Alicia Mischa Renfroe
From Harriet Beecher Stowe’s indictment of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to Upton Sinclair’s attempt in The Jungle (1906) to write what Jack London described as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery” (London 1905: 2), nineteenth‐century American culture sparked protest fiction and reform movements to address a variety of issues, including slavery, women’s suffrage, urban poverty, temperance, immigration, labor relations, political corruption, prisons, asylums, and crime. After the Civil War, America experienced unprecedented industrialization, immigration, and urbanization. According to the US Census Bureau, the population was a little over 31 million in 1860, and by 1900 that number had more than doubled to 76 million; during the same period, the population of Sinclair’s Chicago grew from to 112 172 to 1.7 million and New York from 813 669 to 3.4 million. In an era of industrial capitalism, laissez‐faire economics, and growing corporate power, wealth rapidly accumulated in the hands of a few, and popularized versions of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism justified the growing gap between “the haves and the have nots” by positing that the strong would rise naturally to the top while competition eliminated the weak. Despite active labor federations and protests such as the Railroad Strike in 1877 and the Pullman Strike in 1894, many workers earned low wages for working long hours in dangerous conditions. In Lochner v. New York (1905), the US Supreme Court struck down a New York law limiting the hours of bakery employees to 60 per week on the grounds that the legislation interfered with “liberty of contract.” In his now‐famous dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. argued that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s social statistics.” Envisioned as a way to guarantee the rights of full citizenship for African Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment was interpreted as a means to protect corporations. At the same time, marginalized groups argued for expanded legal rights even as persistent inequalities in terms of race, class, and gender undermined faith in the legal system’s ability to guarantee justice for all. With the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, African American men, but not women, gained the right to vote; Susan B. Anthony protested by reading the “Declaration of Sentiments” outside the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876. Just 20 years later, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld segregated railroad cars on the principle of “separate but equal” and set the stage for years of Jim Crow laws; though Justice Harlan’s famous dissent claimed that “there is no caste here,” the majority decision reinforced racial inequality.
Zoe Trodd (2006) suggests that American protest writers “recognize the failed promises of the democratic experiment” and explore “the contradiction between what is and what ought to be” through a “critique of America’s founding documents” (xix). Thus, protest literature “gives distinctive shape to long‐accumulating grievances, claims old rights, and demands new ones” (xix). Often read as the text that began the American protest tradition, Uncle Tom’s Cabin employs a similar strategy by appealing to a higher law grounded in Christian principles to justify breaking the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In the concluding chapter, Stowe urges her readers that “there is one thing that every individual can do, – they can see to it that they feel right.” At the same time, Stowe recognizes that this approach may not be enough and turns to higher law in chapter 9, “In Which It Appears That a Senator Is But a Man.” Shortly before the fugitive slave Eliza and her son arrive on their doorstep, an Ohio couple debates the legitimacy of the new law. When Senator Bird admits that he voted for the law, his wife takes him to task: “I want to know if you think such as law as that is right and Christian? […] It’s a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it.” She uses higher law to justify her decision: “I don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible, and […] that Bible I mean to follow.” This conversation is crucial for Stowe’s argument: people who “feel right” will follow the dictates of higher law, here broadly described as Christian principles, and refuse to obey a contradictory law (Stowe 2008: 449, 114, 115). Like the invocation of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence, higher law provides an alternative standard of justice, a justification for rejecting the law of the land, and a powerful rhetorical strategy for protest.
During the late nineteenth century, many writers called attention to real‐world conditions and imagined alternative social orders in the interest of social justice. Focusing on Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron‐Mills” (1861), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), this chapter will trace two important strands of social protest literature, one emerging in the realist and naturalist novel and the other in the utopian novel. Often recognizing the tension between law and justice, these writers examine the inability of important social institutions to address inequality. For Davis, Sinclair, and others who draw on the emerging techniques of realism and naturalism to expose the harsh conditions of this world, law is an example of a social structure in dire need of reform even as it provides the language to justify that reform. By contrast, utopian novelists like Bellamy and Gilman propose alternative social orders in which the structure itself eliminates the need for law as means to resolve disputes or to articulate claims for justice.
Although Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, Looking Backward, and other protest works were bestsellers, social protest fiction has been a neglected genre in American literary studies, often criticized for being too political and didactic. Cecelia Tichi (2011) notes that propaganda, a term aligned in the twentieth century with “repressive and genocidal regimes,” plays an important but conflicted role in what she terms the “novel of civic protest” (395). For Tichi, such novels “exhibit a disciplined curtailment of interpretations” (399), and they “speak for and of their major characters but cannot speak to or with them” (403). In contrast, Amanda Claybaugh (2007) resuscitates the “novel of purpose” in her transatlantic study of social reform: “the novel of purpose, emerging as it does out of the reformist novel, reminds us that […] the nineteenth‐century novel was not simply moral but social, indeed political. It was actively seeking to remake the world that it was also seeking to represent” (36). Her approach suggests productive ways of situating American protest writers in conversation with their European counterparts such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, William Morris, Samuel Butler, and others.
Along with assumptions about the relationship between propaganda and art, other factors contribute to the complicated reception of social protest literature. As Chip Rhodes (2012) observes, the field of American literature was shaped by mid‐twentieth‐century scholars who emphasized romanticism and individualism over political protest; influential critics like Leslie Fielder and Richard Chase understood American literature “as a story of escape from politics, not engagement with it” (187). New historicist approaches in the 1980s and 1990s inspired increased attention to historical context, but protest fiction continued to be a neglected genre. For some, literature, as one discourse among others, cannot be properly said to critique its culture; Walter Benn Michaels (1987) suggests that Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, long read as an indictment of capitalism, actually reflects its values; he notes that “the only relation literature as such has to culture as such is that it is part of it” (27). Finally, many recent studies of late nineteenth‐century American literature, regardless of the theoretical focus, tend to focus on the literary movements of the period. While labels like “realism,” “naturalism,” and “sentimentalism” can be useful, they are also limited, often obscuring the importance of hybrid texts and other genres.
John Stauffer (2006) notes the absence of a “common understanding of protest literature” and suggests that “the term has been used to mean virtually all literature […] or no literature” (xii). As a corrective, he proposes a broad definition: “Protest literature functions as a catalyst, guide or mirror of social change. It not only critiques some aspect of society, but also suggests, either implicitly or explicitly, a solution to society’s ills” (xii). Stauffer identifies three common rhetorical strategies: empathy, shock value, and symbolic action (xiii). A concept drawn from the work of Kenneth Burke, symbolic action “implies indeterminacy of meaning, rich ambiguity, and open‐endedness in the text, which goes beyond the author’s intent” and “invites dialogue, debate, and interpretation among readers” (xiii). Most importantly, as Stauffer explains, “while protest literature seeks to ameliorate social evils, its primary effect is to empower and transform individuals” (xiii–xiv). Situated in the context of nineteenth‐century American literature, these rhetorical strategies suggest techniques associated with multiple, and often oppositional, literary movements with complicated reception histories. Stauffer’s suggestion that readers of protest literature must feel the pain of victims echoes Stowe’s injunction that readers must “feel right.” As several scholars argue, sentimentalism occupies a complex and often conflicted space in traditional accounts of American literature, and it is important to note that social protest literature often includes elements of sentimentalism that, in turn, may contribute to its marginal status. In his famous 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin describes Uncle Tom’s Cabin as both a “cornerstone of American social fiction” and “a very bad novel,” the latter because of its “excessive” sentimentality (Baldwin 1968: 9, 10). Along with appeals to feeling, protest fiction relies on shock value, which depends on gritty, realistic details that tend to be associated with naturalism, a label that can make it difficult to recognize protest and reform impulses. However, in “The Novel with a Purpose,” Frank Norris (1903), a key advocate of naturalism and disciple of the French writer Émile Zola, argues that “it is the complaint of the coward, this cry against the novel with a purpose, because it brings the tragedies and griefs of others to notice. Take this element from fiction, take from it the power and opportunity to prove that injustice, crime, and inequality do exist, and what is left? Just the amusing novels that entertain” (32). More recently, Donald Pizer (2006) suggests that traditional definitions of naturalism emphasize its philosophical roots in environmental, economic, and biological determinism and may obscure the way naturalism can work “as a form of radical expression” (201). In a similar vein, Jeanne Campbell Reesman (2012) reminds us that “Emile Zola’s reform politics informed the very birth of naturalism” (43).
Often likened to Zola during her own day – her obituary in the New York Times on 30 September 1910 notes her “stern but artistic realism” comparable “to a man of power not unlike Zola’s” – Rebecca Harding Davis published 10 novels, serialized 16 more, and penned hundreds of short stories and essays that examine a variety of social issues, including Reconstruction in Waiting for the Verdict (1867); political corruption in John Andross (1874); asylum reform in Put Out of the Way (1870); and married women’s property rights in A Law Unto Herself (1878). “Life in the Iron‐Mills” (1861) tells the story of Hugh Wolfe, an iron puddler and artist, and his cousin Deborah, a hunchbacked textile worker; their hand‐to‐mouth existence in harsh working conditions foregrounds the reality of economic oppression and prefigures the environmental determinism of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. Early in the story, Davis acknowledges that “many a political reformer […] and many a private reformer […] has gone among them [the workers] with a heart tender with Christ’s charity, and come out outraged, hardened” (Davis 1998: 42). Here, Davis suggests the importance of empathy as a catalyst for action, and her comment points to the tension between collective and individual action as mechanisms for reform.
Like Stowe, Davis looks outside the written law for a standard of justice; however, Davis’s version depends not on abstract appeals to higher law but on the particularity of Hugh Wolfe’s story.1 Her frame narrator insists: “I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me. […] I want you to hear this story” (41). Readers are urged to see all of the facts of Hugh’s life: “Be just: when I tell you about this night, see him as he is. Be just, – not like man’s law, which seizes on one isolated fact, but like God’s judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless cankering days of this man’s life” (49). Davis relies on shocking details about the workers and their environment. Set in an industrial town reminiscent of Dickens’s “Coketown” in his novel Hard Times (1854) and likely modeled on Davis’s hometown of Wheeling, Virginia (later West Virginia), “Life in the Iron‐Mills” foregrounds the costs of industrialization on “masses of men […] breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body” (40). This portrait of the worker is reinforced by descriptions of conditions “like a street in Hell” where “crowds of half‐clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire” (45). Hugh and Deb struggle to survive. Deb works 12 hours a day as a picker in a cotton mill and is likely hunchbacked as a result; known as “one of the girl men,” Hugh has a thin, weak frame and unhealthy yellow complexion (48).
Davis highlights the limited perspectives of both “political” and “private” reformers through a group of middle‐class visitors who visit the iron mill. Hugh uses korl – a waste product from the smelting process – to sculpt a “white [figure], of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning” (52). Davis uses the korl woman to explore contemporary attitudes about workers and reform, ranging from a utilitarian calculus of the number of “hands employed” in relation to the “sinking fund” or potential votes in an election to an ineffectual sense of charity grounded in self‐reliance and individualism (51, 52). For Kirby, the mill owner’s son, the workers are “brought […] to the polls” in support of capitalistic interests (51); legal reform through the democratic process is limited because political corruption trumps the possibility of collective action along class lines. In contrast, Mitchell, Kirby’s brother‐in‐law, emphasizes individualism, observing of Hugh’s sculpture, “It asks questions of God, and says ‘I have a right to know.’ Good God, how hungry it is” (54). Mitchell’s logic is akin to Stowe’s approach in Uncle Tom’s Cabin; he appeals to an abstract right to articulate a real‐world need. Dr. May employs a similar strategy when he encourages Hugh to “Make of yourself what you will. It is your right” (56) and later “to remember that it was his right to rise” (58). His logic reflects the abstract right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness embodied in the Declaration of Independence and suggests the complicated ways that reform movements and protest literature draw on foundational documents. As exemplars of potential private reformers, Mitchell and May are limited by their class‐bound perspectives, and neither recognizes the economic inequalities at the heart of Hugh’s situation. Davis further complicates this perspective when Deb steals a wallet, gives the money to Hugh, and argues that he has a “right to keep it” (61).
Reinforcing her economic critique, Davis suggests that powerful institutions, such as the church and the legal system, provide limited solutions. Contemplating his dilemma, Hugh visits a church where he cannot understand the sermon but recognizes the gap between himself and the congregation: “Was it not his right to live as they?” (62). Gesturing to the complicated ending of the story, Hugh turns instead to a sunset for inspiration: “The gates of that other world! What, in that world of Beauty, Content, and Right, were the petty laws, the mine and thine, of mill‐owners and mill‐hands?” (63). He experiences a new awareness of himself as “a man […] free to work, to live to love! Free! His right!” (63). This passage echoes Stowe’s appeals to a higher law, but Davis highlights their limits in the next line: “his soul took in the mean temptation, lapped it in fancied rights, in dreams of improved existences” (63). Here, abstract rights are mere fancies with little application in the real world.
Davis’s complicated ending encourages symbolic action as it invites readers to consider different models of protest and reform. Hugh’s story ends with an emphasis on these “petty laws” when Davis exposes the limits of the legal system in her representation of Hugh’s trial. In the courtroom battle of competing stories, Hugh has no legally recognizable voice, and Davis’s narrative strategy reinforces this point. Readers do not have access to Hugh’s testimony nor the slightly more formal account of it in the police reports. Instead, a jailer reports: “These mill‐hands are getting ’onbearable. When the sentence was read, he just looked up, and said the money was his by rights, and that all the world had gone wrong” (66). Hugh’s right, as he understands it, is not a right recognized by law, and his story, as Davis reminds us, is not one that can be articulated by the official narrative of the trial or understood by readers of the morning paper. In his jail cell shortly before his suicide, Hugh contemplates his fate: “But was there right or wrong for such as he? What was right? And who had ever taught him?” (68). With these questions, Davis indicts the legal system, as well as the public and private reformers who cannot hear his story, for their complicity in Hugh’s fate. In contrast, Deb finds solace in a Quaker community, situated literally outside the city and figuratively distanced from capitalism itself. The Quakers suggest an alternative social order but only a partial solution; many years later, Deb sits in a Quaker meeting house, “her worn face […] turned now and then to the sky” (73). Linked to Hugh and Deb in the concluding imagery, the korl woman also gets an ending; the narrator reports that “nothing remains” of Hugh’s story “but this figure of the mill‐woman cut in korl” (74). At the end of the story, the korl woman is veiled, hidden “behind a curtain” in the narrator’s library where the “gray light” of morning “touches its head like a blessing” as “its groping arm points […] to the far East, where […] God has set the promise of the Dawn” (74). Davis’s conclusion invites debate about the gap between abstract ideals and reality; as a figure of the worker, the korl woman gestures to the future – the dawn of a new day in this life or the next – yet remains hidden in the shadows. With this ambiguous ending, Davis suggests the limits of rights as a means to articulate claims for social justice.
Like Davis, Upton Sinclair foregrounds the plight of the working class, and much of his work explores the injustices of capitalism and reveals his life‐long commitment to social justice.2 He examines the accumulation of wealth in Metropolis (1908), the conditions in coal mines in King Coal (1917), the Teapot Dome scandal in Oil! (1927), and the automobile industry in The Flivver King (1937). An active socialist, Sinclair edited an anthology of protest writing titled A Cry for Justice (1915) and ran for political office several times on a socialist platform. But he continues to be best known for The Jungle (1906), his sensationalistic exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking industry and an immediate bestseller. He lived in the meatpacking district for seven weeks and disguised himself as a worker to see the slaughterhouses first hand. Labeled a “muckraker,” a term used in the Progressive era to describe reform‐minded investigative journalists who exposed corruption in business and politics, Sinclair hoped the novel would reveal the evils of wage slavery, particularly in a legal system that supported the interests of the capitalists.
In “What Life Means to Me,” Sinclair cites Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a model because he wanted to write a work of literature that would also reach a large audience and “shake the country out of its slumber” (1906: 593). Instead, his readers focused on the tainted meat that ended up on their own tables; as Sinclair put it, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident, I hit it in the stomach” (594). Horrified middle‐class readers learned about workers falling into lard vats and rat feces spicing the sausage, and the novel prompted a congressional investigation that later resulted in the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Despite its popularity and effectiveness (albeit on the wrong issue), many scholars view the novel as more propaganda than art, citing the turn to socialism in the final chapters as a major weakness. Sinclair distinguishes himself from the realists of his day by claiming that The Jungle “is the result of an attempt to combine the best of two widely different schools; to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola” (594). For Sinclair, “the proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of ‘art for art’s sake’ than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin” (594).
Relying on specific, often sensationalistic details, Sinclair emphasizes horrific working conditions, adulterated food, and prevalent corruption. The novel tells the story of a family of Lithuanian immigrants who arrive in Packingtown to pursue the American Dream. A strong young man, Jurgis Rudkus joins hundreds of workers on the killing beds, slaughtering animals for the Beef Trust and risking his life to support his young wife and their relatives. Like Stowe and Davis, Sinclair occasionally directly addresses his readers, inviting them to imagine themselves into the worker’s position:
Your hands are slippery, and your knife is slippery, and you are toiling like mad, when somebody happens to speak to you, or you strike a bone. Then your hand slips up on the blade, and there is a fearful gash. And that would not be so bad, only for the deadly contagion. The cut may heal, but you never can tell. […] There are learned people who can tell you out of the statistics that beef‐boners make forty cents an hour, but, perhaps, these people have never looked into a beef‐boner’s hands.
(Sinclair 2015: 12)
This early description emphasizes dangerous working conditions and the implications for injured workers, issues the family comes to understand firsthand. Marija and Jonas replace workers who are injured or dead; Jonas’s “predecessor had been […] crushed in a horrible and nameless manner” (71). Marija eventually turns to prostitution because she has lost part of her hand as a result of blood poisoning. In one of the most shocking details in the novel, men in the cooking room sometimes fall into rendering vats where they might be “overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard” (114). Jurgis’s father bribes a foreman by promising a third of his wages in exchange for a dangerous job mopping the pickling room and tossing the waste products back into the meat supply for processing; he eventually dies from breathing the toxic fumes. Ona pays for a position, is forced into a sexual relationship with her boss, and eventually joins her co‐workers who moonlight as prostitutes in a brothel run by the forelady. Even the church is complicit in this system: a priest signs a fake birth certificate to enable the underage Stanislovas to go to work. The other children sell newspapers, sleep in the downtown streets, and scavenge for food on a garbage dump. Sinclair makes it clear that all but the youngest must work if the family is to survive; in this environment, “it was a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost” (85). Though Jurgis believes he must only “work harder” (22) to succeed, he finally recognizes the extent of their plight when he is injured and loses his place. Bedridden while his family struggles to replace his income, Jurgis realizes that “It was true, it was true –, that here in this huge city, with its stores of heaped up wealth, human creatures might be hunted down and destroyed by the wild‐beast powers of nature” (134). As this passage suggests, Sinclair uses the techniques of naturalism to chart the family’s decline and relies on shocking details to generate empathy and action in his audience.
Throughout the novel, Sinclair suggests that law is a discourse of power that recognizes and legitimizes some experiences but not others. In this sense, the legal system itself plays an important role in the family’s destruction when the family “buys” a house without understanding the terms of the purchase contract. Despite warnings that people “had been done to death in the ‘buying a home’ swindle,” they want the American dream (54). Szedvilas, a friend who can read some English, recognizes the word “rental” again and again. The family pays for advice from two lawyers, but neither explains that the contract amounts to a rental agreement and also includes monthly interest payments, required insurance premiums, and fees to the city for water, sidewalks, and other improvements. Though advertised as brand new, the house is 15 years old and has been called home by a host of immigrant families, all of whom were unable to make the payments for the full term. A neighbor explains that the houses “were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them. When they failed – even if it were only by a single month – they would lose the house and all they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it all over again” (75–76). With the contract signed and no way out, the narrator notes that “they were like rats in a trap” and “victims of a relentless fate” (77). The law supports capitalistic interests and facilitates the exploitation of the poor.
Reinforcing this point, Sinclair uses a trial scene to bring to light social issues that the legal system elides; cultural anxieties about crime, immigration, labor, and class divisions coalesce into a seemingly simple question of guilt or innocence. When he learns that Ona’s boss, Conner, has coerced her into a sexual relationship, Jurgis attacks Conner, who uses his connections to bring criminal charges and blacklist Jurgis. At his trial, Jurgis faces a Packingtown judge with no lawyer and only limited English to tell his side of the story. The corrupt judge believes Conner’s account, and Jurgis is sentenced to 30 days. Jurgis realizes that “he was flung aside, like a bit of trash, the carcass of some animal” while “his whole family might be perishing in the cold” (83), but “that was their law, that was their justice” (84). Imprisoned like “a wild beast, a thing without sense or reason, without rights, without affections, without feelings,” Jurgis comes to understand that “there was no justice, there was no right, anywhere in it – it was only force” (184). Without his income, the family almost starves and loses the house: “the law was against them, the whole machinery of society was at their oppressors’ command” (204). Far from a neutral arbiter of disputes, law is a discourse of power, and the legal system supports capitalistic exploitation.
Like Davis, Sinclair emphasizes the gap between the abstract rights promised in the Declaration of Independence and the reality of workers’ lives. For him, socialism is the only way to address this discrepancy, since other Progressive era approaches to reform provide only partial solutions. Like Hugh Wolfe, Jurgis has only a vague notion of his rights, legal or otherwise; he does not understand what “right” means and initially believes it is “the right to hunt for a job” (66). However, after months of “working for the church” (a practice that forces the men to work off the clock), Jurgis comes to understand why “men talk of fighting for their rights,” and for a brief time joining the union seems to be the solution (101). However, much like Kirby’s view of his “hands” as potential votes, unions are complicit in the corruption that permeates the system. A union man helps Jurgis become a citizen and pays him to vote, multiple times, for a candidate who advances the meatpackers’ interests. After being blacklisted for the fight with Conner, Jurgis finds a job at the Harvester Works, a “place to which philanthropists and reformers pointed with pride” (227). With a large, clean work area, a restaurant, and a reading room, it seems a model factory, yet it closes without notice when demand for the product drops; Jurgis and his co‐workers join the “tens of thousands already in the city, homeless and begging for work” (231). Pointing to another reform, Sinclair introduces a settlement house worker who helps Jurgis secure a position in a steel mill, but his working conditions are reminiscent of Hugh Wolfe’s half a decade earlier: in a world of “liquid fire” and “roaring flame,” “the men in the mills were all black with soot and hollow‐eyed and gaunt; they worked with fierce intensity […] never lifting their eyes from their tasks” (236).
As these gestures toward Progressive era reforms imply, for Sinclair individual rights can be guaranteed only through collective action, and he argues that socialism produces the only equitable form of social organization. This aspect has generated much criticism since the uplifting ending seems inconsistent with the overwhelming details of the family’s destruction. During his conversion to socialism, Jurgis listens to speakers who debate the party’s platform; here, Sinclair illustrates different strands of socialism and encourages his readers to consider different approaches to change. Nicholas Schliemann, a philosopher and socialist, argues that government simply protects property rights, marriage is often a form of prostitution, and religion “poison[s] the mind” with its emphasis on the next life at the expense of this one (380). He imagines a new social order, akin to Edward Bellamy’s utopia in Looking Backward, in which private property is abolished. Comrade Lucas, in contrast, argues for Christian socialism, citing Jesus as “the true founder of the Socialist movement” (381). In what many scholars compare to a religious conversion, Jurgis joins the cause and becomes “a new man” who “would dwell in the sight of justice and walk arm in arm with power” (352). The novel ends with the call to organize and the rallying cry, “Chicago will be ours!” (395). In contrast to the ambiguous ending of “Life in the Iron‐Mills,” Sinclair provides a specific direction for protest and reform, and his hopeful ending exists in productive tension with the family’s horrific experiences.
Through accounts of a utopian future, novelists such as Edward Bellamy invite their readers to imagine exactly how “Chicago will be ours.” Along with realism and naturalism as vehicles for describing the world, utopian fiction is another important strand of protest fiction in late nineteenth‐century America. Unlike Davis, Sinclair, and others who showcase contemporary issues through vivid descriptions of the real world, utopians invent a new world that improves on the ills of their present‐day reality; both forms call for change and invite readers to imagine new forms of social organization. Fátima Vieira (2010) identifies several characteristics of utopia and argues that the most important is “the desire for a better life, caused by a feeling of discontentment towards the society one lives in” (6). Noting the relationship between utopias and reality, she points out that “utopists depart from the observation of the society they live in, note down the aspects that need to be changed, and imagine a place where the problems have been solved” (8). Further, utopian fiction does more than critique the existing social order; “utopias put forward projective ideas that are to be adopted by future audiences, which may cause real changes” (8). In Looking Backward and Herland, Bellamy and Gilman suggest alternative ways of organizing society that eliminate the need for law, both as a discourse of protest and as a system to be reformed.
Published just two years after the Haymarket Square Riot, a violent confrontation between the police and labor radicals during a protest in Chicago, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 examines the “labor question” and describes a peaceful transition to a future of cooperation and equality. A surprising bestseller of its time that was translated into several languages, the novel sparked an anarchist rebuttal from William Morris in News From Nowhere (1890) and inspired William Dean Howells to write his utopian “Altrurian trilogy,” A Traveler From Altruria (1894), Letters of an Altrurian Traveler (1904), and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907). Though he rejected socialism as a label, Bellamy championed national ownership of the means of production, a solution that flew in the face of American ideas about private property and individual rights; he called his approach “Nationalism,” and it clearly resonated with his mostly middle‐class audience, inspiring a political movement with its own magazine, The Nationalist, as well as over 400 nationalist clubs and associations across the country.
Looking Backward chronicles the time‐traveling adventures of Julian West, an insomniac who falls asleep in 1887 and awakens over 100 years later in Boston where he meets his hosts, Dr. Leete and his daughter Edith, a descendant of West’s nineteenth‐century fiancé. For West, who lives on his inheritance, the working class is a mere inconvenience, reduced to strikers who disrupt his wedding plans. In 2000, he struggles to make sense of a new order predicated on cooperation instead of self‐interest and grounded in a strong sense of the common good rather than individual rights. In the opening chapter, Bellamy illustrates “the relations of the rich and poor” in late nineteenth‐century America by using a horse‐drawn carriage as a metaphor. A small group of passengers rides on top while everyone else pulls the carriage or dies trying. Those at the top can leave their seats to heirs and believe they “[belong] to a higher order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn” even though some may fall and join “the toilers at the rope” while others are “trampled in the mire” (Bellamy 1995: 35, 34). In a capitalistic system driven by competition, self‐interest, and greed, the distinction between the comfortable passenger and the toiler is arbitrary and contingent.
In the tradition of protest literature, Bellamy indirectly appeals to abstract rights to justify his utopia. By 2000, the “labor question” has “solved itself” through “industrial evolution” (53). The corporations of the nineteenth century have merged into the Great Trust that represents all of the people and operates “in the common interest for the common profit” (57). This approach eliminates unnecessary competition and waste while providing equality for everyone. Bellamy implicitly invokes the American Revolution and “The Declaration” as precursors: “the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred odd years before they had assumed the conduct of their own government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely the same grounds that they had organized for political purposes” (57). The Great Trust operates through an Industrial Army made up of 18‐ to 25‐year‐old men and organized according to strict, military‐like policies designed to eliminate conflict; a man who refuses to serve “is sentenced to solitary imprisonment on bread and water until he consents,” and even the infirm, sick, and insane join an “invalid corps” (91). Most labor issues have disappeared, apparently without reform, violence, or revolution. Workers enter professions based on their abilities and interests, and unlike the “private capitalists and corporations” of the nineteenth century, “the nation does not maim and slaughter its workmen by the thousands” (62). In lieu of wages tied to specific jobs, each worker receives the same credit by virtue of “his humanity, and “the basis of his claim is the fact that he is a man” (74). For modern Bostonians, “desert is a moral question” that should not be determined “by a material standard” (75). The new order eliminates the negative effects of urbanization and industrialization. The city is clean, with tree‐lined streets and beautiful buildings; consumer goods are readily available at fixed prices and delivered to local distribution centers; and people choose homes according to need, rather than the desire to compete with their neighbors in a game of conspicuous consumption.
In a world without private property and premised on absolute equality, the legal system is largely irrelevant. In West’s nineteenth‐century Boston, inequality produced crime as “want tempted the poor, [and] lust of greater gains […] tempted the well‐to‐do” (128). With no private property or money, Leete’s Boston 2000 has eliminated lawyers, juries, prisons, and most written law; hospitals address atavistic crimes committed by “the ignorant and bestial” and “explained as the outcropping of ancestral traits” (128). Most defendants simply admit their guilt, and in the rare instance of a “not guilty” plea, a judge appoints two other judges to present the case. The result is a “trial by three judges occupying different points of view,” and their decision is “as near to absolute truth as men can come” (130). If they disagree, a new group hears the case until a unanimous decision results. Ultimately, utopia does not need law at all; as Leete explains, “We have nothing to make laws about. The fundamental principles on which our society is founded settle for all time the strifes and misunderstandings which in your day called for legislation” (132).
Though these “fundamental principles” apparently eliminate economic inequality, gender issues persist, and discussions of “race” eliminate all reference to racial or ethnic minorities. Women serve in the Industrial Army, even after marriage, in all‐female groups, earn credits in their own names, and leave only to bear children. However, they work shorter hours and perform gendered tasks that reflect nineteenth‐century assumptions about women’s roles; a woman is not allowed “to follow any employment not perfectly adapted […] to her sex” (155). Because women do not depend on men for financial support, “love matches” allow sexual selection “to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out” (160). Bellamy ends with West awakening from a nightmare in which he returns to the “Inferno” of his Boston. Safely back in Boston 2000, Edith comforts him like a quintessential nineteenth‐century heroine, and West concludes, “Fortunate is he who, with a case as desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful” (193). As this line suggests, Bellamy’s 2000 retains much of 1887.
While Bellamy focuses primarily on economic issues, Charlotte Perkins Gilman foregrounds the social construction of gender in Herland (1915), one of her three utopian novels and an expansion of the ideas developed in her feminist treatise Women and Economics (1898). The novel describes the adventures of three American men who encounter an all‐female society and eventually marry three of its inhabitants. None of the men are “the least ‘advanced’ on the woman question,” and their attitudes reflect contemporary ideas about gender (Gilman 1979: 9). The narrator, Vandyke Jennings, is a sociologist who is “highly scientific” and able “to argue learnedly about the physiological limitations of the sex” (9). Jeff Margrave is a doctor who “idealized women in the best Southern style […] of chivalry and sentiment” (9). Terry O. Nicholson is the most misogynistic of the three, imagining a “sublimated summer resort – just Girls and Girls and Girls” (7). When they encounter only women, Van exclaims, “[T]his is a civilized country! […] There must be men” (11). The rest of novel invites readers to question his patriarchal assumption.
Influenced by Bellamy’s nationalism, Gilman imagines an alternative order that exposes the social construction of gender. At first, the men are confined until they learn enough of the Herlanders’ language and customs to interact with the larger society; they encounter a different world. Existing independently of men for over 2000 years, the matriarchal community runs according to principles of cooperation, and, with no gendered division of labor, women fill all kinds of roles, so references to “feminine” and “masculine characteristics” do not exist (57). Herlanders are athletic, wear practical clothing, and share in the education and upbringing of their children, conceived through single‐sex parthenogenesis. Herlanders manage population growth through “‘negative eugenics’” and view Motherhood, defined as educating and caring for children, as the “highest art” (69); women share childcare and leave education to those “most fit” to perform the task (83). Since women are not confined to the home by childrearing and other domestic responsibilities, they are free to pursue other activities. The women are surprised to learn about patriarchal religion, marriage, and gender roles in America; in their world, there is “no accepted standard of what was ‘manly’ and what was ‘womanly’” (92). They do not understand why women must take their husbands’ names and give up occupations outside the home.
In Herland, like Looking Backward, various reforms make law and a legal system virtually unnecessary. While Americans draw on “systems of law that go back thousands and thousands of years,” Herlanders “have no laws over a hundred years old” because they update the few laws that they need (63). They do not need law because they do not have criminals; it has been 600 years since Herland has had a “criminal” because the women make it a point “to train out, to breed out, when possible, the lowest types” (82). Indeed, the only “criminal” in the novel turns out to be Terry. When he marries Alima, he expects to claim his marital rights, as he would be legally entitled to do in early twentieth‐century America. As Van explains it, “Terry put into practice his pet conviction that a woman loves to be mastered, and by sheer brute force, in all the pride and passion of his intense masculinity, he tried to master this woman” (132). Unlike an American court, where “he would have been held quite ‘within his rights,’” the Herlanders convict him of “an unpardonable sin” and order him to leave the country with his promise not to expose the location (132, 134). Although Jeff stays with his pregnant wife in Herland, Van returns home with Terry, so a crime predicated on patriarchal assumptions ends their encounter with an all‐female utopia.
Drawing primarily on four texts, this chapter examines two strands in the protest literature of the period; however, many other works might have been included for productive comparison. As Jean Pfaelzer (2012) observes, though utopian novels “promise […] political, financial, and gender equality, they also project on the future the recovery of an idealized white past” (323). Neither Bellamy nor Gilman refer to racial or ethnic minorities. In “Life in the Iron‐Mills,” Davis mentions slavery only in passing, though she later offered a more thorough treatment of racial issues in Waiting for the Verdict (1867). While Sinclair in The Jungle depicts African Americans as stereotypical strikebreakers, several African American writers use protest literature to examine racism and violence. Ida B. Wells incorporated newspaper articles and other documents to expose lynching and other abuses in Southern Horrors (1892). Charles Chesnutt portrays the rise of white supremacism and the notorious Wilmington, North Carolina race riot of 1898 in his historical novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Drawing on the techniques of naturalism, Paul Lawrence Dunbar in The Sport of the Gods (1902) tells the story of an African American family forced to move to New York when the father is falsely accused of theft. Other examinations of urban poverty include Charles Loring Brace’s The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872), Lincoln Steffens’s Shame of Cities (1904), Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), and Jane Adams’s Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). The photojournalist Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) incorporates photographs and statistics to expose the brutal conditions of life in the New York slums, appealing “for justice […] from the public conscience”; and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) offers a fictionalized account of that “other half” in New York’s Bowery district, a world of squalid tenements, alcoholism, and violence. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871) examines the plight of female factory workers as well as the legal status of middle‐class women. In A Century of Dishonor (1881), Helen Hunt Jackson critiques policies about Native Americans by drawing on the language of the Declaration of Independence; and she models Ramona (1884), originally titled In the Name of the Law, on Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In his introduction to Sinclair’s radical anthology The Cry for Justice, Jack London predicts that after reading hundreds of pages excerpted from “the humanist thinkers of the world,” the audience will realize that “this fair world so brutally unfair, is not decreed by the will of God nor by any iron law of Nature” and “that the world can be fashioned a fair world indeed by the humans who inhabit it, by the very simple, and yet most difficult process of coming to an understanding of the world” (London 1915: 3). For London, God’s will and the laws of nature do not provide an ideal standard by which to measure justice in this world; they therefore cannot be invoked as deterministic forces to justify injustice. As this chapter suggests, protest literature often appeals to natural rights invoked by foundational documents or to higher law grounded in religious traditions to justify the extension of abstract rights to others. While they draw on this strategy to some extent, both Davis and Sinclair suggest the limits of abstract rights as a means to redress real‐world wrongs. In contrast, in the utopian worlds of Bellamy and Gilman, a new social order virtually eliminates the need for law. Taken together, these writers signal a shift in how law works as a discourse of protest or reform and invite conversation about the myriad ways to challenge the dominant culture in the interest of social justice.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 25 (NATURALISM); CHAPTER 27 (THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE).