The Pastoral Escape: the Resistance of Pastoral Romanticism in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Humanities and Social Sciences Review, cilt.9, sa.1, ss.411-420, 2020 (Hakemli Dergi)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 9 Sayı: 1
- Basım Tarihi: 2020
- Dergi Adı: Humanities and Social Sciences Review
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Other Indexes
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.411-420
- Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır
Özet
Though being considered a ‘muckraker’ journalist, Upton Sinclair is best known for his fictional work
The Jungle. Muckrakers were not many in number but each had their viewpoint on how the society was
to be reformed, and these were observed in their journalism. As for Sinclair, his was the clearest in The
Jungle: reform was to come through ‘socialism’. His later chapters on socialist solutions have always
been criticised, even by himself, as weak. His ending invests too much in mere propagandistic
scaffolding and hence ends up collapsing altogether into repugnant prattle, unable to provide a closure
to Jurgis’s gripping tragedy. However, it eventually serves to, together with Sinclair’s deliberate
marketing of it so, present The Jungle as a complete Marxist-socialist statement in its entirety, and
conceals the inability of the narrative to square its circles with the social contradictions it initially sets
out to resolve, namely corruption and injustice in all aspects of society. This inability manifests itself at
the text level in Sinclair’s inability to plot a socialist deliverance for Jurgis and his society from
corruption and injustice at the end. Yet, although his ending fails, Chapter 22 stands out as the closest
thing to salvation Jurgis attains throughout. A surfacing of the southern country life in a single Chapter
22, in contradiction to an otherwise urban Chicago setting, becomes symptomatic of the ideological
closure in Sinclair’s grasp of the contradictions mentioned. Resorting to Fredric Jameson’s semantic
enrichment, this paper aims to work through and bring into question the ideological closure of Sinclair’s
work by reconsidering this chapter’s role in and meaning for the narrative. Working within Jameson’s
first semantic horizon, the paper aims to analyse how Sinclair’s reading of social injustice and
corruption and socialist reformation is unable to break away from the frame of the American Dream and
a pastoral romance.