as if the force which moves him were not recognizable as his own. Indeed, the novel is suffused with a horror of blind, mechanical repetition from beginning to end, which includes, but runs substantially deeper than, a hatred of the cycles of capitalism. In his rises and falls, Jurgis is encased in these mechanical repetitions, the most startling being the second attack on Ona's rapist, Connor, which reenacts the first: “precisely as before, Jurgis came away with a piece of his enemy's flesh between his teeth; and, as before, he went on fighting with those who had interfered with him” (p. 268).

These anarchic forces, however, are called to order through the intervention of Schliemann, the German intellectual whose authoritative socialist monologues offer explanations of the ills of the novel and propose regulatory solutions:

Nicholas Schliemann was familiar with all the universe, and with man as a small part of it. He understood human institutions, and blew them about like soap-bubbles. It was surprising that so much destructiveness could be contained in one human mind. Was it government? The purpose of government was the guarding of property-rights, the perpetuation of ancient force and modern fraud. Or was it marriage? Marriage and prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man's exploitation of the sex-pleasure. The difference between them was a difference of class. If a woman had money she might dictate her own terms.

(p. 322)

Schliemann stands for a voice of absolute male intellectual authority, one that controls the body and its desires. According to Sinclair, Schliemann “studied the compositions of food-stuffs, and knew exactly how many proteids and carbohydrates his body needed. … That was the nearest approach to independence a man could make ‘under capitalism,’ he explained; he would never marry, for no sane man would allow himself to fall in love until after the revolution” (p. 321). At the same time, Schliemann has an erotic power over women, produced, evidently, by his intellectual greatness. As Jurgis listens to this disavowal of marriage, he notices a “beautiful young girl” listening to Schliemann “with something of the same look that he himself had worn, the time when he had first discovered Socialism” (p. 332). This “young college student … only spoke once or twice while Jurgis was there—the rest of the time she sat by the table in the centre of the room, resting her chin in her hands and drinking in the conversation” (p. 321).

The construction of such authority has been an important goal of the narrative all along, and once it is established, however ambivalently, Jurgis can be pushed to the margins like a spent puppet. Part of the unconsciousness which has been driving the novel, in other words, and part of what decenters Jurgis, is finally Sinclair's own will-to-authorship, which twines itself around the “proper” subject of the novel. The capacity magically to transform reality into the shape of desire is the prerogative of the author, the prerogative of the maker of narrative, and not a characteristic of actual experience as we know it.

The deepest desire of a writer often is to attain the position of author, a desire that often precedes—and hence underwrites—even the acquisition of a specific subject, which often results from a long and difficult search. Sinclair had an enormous desire for literary success early in his career and faced enormous difficulties in its pursuit. The roots of his desire to write, according to Sinclair's Autobiography, were located in a vision of the essential salubrity of genius he had had in the midst of his adolescence. In this vision, he imagines a kind of teetotaling boy's camp of literature, in which he could join a mix of great characters and great authors gathered around the fire:

There was a campfire by a mountain road, to which came travelers who hailed one another and made high revelry there without alcohol. Yes, even Falstaff and Prince Hal were purified. … There came the melancholy Prince of Denmark, and Don Quixote. … Also Shelley. … I was laughing, singing, with the delight of their company.⁷

Unfortunately for Sinclair, at the time of The Jungle's composition, this vision of the felicity of literary success had not been realized in the realm of experience despite several efforts to produce literature of a monumental kind. One of these texts, The Journal of Arthur Stirling,⁸ took for its subject the fate of the man of “genius” trapped in a culture that fails to recognize and reward—and hence actively thwarts—his ambitions and abilities.⁹

If Sinclair's ambition would make The Jungle a desperate project in any case, this desperation was augmented by the poverty in which he found himself at the time of his novel's composition and by the disintegration of his marriage. Sinclair wrote much of The Jungle in a small cabin he built himself in Princeton, New Jersey, as a space in which he could isolate himself from the problems of family life. His son David had been diagnosed with malnutrition and rickets in 1903, and his marriage to his first wife, Meta, had fallen into disrepair. Apparently acting out of a fear of fathering any more children who might complicate his life, Sinclair had adopted a regimen of sexual abstinence, arguing the common position of numerous health authorities that sexual activity ought to occur only for purposes of reproduction. One night, according to Leon Harris, Sinclair found his wife, Meta, in bed with a pistol, weeping because she was unable to pull the trigger.¹⁰ Sinclair himself readily admitted the connection between such unmitigated personal suffering and The Jungle:

Externally, the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in wintertime in Chicago? I had only to recall the previous winter in the cabin when we had had only cotton blankets, and had put rugs on top of us and cowered shivering in our separate beds. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Ona was Corydon, speaking Lithuanian but otherwise unchanged. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book.

(Autobiography, p. 112)

Sinclair responded to such difficulties by increasing his commitment to writing, in pursuit of the kind of authorial success that promised rescue.

Because “author” is our culture's best metaphor for achieved humanist selfhood and the mastery of experience such selfhood implies, the story of becoming an author and the story of the genesis of selfhood are often intertwined and difficult to distinguish. Both will be highly inflected by gender in a culture in which subjects and authors are produced by the normative structures of nuclear family life. As the enterprise of psychoanalysis has made clear, a central task of the subject in the Western family is the management of gender difference and the consolidation of an identity as a heterosexual male or female. As a consequence, the materials an American author must manage in the course of becoming an author, the materials a subject must manage in order to compose identity, will always have a primary relation to gender.

A nineteenth-century male American author must have wrestled with gender in two respects. On the one hand, most men were raised by women and so necessarily receive much of their early training from feminine hands. At the same time, women are much more than mothers in American literature. As the imagined primary readers for the novel, as the active bearers and producers of cultural values, beliefs, and traditions, of poems, plays, and novels, women are real and substantial presences in American literature; nineteenth-century literary men experienced the prominence of women as a material reality and reacted to it.¹¹

The power of women's presence in American culture, in fact, is evident in what may be The Jungle's most important literary predecessor. Sinclair apparently was partly inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin, which he refers to in Manassas as “the most unquestionable piece of inspiration in American fiction.” According to Sinclair, nowhere in the world “is there a book more packed and charged with the agony and heartbreak of woman” (Sinclair's italics).¹² Jack London, of course, famously called The Jungle the “Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery,”¹³ and Sinclair directly betrays a competitive relation to Harriet Beecher Stowe in the text of the recently recovered first edition: “She had many things in her favor which cannot be counted on by him who would paint the life of the modern slave. … Who can make a romance out of the story of a man whose one life adventure is the scratching of a finger by an infected butcher knife?” (DeGruson, p. 65).

If Stowe was a literary foremother, biographically Sinclair's mother had a substantial influence on the formation of his character. He remembered, for example, his mother reading to him from early childhood, and he was abysmally ignorant in his early schooling in the (masculine) business of mathematics. As he says in his autobiography: “I knew everything but arithmetic. This branch of learning, so essential to a commercial civilization, had shared the fate of alcohol and tobacco, tea and coffee; my mother did not use it, so neither did I” (Autobiography, p. 21). At the same time, his interest in reading alienated him from his alcoholic, navy-obsessed father:

“The social position of a naval officer is the highest in the world,” pronounced my father. “He can go anywhere, absolutely anywhere.” … And meantime the little son was reaching out into a strange world of books; reading things of which the father had never heard. “What are you reading?” he would ask, and the son would reply, none too generously, “A book.” … The chasm between the two was widening, never to be closed in this world.

(Autobiography, p. 20)

Although Sinclair's mother was a key figure in his childhood and adolescence and helped form both his commitment to reform and his interest in literature, the author broke with her completely in later life, apparently over issues of his own authority. According to Leon Harris, Sinclair told his son David at the time of her death, “she was the best of mothers up to about the age (my age) of 16. Then I grew beyond her, & she wouldn't follow, or couldn't. If she'd let me alone, it could have been all right; but she still thought I was a child & stubbornly fought to direct my life & mind. So for 35 years I could not meet her without a controversy starting.”¹⁴

As Sinclair's autobiographical writings underline, a paradox of naturalism, in and out of The Jungle, is that it produces images of female power which then pose problems for male identity. For example, Sinclair's Marija Berczynskas, located outside any and all conventions of feminine gentility, is the most remarkable and powerfully conceived character in The Jungle. In his account of the wedding which opens the text, Sinclair tells us that “it was all Marija Berczynskas. Marija was one of those hungry souls who cling with desperation to the skirts of the retreating muse. … Whether it was by beer, or by shouting, or by music, or by motion, she meant that it should not go” (p. 14). Moreover, Sinclair thought of himself as a kind of feminist man, and The Jungle clearly contains an explicit critique of marriage as a form of prostitution. Quite early in the novel Jurgis tries to buy Ona from her parents for his father's two horses. As Schliemann proclaims at novel's end, “marriage and prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man's exploitation of the sex-pleasure.” Indeed, Sinclair dedicates his autobiographical account of his troubled first marriage, Love's Pilgrimage, which he refers to as “this woman's book,” to “those who throughout the world are fighting for the emancipation of woman.”¹⁵

In general, then, The Jungle massively and misogynistically defends against a feminine power that it creates itself. A crucial question of the text concerns a paradox central not only to The Jungle, but to the work of London, Norris, Dreiser, and much of naturalism. Why, if The Jungle enacts a construction of masculine authority, does it have an interest in powerful women instead of powerful men? The answer must be that naturalist masculinity involves disabling contradictions and fundamentally does not work, as its persistent depictions of men in various stages of fragmentation—often, literally as bodies in pieces—graphically indicate. The nineteenth-century insistence on separate spheres, in which men were raised by women toward masculine difference and autonomy, rendered the consolidation of masculine identity impossible. Female responsibility for childrearing guaranteed that men will come to contain qualities acquired from maternal sources. At the same time, rigid definitions of gender difference made it difficult to define these qualities as other than feminine. Gender difference in culture thus became gender difference within the masculine psyche, pushing naturalist masculinity into breakdown and disintegration.

Sinclair's novel clearly works to expose the inadequacy of Jurgis's conventional masculinity, ridiculing the conceit of his pride in his own self-sufficiency and strength. This assurance apparently has masculine origins, given that the text credits Jurgis's upbringing to his father and never mentions his mother at all.¹⁶ The adult Jurgis “could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten. ‘That is well enough for men like you,’ he would say, ‘silpnas, puny fellows—but my back is broad’” (p. 21). The Jungle will teach Jurgis, distinctly not a writer himself, what a beating feels like, as Sinclair gropes toward new forms of male identity.

The unmaking of Jurgis's masculinity, the exposure of its weaknesses and contradictions, creates space for an exploration of an alternative, “feminine” subjectivity. The forces of unleashed femininity, however, surface in the novel chiefly as a terrifying negation, necessitating the construction of a new form of masculine authority lest the novel share in Jurgis's abjection. The problem of this authority is, at the same time, the problem of how to find an ending for the narrative after the dissolution of its middle, an ending necessary if Sinclair's own act of authorship is to have a successful conclusion. At stake in this ending, finally, is the novel's capacity to imagine something like a fundamental transformation of late nineteenth-century conventions of gender, a transformation that can still supply an aesthetically necessary sense of narrative closure.

I have argued that the cold and clinical Schliemann represents one kind of male authority at the end of Sinclair's narrative. In fact, The Jungle has multiple and contradictory endings that work to qualify Schliemann's authority and create space for Sinclair's ambivalence about it. Schliemann's appearance in the text is preceded by another figure of intellectual authority, a wildly passionate speaker who first wins Jurgis to socialism. This man, like Schliemann, has the power to transfix not only Jurgis, but a young and beautiful woman. Jurgis initially finds her presence at the public lecture disturbing:

He turned a little, carefully, so that he could see her better; then he began to watch her, fascinated. She had apparently forgotten all about him, and was looking toward the platform. A man was speaking there. … A feeling of alarm stole over him as he stared at her. It made his flesh creep. What was the matter with her, what could be going on, to affect any one like that? … There was a faint quivering of her nostrils; and now and then she would moisten her lips with feverish haste. Her bosom rose and fell as she breathed, and her excitement seemed to mount higher and higher … like a boat tossing upon ocean surges.

(p. 290)

The woman's response mirrors the emotional state of the speaker, whose power on the stage seems produced by his own borderline disintegration:

It was like coming suddenly upon some wild sight of nature,—a … ship tossed about upon a stormy sea. Jurgis had an unpleasant sensation, a sense of confusion, of disorder, of wild and meaningless uproar. The man was tall and gaunt, as haggard as his auditor himself; a thin black beard covered half of his face, and one could see only two black hollows where the eyes were. He was speaking rapidly, in great excitement; he used many gestures—as he spoke he moved here and there upon the stage.

(p. 290)

As Jurgis listens, he feels a surfacing of unmasterable forces that represent a transformation of his earlier abjection into bliss:

There was an unfolding of vistas before him, a breaking of the ground beneath him, an upheaving, a stirring, a trembling; he felt himself suddenly a mere man no longer—there were powers within him undreamed of, there were demon forces contending, age-long wonders struggling to be born.

(pp. 296-97)

It is difficult not to view homoerotic forces as among the ones liberated here, particularly since Jurgis's conversion leads him to work in a hotel run by a benevolent socialist aptly named “Tommy Hinds.” Sinclair speaks of this relation in terms that combine desire and fragmentation: “he would have cut off one hand for Tommy Hinds; and to keep Hinds's hotel a thing of beauty was his joy in life.”

The body-shattering danger of these first relations requires the introduction of Schliemann, who, as opposed to the figure on the platform, quietly sits “without emotions; with the manner of a teacher setting forth to a group of scholars an axiom in geometry” (p. 321). It is Schliemann, finally, who represents the power of male intellectual authority in naturalism to hold the disruptions of the body, sexuality, and gender in check precisely by the generation of an abstract account of them. At the same time, the voice of Schliemann has little in common with the impassioned prose Sinclair produces, or with the prose of the woman Sinclair invokes as his literary predecessor, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Devoid of emotion, Schliemann also seems devoid of literature and so represents a style of masculine authority that suppresses the masculine writer.

The two speakers, then, suggest a masculinity divided between its masculine and feminine selves and also divided between eroticized and noneroticized male relations. The differences in the two editions of the novel have similar implications. In the earliest edition of the novel, Sinclair makes even more explicit the feminine aspects of the first speaker:

He was a man of electric presence, with a face worn thin by struggle and suffering. The fury of outraged manhood gleamed in it—and the tears of suffering little children pleaded in his voice. He was represented in the papers as a man of violence, but he had the tenderness of a woman.

(DeGruson, p. 309)

The prominence of the feminine in this figure of authority coexists with a vulnerability to the disruptive presence of actual women. The novel ends with the interrogation of the “Pitchfork Senator” by a woman in the audience who will not be put in her place. The Senator tries mockery, saying, “I can face any man, but, my God, I'm not used to arguing with women” (p. 313). According to Sinclair, “the laughter over this would have cleared the atmosphere in any meeting less determined; but when it ceased, the woman was still there. She kept shaking her finger at the speaker—she would have answers” (p. 313). One page later, Sinclair refers to this woman as the Senator's “Nemesis,” as she leaps to her feet and interrogates him again. The speaker's vulnerability to the woman and her wagging finger, in turn, signals a continuing vulnerability for Jurgis Rudkus. As opposed to Schliemann's “solutions” to Jurgis's problems, the first edition returns him once again to prison, and so refuses to rescue him from the irrational repetitions of its plot. It thus also answers ambiguously the question of whether, for men, an underlying femininity is tolerable.

Taken together, the endings of The Jungle suggest naturalism's discontent with the masculine authority that, because of the imperatives of culture and the dynamics of literature, it also strives to compose. Its investment in depictions of a powerful and omnipresent femininity, finally, contains a wish that its own repressive structures be shattered as well as a fear that such a wish might be granted. It powerfully depicts male disintegration, and it uses the energy of disintegration to generate new forms of confining masculine power. It veers wildly from the iron rails of probability, and it clings desperately to the structure of normative masculine plots. It wrestles manfully with the appalling inconsistencies and contradictions of late nineteenth-century gender roles, but finally cannot transcend them.

Notes

1. See Christine van Boheemen, The Novel as Family Romance: Language, Gender and Authority from Fielding to Joyce (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), p. 114. See also Mark Seltzer's important chapter, “The Naturalist Machine,” in Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 25-44.

2. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, ed. James R. Barrett (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

3. Sinclair's account of all this “uproar” at times seems uncomfortably close to his accounts of the uproar caused by the numerous foreign languages of Packingtown. At points in The Jungle ethnicity itself seems an aspect of the profusion, the entrapping productivity, of nature.

4. Seltzer argues that such fears are in fact characteristic of a broad range of American naturalist texts, which work to substitute a safely masculine narrative of the creation of life. “The Naturalist Machine,” pp. 23-44.

5. Upton Sinclair, The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, ed. Gene DeGruson (Atlanta: St. Luke's Press, 1988), p. 96. This edition was compiled from a manuscript discovered in a barn in Kansas and contains some significant differences from the Doubleday version, which earned Sinclair fame. Page numbers for citations from this edition will be given parenthetically with editor's name, DeGruson, to distinguish them from the standard edition.

6. Such metaphors suggest the problem in naturalism of the articulation of the body and subjectivity in industrial machine metaphors that imply an alienation of the subject from his or her own desires. While industrialism provides the possibility of such metaphors, and hence of such understandings of the self, it is not clear what the relation of such metaphors are to a body that resists perpetual refiguration, to a body-as-inertia. Seltzer seems to leave a place in discourse for such a body, which contradicts the “interpretive standard in recent cultural criticism” of “the unnaturalness of nature.” To Seltzer, the suspect conventional imperative is “when confronted by the nature-culture opposition, choose the culture side” (p. 155). The issue is an important one; opening up a space for a subject who is different from discourse reconstitutes a space for a historical psychoanalysis as an attempt to map the intersection of the subject and culture. We cannot give such an account by yielding to the metaphors of a particular historical moment as the exhaustive “truth” of subjectivity.

7. Upton Sinclair, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), p. 54. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

8. Upton Sinclair, The Journal of Arthur Stirling: “The Valley of the Shadow” (1903; repr. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906).

9. This subject is a common one in American naturalist literature. Characters who might be described as thwarted geniuses include Basil Ransom in Henry James's The Bostonians; Martin Eden in the text that bears his name; Wolf Larsen in Jack London's The Sea-Wolf; and Eugene Witla in The Genius.

10. Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975), p. 62.

11. The salience of women's culture in the nineteenth century and the importance of its influence on men's culture have been established in recent years by a host of books. See, for example, Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 1977); Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982) and Henry James and the “Woman Business” (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989); Cynthia Jordan, Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fictions (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989); David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989); and Leland S. Person, Jr., Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988).

12. Sinclair's assessment of the novel includes both an aggressive reference to those critics who still “speak of it as having historical rather than literary interest” and a judicious critical acknowledgment that “its literary faults are evident enough.” Nevertheless, anyone who can read it with “dry eyes” is “not an enviable person.” See Upton Sinclair, Manassas: A Novel of the War (New York: Macmillan, 1904), p. 58.

13. Reported in Harris, p. 64.

14. Harris, p. 99.

15. Upton Sinclair, Love's Pilgrimage (London: William Heinemann, 1912).

16. Sinclair relates Jurgis's past in mythic terms that suggest the possibility of a masculinity not complicated by the presence of women. The onset of Jurgis's love for Ona represents a fall from this masculine fairy tale world into a “foolish trap”: “His father, and his father's father before him, and as many ancestors back as legend could go, had lived in that part of Lithuania known as Brelovicz, the Imperial Forest. This is a great tract of a hundred thousand acres, which from time immemorial has been a hunting preserve of the nobility. There are a very few peasants settled in it, holding title from ancient times; and one of these was Antanas Rudkus, who had been reared himself, and had reared his children in turn, upon half a dozen acres of cleared land in the midst of a wilderness” (p. 22).