Summary: Chapter 14
[T]here were things that went into the
sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.
See Important Quotations Explained
Jurgis and his family know all of the dirty secrets
of the meat-packing industry. The most spoiled of meats becomes
sausage. All manner of dishonesty exists in the industry’s willingness
to sell diseased, rotten, and adulterated meat to American households.
The working members of the family fall into a silent stupor due
to the grinding poverty and misery of their lives. Ona and Jurgis
grow apart, and Jurgis begins to drink heavily. He delivers himself
from full-blown alcoholism through force of will, but the desire
to drink always torments him.
Antanas suffers various childhood illnesses, and the measles attack
him with fury. His strong constitution allows him to reach his first
birthday, but he is as malnourished as the rest of the Packingtown
poor. Ona, pregnant again, develops a bad cough and suffers increasingly
frequent bouts of hysterical crying.
Summary: Chapter 15
Winter arrives again, and with it comes the grueling rush
season. Fifteen- and sixteen-hour workdays are frequent. Twice,
Ona does not return home at night. She explains that the snow drifts
kept her away so she stayed with a friend. When Jurgis discovers
that she is lying, he wrangles a confession out of her. Sobbing
hysterically, Ona confesses that Phil Connor, a boss at her factory,
continually harassed her and pleaded with her to become his mistress.
She tells Jurgis that Connor eventually raped her in the factory
after everyone had gone home and threatened to arrange the firings
of every wage earner in her household. Moreover, he threatened to
prevent them from obtaining work in Packingtown ever again. With
these threats, he forced her into accompanying him to Miss Henderson’s brothel
in the evenings for the past two months.
Jurgis, livid, storms to Ona’s workplace. Upon seeing
the coarse-looking and liquor-reeking Connor, he leaps at him and
sinks his fingers into Connor’s throat. He channels all of his outrage
about the rape into such a thrashing frenzy that he doesn’t even
notice the pandemonium in the factory. A half-dozen men finally
tear Jurgis, blood and skin dripping from his teeth, from the unconscious
Connor and take him to the police station.
Summary: Chapter 16
[C]ould they find no better way to punish
him than to leave three weak women and six helpless children to starve
and freeze?
See Important Quotations Explained
Jurgis is arrested and taken to jail, where old men and
boys, hardened criminals and petty criminals, innocent men and guilty
men share the same squalid quarters. A date is designated for Jurgis’s trial
and his bond is set at three hundred dollars. Afterward, he is taken
to the county jail and made to strip; he is then walked, naked, down
a hallway past the inmates, who leer and make comments. He is put
into a small cell with a filthy, bug-infested mattress. Upon hearing
a clanging of bells that evening, Jurgis realizes that it is Christmas
Eve. He recalls the previous Christmas, when he and Ona walked along
the avenue with the children and gazed at the marvelous food and
toys in the store windows. He begins to sob when he thinks of his
family spending Christmas without him and with Ona ill. He laments
his family’s plight and feels that the Christmas chimes are mocking
him.
Summary: Chapter 17
While Jurgis awaits his trial, he becomes friends with
his cellmate, Jack Duane. Jack claims to be an educated man from
the east. He says that his father committed suicide after failing
in business. He adds that a big company later cheated him out of
a lucrative invention. His misfortunes led Jack to become a safe
breaker. Before Jurgis’s trial, Jack gives Jurgis his mistress’s
address and encourages him to seek his help should the need arise.
