SOURCE: Derrick, Scott. “What a Beating Feels Like: Authorship, Dissolution, and Masculinity in Sinclair's The Jungle.” Studies in American Fiction 23, no. 1 (spring 1995): 85-100.

In the following essay, Derrick analyzes Sinclair's use of naturalism in order to explicate the gender roles in The Jungle.

American naturalism owes much of its contemporary power to the success of its efforts to depict a thoroughly decentered subject. The naturalist text typically represents the determining impact of various and sundry social and natural forces on its characters and diminishes the importance of consciousness as the cause of the actions it records. Naturalist style, long criticized for lacking high modernist polish, actually contributes through its rawness to this effect. Rather than presenting themselves as intricate products of careful craftsmen, naturalist fictions such as Sister Carrie or The Sea-Wolf often seem hammered directly into being by a remorseless reality. Such novels ask for interpretation in...