SOURCE: Morris, Matthew J. “The Two Lives of Jurgis Rudkus.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 29, no. 2 (winter 1997): 50-67.

In the following essay, Morris examines the character Jurgis's evolving representative function in The Jungle.

William Dean Howells once warned that realism, like romance, would ultimately die as a truthful art form: “When realism becomes false to itself, when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too.”¹ He meant that realism must show some of the pattern of life, instead of merely accumulating description. That is a reasonable program, although Howells chose puzzling terms: one might just as easily have aligned “picturing” with formless description, and “mapping” with a realism that discloses the underlying structure of events. What does a map do if not subordinate surface appearances to a schema of spatial relations? But Howells was stressing precisely the schematic quality of a...