Meat Packing Industry
This photographic print displays Swift & Co.’s meat packing plant in Chicago, Ill., circa 1905. The picture shows factory workers cutting up and gutting various parts of hogs. This picture evokes all of the senses that Sinclair places within his writing. The picture also sets up another picture, one where the men working are no better off than the chunks of deceased meat surrounding them. This picture creates two stories and two ideas simply off the fact that they arouse the senses. The descriptive language in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, links Jurgis to the hogs by revealing the similar emotions and environments that both man and animal endured, therefore creating a sense of parallelism between Jurgis and the hogs in unveiling the truth behind the lives of these poor workers. The Jungle is a novel full of language evoking smell, sound, touch, sight and taste. The language is written in that the reader is too smelling the rotting flesh of hog meat lying helplessly awaiting butchering or having his or her ears flooded with the high-pitched cry of a mother weeping over her young son’s emaciated deceased body. Sinclair’s writing allows one to understand the physical and emotional feelings of the animals in the text, both human and nonhuman. This common understanding is derived from the vivid bodily senses that are described throughout the text in various environments by different people or animals. The senses in this text are everywhere, which has allowed me to connect to these main scenes and characters of the novel. In doing so, I came across the direct reflection between Jurgis and the doomed hogs themselves. This strong and graphic language allows me to connect these two animals revealing that in fact Jurgis and the hogs share the same pain, deceit, hopelessness, and culmination. It is through the use of this type of language that makes it possible for smelly old hogs to reflect that of a strong immigrant man. This photo is a perfect representation of all of these ideas.