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Imagery In The Jungle And The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

Decent Essays

During the progressive era, 1900-1920, Chicago had a growing population due to the vast number of European immigrants settling there. By the 1900s, nearly 750,000 people, almost half of Chicago’s population was having to live in the central park. Trying to produce enough food to keep the city feed was grueling. It was about meeting the demand. When The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was published in 1906, which revealed the stomach turning ways of the meat packing companies, it caused the people to become enraged. In The Jungle, he uses disturbing visual imagery to describe the filthy conditions of the meat packing industry in Chicago during the progressive era, in order to get the public’s attention, henceforth gathering the public along his side to fight for better health codes.
In The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, he uses the idea of unhealthy food and no medicine, to counterbalance the chances the meat packing companies are taking, therefore causing a union to reform health codes for the better. In The Jungle, Upton states,
It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and

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