Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Packingtown and the Stockyards
Perhaps the novel’s most important symbol is the animal
pens and slaughterhouses of Packingtown, which represent in a simple,
direct way the plight of the working class. Just as the animals
at Packingtown are herded into pens, killed with impunity, made
to suffer, and given no choice about their fate, so too are the
thousands of poor immigrant workers forced to enter the machinery
of capitalism, which grinds them down and kills them without giving
them any choice. Waves of animals pass through Packingtown in a
constant flow, as thousands of them are slaughtered every day and
replaced by more, just as generations of immigrants are ruined by
the merciless work and the oppression of capitalism and eventually
replaced by new generations of immigrants.
Cans of Rotten Meat
Historically, The Jungle’s most important
effect was probably the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, enacted
in response to public outcry over the novel’s portrayal of the meat
industry’s practice of selling rotten and diseased meat to unsuspecting
customers. Sinclair uses the cans of rotten and unhealthy meat to
represent the essential corruption of capitalism and the hypocrisy
of the American Dream. The cans have shiny, attractive surfaces
but contain a mass of putrid meat unfit for human consumption. In
the same way, American capitalism presents an attractive face to
immigrants, but the America that they find is rotten and corrupt.
The Jungle
The novel’s title symbolizes the competitive nature of
capitalism; the world of Packingtown is like a Darwinian jungle,
in which the strong prey on the weak and all living things are engaged
in a brutal, amoral fight for survival. The title of the novel draws
attention specifically to the doctrine of Social Darwinism, an idea
used by some nineteenth-century thinkers to justify the abuses of
wealthy capitalists. This idea essentially held that society was
designed to reward the strongest, best people, while inferior people
were kept down at a suitable level. By relating the story of a group
of honest, hardworking immigrants who are destroyed by corruption
and evil, Sinclair tries to rebut the idea of Social Darwinism,
implying that those who succeed in the capitalist system are not
the best of humankind but rather the worst and most corrupt of all.
