A Catch-22: The Defiling and Perversion of Femininity in The Jungle Anonymous College

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a novel that follows a penniless Lithuanian family surviving in Packingtown, the meat-packing district of Chicago, underlines the stark gender divide in destitute environments. Ona Lukoszaite, a meek and frail teenager, serves as the novel’s prime archetype of the distinctive ways that women suffer in poverty. Corrupt and patriarchal capitalist structures, which in turn create destitution, force Ona to sully and perverse her own femininity in order to survive; Ona defiles her own femininity by performing physically strenuous labor and unwillingly prostituting herself. For the purposes of this essay, femininity will be defined as the traditional prototype of the woman. Femininity is characterized by weakness, submissiveness, emotion, and a maternal nature not usually found in the advertised prototype of a man. Ona’s environment ultimately punishes her for her need to meddle with her femininity by expediting her physical and mental deterioration and deeming her tainted for her “corrupt morality.” Thus, through the characterization of Ona, Sinclair indicates a vicious circle for women in impoverishment: a poor woman must defile and pervert her own femininity to survive in a demanding capitalist system,...