The Jungle

Ona Lukoszaite is Jurgis’s fiancée and later his wife. She is the daughter of a well-to-do Lithuanian farmer. Following his death, she and her stepmother Elzbieta decide to emigrate to America with Jurgis. 

At the time of her marriage, Ona is a sweet, shy, and affectionate girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. She is not quite 16 and physically petite, but nevertheless has no choice but to work to help support the family. This proves disastrous when she is forced to return to her job wrapping hams only a week after giving birth to her son Antanas—an ordeal she never recovers from. Her mental state likewise deteriorates, in part because of the strain that poverty places on her relationship with Jurgis, and in part because a foreman at her workplace—Phil Connor—harasses her and coerce her into having sex. Ona goes into premature labor while her husband is in prison and dies shortly after he returns home. As The Jungle frames it, her story is emblematic of the fate of women under unfettered capitalism: exploited for work and for sex, and prevented from fulfilling their ideal role as wives and mothers.

Marija Berczynskas is her cousin Ona’s physical and temperamental opposite she is “short, but powerful in build” with “a broad Slavic face, with prominent red cheeks” (8), and is stubborn and outspoken by nature. Orphaned as a child, Marija worked for an abusive farmer until she was twenty, at which point she decided to accompany Ona to America in search of a better life. There, she initially has little difficulty finding work painting cans; with the money she earns, she becomes a partial owner of the family’s house. She plans to marry Tamoszius Kuszleika. 

Like the rest of the family, however, Marija is gradually broken by the grim realities of life in Packingtown, which include unexpected layoffs and bouts of blood poisoning. She is forced to repeatedly postpone her plans to marry and eventually to abandon them entirely. When Jurgis reconnects with her after returning to Chicago, she is supporting the family by working as a prostitute. Now addicted to morphine, Marija is so jaded and desensitized that she can’t be persuaded to hope for anything better from life. Like Ona, Marija illustrates capitalism’s destructive influence on the domestic sphere, particularly on female gender norms. 

“Teta” Elzbieta is Ona’s stepmother and the mother of six children of her own. She married Ona’s father when Ona was a small child, and the two are very close. As a result, she accompanies Ona and Jurgis when they emigrate. Once in America, Elzbieta does her best to preserve the customs and culture of life in Lithuania, insisting, for example, that Ona and Jurgis have a traditional wedding: “[S]he had been a person of importance in her girlhood—had lived on a big estate and had servants […] They were not going to lose all caste, even if they had come to be unskilled labourers in Packingtown” (70).

In part as a result of this respect for tradition, Elzbieta eventually takes a job in a sausage-room; by doing so, she hopes to be able to keep her youngest children from having to sell newspapers on the street—a job that exposes them to questionable influences. Nevertheless, she is eventually forced to accept the moral compromises of life in capitalist America. When Jurgis reconnects with her, she is living largely off of Marija’s income as a prostitute. As Sinclair describes her, Elzbieta is long-suffering and largely uncomplaining, with an innate instinct to persevere and to avoid reflecting too deeply on her situation. In this sense, Sinclair implies Elzbieta is well-adapted to life in Packingtown, which tends to deaden residents to anything but their own survival.

“Dede” Antanas is Jurgis’s 60-year-old father. He is a gentle-natured, hardworking, and loyal man with a love of learning. He fancies himself something of a scholar and is optimistic about the family’s decision to emigrate, despite the fact that it means leaving behind his modest farmstead in Lithuania. Once in America, however, Antanas’s relative old age makes most employers reluctant to hire him. Worse still, when he finally secures a job mopping the floor of Durham’s “pickle rooms,” the working conditions soon take a toll on his health; he dies—likely from tuberculosis— during the family’s first winter in America. His story is thus representative of the callous way in which unfettered capitalism discards those unable to work on account of age, illness, or infirmity.

Jonas is Elzbieta’s brother. He is a “dried-up little man” who works on his brother-in-law's farm (24) and who proposes going to America after the man’s death, explaining that a friend of his became rich there. He takes a job pushing a truck at Durham’s when the family settles in Packingtown and becomes a partial owner of the house they purchase. However, he fails to come home one day during the family’s second winter in Chicago, and his relatives never learn whether he died in a hushed-up workplace accident or whether he simply decided to strike out on his own in the hopes of securing a less miserable existence. 

Antanas Rudkus is Jurgis and Ona’s only child. Named after Jurgis’s father, Antanas is a healthy, intelligent, and happy baby with dark, curly hair and “the brightest little black eyes” (120). Jurgis dotes on his son, and in the aftermath of Ona’s death, Antanas becomes “his one hope, [and] his one victory” (235). As a result, when Antanas drowns in a flooded street, it destroys any lingering faith Jurgis had in the promise of American capitalism, and temporarily sets him on a path of self-interest and corruption. 

Jack Duane is a cheerful and “dapper young fellow, with a light brown moustache and blue eyes and a graceful figure” (182). Formerly an electrical engineer, Duane became a robber and safe-breaker after a company cheated him out of the profits for one of his inventions. Jurgis first meets him when the two are sharing a jail cell. Duane takes Jurgis under his wing, introducing him to the world of petty crime and paving the way for Jurgis’s eventual entry into dirty politics. By striking back against a corrupt system in a similarly corrupt fashion, Duane embodies one possible response to the brutality of capitalism, though not the one The Jungle ultimately endorses.

Freddie Jones is the son of one of Chicago's meatpacking magnates. He is roughly 18 and has a “handsome boyish face” (262). When Jurgis happens to encounter him one night, Freddie is very drunk and takes an immediate liking to Jurgis. He insists that Jurgis accompany him home for a meal and entrusts him with a $100-bill for cab fare; Freddie’s carelessness with this money, coupled with his generally airy though kind demeanor, speaks to the wildly different worlds in which the company owners and the workers they employ live.

Of Elzbieta’s six children—Ona’s half-siblings—the one who plays the most prominent role in The Jungle is her eldest child, Stanislovas. He is 13 and small for his age when the family first comes to America, but they soon have no choice but to pull him out of school and send him to work filling lard cans at Durham’s. The harsh winter commutes to and from work cause him to develop a phobia of the cold and snow, and he is eventually killed by rats after drinking himself into a stupor and becoming locked inside a factory when it closes for the night.

Elzbieta’s younger children include a daughter Kotrina, who is 11 when the family emigrates, and four sons—Vilimas, Nikalojus, Juozapas, and Kristoforas—ranging in age from nine downwards. The two youngest boys are disabled, Juozapas having lost a leg in an accident and Kristoforas due to a congenital hip deformity and rickets. The latter dies at the age of three as a result of food poisoning. Meanwhile, Vilimas and Nikalojus are forced to begin selling newspapers when they are 11 and ten, respectively. This work exposes them to a variety of influences the family finds distressing, including gambling dens, saloons, and brothels. Although Kotrina initially does much of the housekeeping, she later begins selling papers as well and is at one point nearly assaulted by a man on the street. 

The most important politician in Packingtown is the alderman Mike Scully: a “little, dried-up Irishman” with “rat-like eyes” (293). He’s the boss of the local Democratic Party and thus wields outsized influence not only within the district, which nearly always votes Democratic, and also throughout all of Chicago, where the economy depends on the meatpacking business. Although he portrays himself as a friend of the workers, he is i very rich—among other things, he owns the brickyards and the local dump—and he uses his power to serve the interests of the meatpackers. Scully is also deeply corrupt, as Jurgis discovers when he finds himself employed by him to help fix a local election. Another prominent local figure is Judge Pat Callahan, a corrupt magistrate with ties to both organized crime and the meatpacking companies who sentences Jurgis to 30 days in jail for assaulting Phil Connor.

In addition to those in official government positions, The Jungle also features a number of characters who work unofficially to help rig the political system. These include “Buck” Halloran, a political fixer who first introduces Jurgis to the world of dirty politics, and “Bush” Harper, who works as a night watchman and is also a trusted associate of Scully’s. Harper helps Jurgis become a citizen so that he can vote for Harper’s preferred candidate and later hires him to help throw a Packingtown election to the Republicans.

Finally, there is Phil Connor: a “coarse, red-faced Irishman” (119) who is a foreman at the wrapping room where Ona works and an associate of Scully’s. He has a reputation for harassing the female workers and eventually coerces Ona into having sex with him by threatening to have her and the rest of her family fired. Jurgis attacks Connor twice over the course of the novel—once after learning that he raped Ona, and later after stumbling across him in the street—with disastrous consequences each time.

When the Rudkus-Lukoszaite family move to America, they settle in an area of Chicago where many other Lithuanian immigrants live and work. These include Aniele Jukniene—an elderly widow and washerwoman who runs a cramped and filthy lodging house—and Grandmother Majauszkiene, who lives in a house close to the family’s and first warns them of the construction company’s treachery. In addition, the family reconnects with a friend of Jonas’s from Lithuania named Jokubas Szedvilas, a “fat and hearty” man who runs a delicatessen in Packingtown (9). Although Szedvilas hasn’t become as prosperous in America as Jonas believed, he is comparatively well-off and tries to help the family by lending them money.

Finally, the family meets Tamoszius Kuszleika, a small and “excitable” man who folds hides at Brown's and plays the violin in his spare time (94). He earns extra money by doing so, and while playing at Jurgis’s and Ona’s wedding, he meets and falls in love with Marija. The two plan to marry, but are forced to continually put off the wedding due to her family’s poverty and misfortunes. Tamoszius lends the family what he can before losing a finger —and thus his ability to play the violin—to blood poisoning. When Jurgis discovers Marija in the brothel, she says she hasn’t seen Tamoszius for more than a year.