Title: The Meaning of Meat in Industrial Social Protest Novels;

An Analysis of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Yuri Olesha's Envy (1996 Third Year Paper)
Author(s): Kathleen M. Ryan
Subject & Subject keywords: Food and Drug Law "propoganda" "media" "mass communication"
Abstract:For centuries, writers with political and social agendas have used fiction both to promote causes and to incite their readerships and legislatures into action. This article analyzes the attempts of two twentieth-century Socialist writers to call attention to problems with their respective ruling political regimes and with the industrialization these regimes promoted. More specifically, this article addresses the ways in which both authors utilized meat products and the meat packing industry as vehicles for illuminating their concerns.

Chapter One examines the text and unintended political effects of Th e Jungle, a novel written by the famed American Socialist, Upton Beall Sinclair.' In this brutally realistic piece, Sinclair used meat images and metaphors to convey the plight of industrial slaughterhouse workers under Capitalist industrialization. In contrast, Chapter Two turns to the short modernist novel Envy, written by Soviet author Yuri Karlovich Olesha and to this text's fate under an oppressive Communist regime. In this novel, Olesha employed meat images to demonstrate the human price which may have to be paid for industrialization to succeed. Unlike Sinclair's critique of Capitalism, however, Olesha utilized meat imagery to question the value of Socialist industrialization given the sacrifices which Olesha believed were required by the Communist Party's agenda.

The following comparison of the literary devices utilized in these novels demonstrates how two authors use images of the same subject, the meat industry, to promote vastly different political and social agendas. The respective effect of these novels, however, illuminates many of the difficulties facing writers such as Sinclair and Olesha who try to communicate their beliefs to governments hostile to their views and to readerships potentially unconcerned with the author's ideology.