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Corruption
As Jurgis and his family members experience harder and harder times in Packingtown, they find themselves surrounded increasingly with signs of immorality and corruption—laws that are not enforced, politicians out for their own gain, salesmen who lie about their wares—a whole community of people trying desperately to get ahead by taking advantage of one another. At the beginning of the novel, the signs of corruption are slight; a few people neglect to leave money to pay for the wedding feast. By the end of the novel, however, Jurgis has been a thief, mugger, strikebreaker, and an agent in a political vote-buying scheme. The family itself has been subject to swindles, grafts, manipulation, and rape. As the corruption motif recurs with increasing levels of immorality, it enhances the sense that things are growing worse and worse for the family. Sinclair heightens the atmosphere of grim tragedy and hopelessness to such an extent that only the encounter with socialism in Chapter 28 can possibly alleviate Jurgis’s suffering and give his life meaning.
Family and Tradition
Counterbalancing the motif of human corruption and depravity in the novel is the positive portrayal of the essential goodness of family and social traditions such as the wedding feast in Chapter 1. One of the novel’s central criticisms of capitalism is that it has a destructive effect on the family. For Jurgis’s family, economic hardship at various times helps disintegrate the family: Jonas disappears, Jurgis abandons the family, and Marija becomes a morphine-addicted prostitute. As the novel progresses, the role of family diminishes as the individual characters become increasingly battered and beaten: when Kristoforas dies, for instance, Jurgis is relieved because it means one less mouth to feed in the house. But because of the strength of Teta Elzbieta, the character who most directly represents the home and family, the clan is never quite destroyed. After Jurgis’s reunion with Teta Elzbieta at the end of the novel, not long after his discovery of socialism, the book even brings a measure of optimism into its portrayal of the family’s future, as Teta Elzbieta welcomes his earning power back into the family.
Extreme Weather Conditions
Throughout the novel, Sinclair often emphasizes the harsh weather conditions that Jurgis and his family must endure as they attempt to navigate the already cutthroat world of Packingtown. The extreme summertime heat and, perhaps even more notably, the frigid, snow-filled winters add to the drama of the narrative serve as a reminder to the reader of just how difficult life is as a laborer in Chicago. Sinclair’s appeal to the more universal experience of adverse weather enables him to evoke sympathy from readers who may be less familiar with the realities of life as a working-class immigrant. The heavy snowfalls that characterize the winter months exacerbate the dangerous environments of the factories, for example, and Jurgis and his family are powerless to mitigate their effects. Their inability to escape the harsh weather conditions that develop in Packingtown ultimately mirrors their struggle to survive the unforgiving nature of the meatpacking industry more broadly.
