The Columbia History of the American Novel

and several members of Ona's family, Jurgis ekes out a living in the meatpacking industry. Their lives are a continual struggle to make ends meet, as they all have only the most tenuous hold on their jobs — which are themselves extremely dangerous — owing to their age or youth, their uncertain health, personal injury, and the vicissitudes of industrial management. Jurgis's father, Antanas, dies of consumption, which he develops in the cold dampness of the meatpacking plant. Ona's cousin, Marija, loses her stockyard job and the family income significantly diminishes. At this point, Jurgis, who is taking nightschool classes in English, becomes an active member of the workers' union. The constant strain on the family resources takes a toll on Jurgis, however, and, with Ona having given birth to one child and pregnant with another, he takes to drink. Ona hopes to make money by prostituting herself to her plant supervisor, whom Jurgis assaults upon learning of the arrangement. The narrative moves rapidly through Jurgis's month in jail, the family's loss of their house, Ona's death in childbirth, and the death by drowning of their first son, culminating in Jurgis's stint as a migrant farmworker in the agricultural fields of the West. Upon returning to Chicago, he progresses through another succession of misfortunes, losing a job as a tunnel digger owing to an injury, begging for money on the street, returning to jail for attacking a saloonkeeper who tries to swindle him, working as a holdup man in Chicago's underworld, and, finally, returning to work as a scab in the meatpacking plant during a general strike. While there, he once again attacks Ona's former boss and, while subsequently fleeing the law, he comes upon Marija who is herself working as a prostitute. They are both thoroughly degraded now, until Jurgis hears a speech by a socialist organizer, after which he finds work in a hotel with a socialist manager, and begins a new and, finally, hopeful life. -237-

This expectant ending, coming as it does at the end of a long string of personal calamities for Jurgis, suggests Sinclair's primary intention in writing The Jungle: he wanted to call public attention to the conditions in which Midwestern industrial workers lived, and to urge social activism as a means of ameliorating those conditions. Indeed, the graphic manner in which he depicts the meatpackers' experiences leaves no doubt as to the unjust conditions under which they labored. At the same time, though, what caught public attention about Sinclair's book was not so much the degraded condition of the workers' lives but rather the appalling practices of the meatpacking industry in its preparation of foods for market. Concern about sanitation in the industry led to the passage of the Pure Food Bill of 1907, which President Theodore Roosevel t signed into law; but The Jungle had little effect in raising public outcry about the treatment of the workers in the meatpacking industry.

There is an irony here, in addition to the obvious one about the unintended effect that Sinclair's effort had in the public arena. The age of the protest novel began with an effort by Harriet Beecher Stowe to introduce issues of public concern into the realm of private, domestic life so that the push for reform might be born at home. By and large, that strategy worked in the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and it was further developed by writers such as Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps through the 1870s. When the domestic setting itself became displaced as the site in which novels depicted social transformation as originating, however, and when it became reconceived as the realm in which only certain issues pertaining to women were to be negotiated, the connection between private life and public concern became reformulated as well. Consequently, by the time that Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, in 1906, its effect was bound to be not that readers would come to understand the treatment of others in the realm of labor as a public disgrace that ought to become their private concern, but rather that they would become aware that the sanctity of their private domains, their very families, homes, kitchens, and dinner tables, ought to be protected through the mechanisms of public policy. The development of such regulation is, of course, itself a type of reform; and the logic of the reform novel over the course of the historical period under consideration demonstrates that the primary site of reform, like char-238- ity, is the home. The question that the age raises and leaves unanswered, however, is whether the home marks the beginning of any real social reform, or merely its end, and what is at stake in the difference.

Phillip Brian Harper

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Nation, Region, and Empire

The Civil War, noted Henry James in his 1879 study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, represented to many Americans a collective national fall into reality. No wonder a novel about that war, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) by John William De Forest, has long been considered one of the first works of American realism. Praised for its starkly accurate battle scenes, the novel, however, has been damned for its excessively romantic frame. Yet both plots — of war and of love — work to the same end of national reunification, the cultural project that would inform a diversity of American fiction for the following three decades.

The novel rejects the romance of the Old South in the Louisianan heroine's misguided marriage to an older Virginian 'gentleman,' who though he fights for the Union, also drinks, spends, and loves too hard and too much. At his death, however, and with the heroine's final marriage to a young New Englander who has been toughened by battle, the novel reinscribes a new romance of national restoration. In the conversion of the title, the heroine does more than simply change sides and husbands; she weans herself from a fiercely local attachment to home — a quality identified as female — to a broader national allegiance. Finally, her Southern Loyalist father characterizes his home, with condescension and fondness, as barbaric, primitive, and childlike, and compares its inhabitants to Ashantees, Hottentots, Seminoles, Pawnees, Chinese, and cannibals. As a mineralogist, he -240- maps the South as a peripheral undeveloped 'region' or colony and views reunion as a matter of natural evolution.

De Forest also initiated the search for the 'Great American Novelin 1868, for which he nominated Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) as the only work with sufficient 'national breadth' to link a wide spectrum of characters from different regions, races, and classes. (Not surprisingly, many post-Civil War novels, including his own, aspired to correct, negate, or expand upon Stowe, including works by Charles Chesnutt, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sutton Griggs, and Thomas Dixon.) Less sanguine about a post-Civil War novel achieving such broad dimensions, he saw two factors working against it: the sectional divisiveness that made the United States a 'nation of provinces,' and the rapid rate of social change. 'Can a society which is changing so rapidly,' he asked, 'be painted except in the daily newspapers?' From a different angle, De Forest's obstacles to a national imagination have been viewed recently by Benedict Anderson as its building blocks. Anderson's useful understanding of nations as 'imagined communities' posits their foundations on print culture, on the circulation of both newspapers and novels that unite diverse members, otherwise unknown to one another, through a shared sense of a present and of simultaneous participation in historical change. (It is well known that many authors of the late nineteenth century served their apprenticeship in journalism and continued to write in both modes.) De Forest and his contemporaries, however, found the shared present of their imagined community radically challenged by the immediate past that had nearly destroyed the nation, and that set the agenda for novelists of reimagining a community and rebuilding a nation.

To do so meant reimagining the past. 'Forgetting,' claimed the French philologist Ernest Renan in 1882, 'is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.' He went on to state that 'the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things,' largely the foundation of the nation in violent conflicts, invasions, or massacres. Yet Renan does not imply that nations therefore have no past and inhabit an eternal present, a misconception often applied to the United States, but that present collectivity depends on 'possession in common of a rich leg-241- acy of memories,' particularly of noble deeds and shared sacrifice. His reflections are particularly relevant to the pervasive memory of the Civil War, which writers and politicians actively 'forgot' as mutual slaughter and rewrote as a shared sacrifice for reunion. Also forgotten and reinvented was the legacy of slavery and the questions it posed of a contested relation between national and racial identity.

In a period known for discovering contemporary social reality, writers were equally obsessed with the past, or with multiple pasts, largely of their own invention, whether the pre-Civil War South of Twain, Cable, Chesnutt, and others; the romanticized Revolutionary past; a mythologized medieval past of popular historical romances; island communities of regionalists, such as Jewett, Freeman, and Garland, that seemed to elude historical change; or the primitive past of the race imagined by naturalists, such as London and Norris. Much of this fiction expresses a Janus-faced nostalgia in which desire generated by a modern industrial society longingly projects alternatives onto the screen of the past, which refracts multiple images of the present back to itself. Novels traditionally identified