Forget Prince Charming; I'm rescuing myself!

In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar hold up Vanity Fair's Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp as 19th century examples of the age-old female archetypes of angel and "monster." In the passage Gilbert and Gubar quote, Becky is seen as "writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling around corpses." She is, in short, not only a a proverbial monster, but an actual one as well (though she is "proper, agreeable, and decorous"on the surface.

I balked at this denouncement of Becky. Becky is one of the most sparkling and fearless heroines in all of literature; one whom I, personally, would be proud to relate to. She is sharp, like her last name, with beauty and to match her wit and cunning. She is ambitious and resourceful, and fights for everything; her arsenal is full of tools, and she is not afraid to use men's lust against them.

Gilbert and Gubar hold, however, that she is being depicted as "an emblem of filthy materiality, committed only to [her] private ends," and thus "an accident of nature." The very same behavior, assertion and aggressiveness, would be lauded in a man, of course, but not in little Becky Sharp.


The patriarchal hegemony would have her be more like her counterpart, Amelia: eternally calm and quiet and "good," and furthermore, in the words of Abbe d'Ancourt, cognizant of the fact that she "owes her Being to the Comfort and the Profit of man." This is not Becky, however, with her "demoniac" longing to escape into a reality where she sustains herself, free from the anima projections (as Carl Jung called them) of a man.

I am not (nor is Becky) waiting for Prince Charming. We'll rescue ourselves, thank you.

Into "The Jungle"

Prior to reading Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," all that I knew of it was that it dealt with the evils of the meat industry--and that, at some point, someone will fall into a meat grinder and meet his death (which I nervously awaited throughout the majority of my read, fearing for poor Jurgis, in fact, only to find this was only a passing remark, which didn't hold a candle to the death of young Stanislovas by rats).

So, with a modest amount of fervor, I opened up "The Jungle," expecting a somewhat tedious and perhaps sickening read, centering on horror and solemnity. But instead, to my surprise, I found a wedding! And hollering Marija! In short, I was intrigued at once. The reality of immigrant life in fin-de-siecle Chicago trickled in shortly, of course, as the narrator reminds the readers of his "friends' " staggering poverty, the debt incurred by this traditional veselija feast, the rampant drinking, and the awful but necessary eventuality of plodding through the snow to work the next morning--there will be no days off.

And so, at the close of chapter one, with Ona open his shoulders, Jurgis utters the phrase that is to set the stage for the entire novel: "I will work harder." This is his solution--the only one he knows, and he purposes to work harder and harder still, with all his heaving might, for nearly two thirds of the novel, as one by one his father, wife and child die off -- hapless victims of the struggle for survival within Capitalist society.

For the final third, I was less invested (still interested though); after Ona's death, one could still hope for Antenas, but after his drowning, I, with Jurgis, anticipated only and endless series of strife and malice. Jurgis turns to crime, and achieves luck for a time, but what is the point if there is no wife, no baby, to share this fortune with? And then even when socialism manages to stir Jurgis' soul, everything still seems lost; for is the once-effervescent, ebullient, hardy Marija not a weak, sickly, mamed whore, addicted to drugs? Is not Elzebieta going to die, along with the children, in the same way that the rest of the family has?

Sinclair did a masterful job of bringing to light the hideous evils of greedy Packingtown, and the Rudkus family is the perfect channel through which to draw his readers in. The text was amazing, until all but the last chapter, when Sinclair launched into a veritable pamphlet on Socialism, with not even the pretense of the "story" in the final pages.