Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-5nwft Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-21T21:23:29.060Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Jungle, The Harbor, and the Left’s Early Reception of Radical Sentimentalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2024

Nathaniel Cadle Open the ORCID record for Nathaniel Cadle [Opens in a new window]
Nathaniel Cadle*
Affiliation:
Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
*
Email: ncadle@fiu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay examines the efforts of Upton Sinclair and Ernest Poole to connect their respective novels The Jungle and The Harbor to the nineteenth-century sentimental literary tradition, as well as their leftist allies’ reception of those efforts. Sinclair consistently presented The Jungle as a second Uncle Tom’s Cabin, capable of moving readers to agitate on behalf of working-class immigrants, while Poole engaged reflexively with the tropes and traditions of sentimentalism in order to model for his readers how they should respond to The Harbor. Although both novels became bestsellers and influenced later writers of proletarian fiction, early leftist critics dismissed Sinclair and Poole’s sentimentalism as aesthetically simplistic and politically naïve. This essay turns instead to a slightly later contemporary of those critics, Antonio Gramsci, whose prison writings argue for the revolutionary potential of sentimentalism. Reading The Jungle and The Harbor through the lens of Gramsci’s analysis of organic intellectuals and the cathartic power of popular literary forms, this essay contends, resolves many of the problems those early critics identified in the novels.

Keywords

sentimental novelradical novelAmerican Leftreception studiesUpton Sinclair
Type
Article
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 23 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Literary Studies and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , January 2024 , pp. 69 - 83
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 A. S. Edwards, “Reflections on the Third Annual Convention,” Industrial Union Bulletin, Oct. 5, 1907, 2.

2 Edwards, “Reflections,” 2; Williamson, Jennifer A., Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism: Narrative Appropriation in American Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 8Google Scholar.

3 Tompkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 124.Google Scholar

4 Clark, Suzanne, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 4Google Scholar.

5 Mendelman, Lisa, Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 2, 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Chapman, Mary and Hendler, Glenn, eds., “Introduction,” Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Berlant, Lauren, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 21 Google Scholar.

8 Streeby, Shelley, Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 15 Google Scholar, 17. It is worth noting that, alongside the recovery work of the past four decades, a number of other scholars have offered various critiques of literary sentimentalism’s limitations, especially regarding its ability to build bonds of sympathy across racial lines. See, for instance, Nelson, Dana, “The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’” in American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Wexler, Laura, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Wanzo, Rebecca, The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

9 Fisher, Philip, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 91, 92.Google Scholar

10 Upton Sinclair, “What Life Means to Me,” Cosmopolitan Magazine, Oct. 1906, 594.

11 Poole, Ernest, The Bridge: My Own Story (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 95–96 Google Scholar.

12 Upton Sinclair, “The Jungle: A Story of Chicago,” Appeal to Reason, Feb. 11, 1905, 1, emphasis added.

13 Jack London, Letter to the Appeal to Reason, Appeal to Reason, Nov. 18, 1905, 5. In Talkin’ Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), Elliott Shore claims that Fred Warren envisioned The Jungle “as an ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the wage slaves’” as early as the autumn of 1904, when Warren commissioned Sinclair to write the story; see page 168.

14 Sinclair, Upton, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1962), 112 Google Scholar.

15 Hendler, Glenn, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 32 Google Scholar.

16 Mendelman, Modern Sentimentalism, 5, 6.

17 Nelson, Deborah, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 8, 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Gillman, Susan, “Networking Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Hyper Stowe in Early African American Print Culture,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Cohen, Lara Langer and Stein, Jordan Alexander (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 246 Google Scholar. Calling Ramona “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Indian” was already common by the time Fred Lewis Pattee published his A History of American Literature since 1870 (New York: Century, 1917), 255.

19 Gillman, “Networking Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 245–46.

20 Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle (1906; New York: Penguin, 1985), 29 Google Scholar. Further citations of this novel appear parenthetically.

21 Funchion, John, Novel Nostalgias: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 151 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Rideout, Walter B., The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956, 1992), 38 Google Scholar, original emphasis.

23 Rideout, Radical Novel, 151.

24 Michael Gold, “Go Left, Young Writers!” New Masses, Jan. 1929, 4.

25 Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, 50th anniversary ed. (1942; San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 397 Google Scholar.

26 Baldwin, James, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Notes of a Native Son (1955; Boston: Beacon, 1984), 19 Google Scholar.

27 Williamson, Twentieth-Century Sentimentalism 9, 8.

28 McKay, Claude, A Long Way from Home, ed. Jarrett, Gene Andrew (1937; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 111 Google Scholar.

29 Farrell, James T., A Note on Literary Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936, 1992), 21 Google Scholar.

30 Lenin, V. I., “British Pacifism and the British Dislike of Theory,” in Collected Works, vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress, 1964), 265 Google Scholar.

31 Rideout, Radical Novel, 36.

32 Rideout, Radical Novel, 56, 155.

33 Mumford, Lewis, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (1926; Boston: Beacon, 1957), ixGoogle Scholar.

34 To some extent, the early reception of these novels, especially The Jungle, continues to affect critical discussion of them, though comments about their “didacticism” and “propaganda” have replaced concerns about their “sentimentality.” Russ Castronovo considers the implications of The Jungle’s canonicity despite some critics’ misgivings about its aesthetic value in “Teaching the Good,” Journal of Narrative Theory 41 (Summer 2011): 167–74. See also Castronovo’s “Introduction” to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Jungle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xviii–xxv.

35 Gramsci, Antonio, “Parties and Masses,” in The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935, ed. Forgacs, David (1988; New York: New York University Press, 2000), 122–23Google Scholar, emphasis added. For other examples of Gramsci’s early dismissive views of sentimentalism, see page 122 in “The Popular University,” in The Gramsci Reader; and his 1916 discussion of Victor Hugo’s “sentimental fetishism of the ‘people’ [that] leave[s] one’s conscience undisturbed,” reprinted in Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. II, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 476n1.

36 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Manifesto of the Communist Party , in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Tucker, Robert C. (1848; New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 475–76Google Scholar.

37 Crane, Gregg, The Cambridge Introduction to the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 111 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 For a critique of the tendency to read this passage of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto as an expression of nostalgia for the family, see Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (London: Verso, 2022), 46–49. While Lewis compellingly argues that family abolitionism is inherent to Marxist theory, she does not account for the dialectical engagement with, in Raymond Williams’s terms, the residual and dominant structures of feeling of pre-capitalist and capitalist societies that Gramsci and other twentieth- and twenty-first-century Marxists have attempted. See Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press), 121–35.

39 Another notable Marxist to examine sentimentalism extensively and sympathetically, albeit almost exclusively from a historical perspective, was Leo Löwenthal, one of the members of the Frankfurt School. See especially Löwenthal, Leo and Fiske, Marjorie, “The Debate over Art and Popular Culture: Eighteenth-Century England as a Case Study,” in Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences, ed. Komarowsky, Mirra (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957)Google Scholar; rpt. as “Eighteenth Century England: A Case Study,” in Literature and Mass Culture, by Leo Löwenthal (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2016), 79–158.

40 Antonio Gramsci, “To Tania,” May 22, 1933, Letters from Prison, vol. II, ed. Frank Rosengarten, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 297. Gramsci’s complaint that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “filled with Quaker sentimentality” suggests that his opinion of the novel may have been influenced unconsciously by the legacy of some of the negative, anti-Protestant reviews of Stowe’s book in Italy. For this reception, see Rossi, Joseph, “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Protestantism in Italy,” American Quarterly 11 (Autumn 1959): 416–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Gramsci, “To Delio,” June 11, 1933, Letters from Prison, vol. II, 303.

42 Gramsci, “To Tania,” Aug. 1, 1933, Letters from Prison, vol. II, 316.

43 Gramsci, “To Tania,” Aug. 8, 1933, Letters from Prison, vol. II, 317; Gramsci, “To Julca,” Aug. 8, 1933, Letters from Prison, vol. II, 318. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was enormously popular in Italy, as elsewhere, and translations proliferated in a nation that the Risorgimento still had not unified fully. For discussions of the early translations to which Gramsci may have had access, see esp. 419n11 in Rossi, as well as Jackson, Frederick H., “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Italy,” Symposium 7 (Nov. 1953): 323–32Google Scholar.

44 Gramsci, Antonio, “Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and vice versa from Feeling to Understanding and to Knowing,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Hoare, Quintin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell (New York: International, 1971), 418–19Google Scholar. This particular notebook has not been translated completely into English. The passage that is translated in Selections from the Prison Notebooks exists out of its original context. David Rifkind of the University of Florida, Francesco Benelli of the Università di Bologna, and Emma Bond of the University of St. Andrews helped me parse the meaning of this passage in relation to the original Italian. For an account of when Gramsci worked on each of the various notebooks, see Schwarzmantel, John, The Routledge Guidebook to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (London: UK: Routledge, 2015), 39–65 Google Scholar.

45 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. III, 73, 52.

46 Gramsci, “To Tania,” Jan. 13, 1930, Letters from Prison, vol. I, 304–05.

47 Frank Rosengarten and Raymond Rosenthal, Introduction, Letters from Prison, vol. I, 18.

48 Gramsci, “To Tania,” Apr. 16, 1928, Letters from Prison, vol. I, 198.

49 Gramsci, “To Tania,” Mar. 11, 1929, Letters from Prison, vol. I, 251.

50 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. III, 46.

51 Poole, Ernest, The Harbor (1915; New York: Penguin, 2011) 227 Google Scholar. Further citations of this novel appear parenthetically.

52 Wilson, Edmund, Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 21 Google Scholar.

53 Wilson, Edmund, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), 29 Google Scholar.