What A Beating Feels Like: Authorship, Dissolution, and Masculinity in Sinclair's The Jungle
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Notes
1. See Christine van Boheemen, The Novel as Family Romance: Language, Gender and Authority from Fielding to Joyce (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), p. 114. See also Mark Seltzer's important chapter, "The Naturalist Machine," in Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 25-44.
2. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, ed. James R. Barrett (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
3. Sinclair's account of all this "uproar" at times seems uncomfortably close to his accounts of the uproar caused by the numerous foreign languages of Packingtown. At points in The Jungle ethnicity itself seems an aspect of the profusion, the entrapping productivity, of nature.
4. Seltzer argues that such fears are in fact characteristic of a broad range of American naturalist texts, which work to substitute a safely masculine narrative of the creation of life. "The Naturalist Machine," pp. 23-44.
5. Upton Sinclair, The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, ed. Gene DeGruson (Atlanta: St. Luke's Press, 1988), p. 96. This edition was compiled from a manuscript discovered in a barn in Kansas and contains some significant differences from the Doubleday version, which earned Sinclair fame. Page numbers for citations from this edition will be given parenthetically with editor's name, DeGruson, to distinguish them from the standard edition.
6. Such metaphors suggest the problem in naturalism of the articulation of the body and subjectivity in industrial machine metaphors that imply an alienation of the subject from his or her own desires. While industrialism provides the possibility of such metaphors, and hence of such understandings of the self, it is not clear what the relation of such metaphors are to a body that resists perpetual refiguration, to a body-as-inertia. Seltzer seems to leave a place in discourse for such a body, which contradicts the "interpretive standard in recent cultural criticism" of "the unnaturalness of nature." To Seltzer, the suspect conventional imperative is "when confronted by the nature-culture opposition, choose the culture side" (p. 155). The issue is an important one; opening up a space for a subject who is different from discourse reconstitutes a space for a historical psychoanalysis as an attempt to map the intersection of the subject and culture. We cannot give such an account by yielding to the metaphors of a particular historical moment as the exhaustive "truth" of subjectivity.
7. Upton Sinclair, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), p. 54. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
8. Upton Sinclair, The Journal of Arthur Stirling: "The Valley of the Shadow" (1903; repr. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906).
9. This subject is a common one in American naturalist literature. Characters who might be described as thwarted geniuses include Basil Ransom in Henry James's The Bostonians; Martin Eden in the text that bears his name; Wolf Larsen in Jack London's The Sea-Wolf; and Eugene Witla in The Genius.
10. Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975), p. 62.
11. The salience of women's culture in the nineteenth century and the importance of its influence on men's culture have been established in recent years by a host of books. See, for example, Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 1977); Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982) and Henry James and the "Woman Business" (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989); Cynthia Jordan, Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fictions (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989); David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989); and Leland S. Person, Jr., Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988).
12. Sinclair's assessment of the novel includes both an aggressive reference to those critics who still "speak of it as...
