Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
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.
