“Thus he grew in body and soul, and with him, his clothes seemed to grow and arrange themselves; coat sleeves got longer, cuffs appeared, and collars got less soiled…And we who saw daily a new thoughtfulness growing in his eyes began to expect something of this plodding boy. He had left his queer thought world and come back to a world of motion and of men…He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh.” (Chapter 13)
Through this passage Dubois uses imagery to highlight the eye opening experience that education can provide to those who are oppressed. He also shows that education can be used as a medium to combat oppression because it makes people aware of the gravity of the situation they’re in and allows them to think critically about how to resolve their issues. In this passage we are able to see the shift of John who was once described as carless and whom no one believed would get very far even while pursuing an education. John’s eventual success shows that education can be viewed as a means to freedom. While John wasn’t able to fully understand the oppression he was experiencing before he was educated, he began to notice the “oppression that had not seemed oppression before” once he got an education, and was able to begin working towards overcoming it. With this passage Dubois also seems to be describing a sort of transformation between the free person and the person who is not. The imagery of the shedding of the veil marks this distinction for when the “veil” has fallen a person has begun their path towards achieving freedom. In the section the follows this passage I also think that though Dubois does seem to view education as a step towards freedom he is also aware of the fact that regardless of how much education you get it will be really hard to escape your class since that seems to be something that is determined by race.
“all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.” (Chapter 1)
This quote is much deeper than on the surface mainly because it speaks on the awareness Black people have in order to succeed in a society that was built against them, in a country filled with White people thinking they are superior simply because of difference in appearance. With this statement, Du Bois is saying that Black people had to learn how to find their own faith to survive. The topic of faith can be spoken on just by itself as many forms of song and religion came from slavery as a way to feel connected to the cultures that have been ripped from them as well as creating an outlet to let go of the trauma and pain they have experienced. When it comes to money and intelligence, those who grew up privileged may not give it a second thought as they just measly have it and only start to care about it when families face abrupt bankruptcy and such. Black people were deemed inferior without them having a say in the matter. Money and intelligence as a Black person is known to get you to be noticed in the United States, however, even then one must work under the White man.
Du Bois understands the reality of society for these Black workers as White people feel bothered or challenged when a Black person goes against what they believe in. Although he is directly referencing faith, money and intelligence, he is also referencing how hard Black people work to succeed in this society and how self aware of how others see them they must be to maintain success. There is a reason Black excellence is a term used in today’s society, because till this day many people don’t have the connotations of Black individuals being intelligent as even our government is dominantly White. As a Latina, there is this idea that I should have gotten pregnant young and dropped out of school but more and more of us understand Du Bois and know that despite the system being designed for us to not succeed many people of color persevere past societal barriers and use their intelligence and financial literacy to create generational wealth.
Just the other day my professor told me her friend was one of the first Dominican women to become a Judge and my heart soared with joy because I can only imagine the hurdles she must have faced to gain a position in power. Every time a person of color succeeds that a big F YOU to the White supremacists whose skins crawls as they see us as animals but we finally make them acknowledge that there is nothing they can do that we cant.
Here is a link to the slides used for an in-class discussion of The Souls of Black Folk (focus on The Forethought, Of Our Spiritual Strivings, and Of the Meaning of Progress)
When explaining the path of knowledge and ubderstanding to freedom, DuBois says: “Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life” (Chapter 1). In this metaphor, freedom is a peak that one must traverse a difficult road to achieve. The journey to ultimate or true freedom is longer than the highway of emancipation and law but leads to a higher destination. By using the metaphorical imagery of roads and mountain, his comparison indicates that more rewarding and desirable freedom requires more work than declarations of legal freedom. Civil rights and political power are important stepping stones for freedom—a necessary stop on the “highway” to liberty—but getting to the summit is both more arduous and more gratifying, according to DuBois. This is a recurring theme in The Souls of Black Folk: it seems as if he argues that freedom must be a personal and communal self-realization—an achievement that goes beyond the supposed freedom allowed by white lawmakers. Equity, emancipation, and fulfillment require a fully realized identity and culture, which is why he emphasizes things like music, in the “Songs of Sorrow”.
Coming completely from a place of curiosity (not of assuming I know better or really have any place in this conversation) I wonder if this is a bit demeaning, as it places a bunch of responsibility to achieve freedom on the people whose freedom was stolen.
[NOTE: Because we have a shorter week, a comment reply AND a blog post are due by class Feb 24. To see more of these details, go to the class date in our “Course Schedule”on Cuny Commons”]
This week, I am offering a short video providing an overview of one of W.E.B. Du Bois’s major arguments in The Souls of Black Folk focusing on “the color line,” “double consciousness,” and “the veil.”
Here is the 3 min video:
Summary or key points of the video:
“The Colorline” and “the veil” are both metaphors, forms of figurative language that make comparisons to describe the Black experience in America.
The video takes ideas from The Souls of Black Folk and describes their meaning through the figure of a Black single mother who is also an executive. (I have some reservations about the creator making the contemporary figure specifically a single mother because it makes assumptions about the formation of the Black family, but it still demonstrates how we might use these concepts today).
Comment Reply Questions (choose ONE and write 2-3 sentences as ):
All that said, for the first comment reply option, draw upon the video and the reading and consider:
How might “double consciousness” or “the Veil” be useful terms for thinking not only about the Black experience but other American experiences? Or how might Du Bois’s argument be useful for other groups or other challenges in American soceity?
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Another key aspect of The Souls of Black Folk is that W.E.B. Du Bois includes selections of music before each chapter, which he refers to, in the final assigned chapter, as “the sorrow songs,” or songs sung by slaves during slavery and black people after emancipation. In this way, even though Du Bois’s work is written, it includes other mediums, the medium of music.:
2. What does the incorporation of music in The Souls of Black Folk signify, or what additional meaning does it add? To answer this question, you may consider the following passage from “The Sorrow Songs”:
“They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine…Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past” (Du Bois, Chapter XVI).
HINT and Historical context:
In responding to this question, you may want to consider how literacy was outlawed for slaves in America. In other words, it was a crime for enslaved people to learn and for anyone to teach an enslaved person.
If you are unfamiliar with slave law history (escaped slaves were actually supposed to be returned to their owners by any white citizen who found them in the north; laws against gathering in groups of more than three; laws against traveling on the road without a note, etc) check out the video below:
If you are unfamiliar, watch this video (about 9 mins) to learn more about slave laws. (Note that W.e.B.Du Bois is writing after slavery, which was abolished in 1863, but the laws and social customs still have an impact in 1903 when Dubois publishes his landmark text):
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3. Recall class on February 16 focused onThe Jungle Chapters 22-22, 26 to the end. In class, we discussed how Upton Sinclair describes the “Negro” or Black strikebreakers (you may also refer to them as African Americans). They are dehumanized and often seem like animals, a disease, or sinful. (If you need a review of these points, check out the Google slides for this session linked here “Strikes, Scabs, Sexwork, and Socialism”)
3. Compare Upton Sinclair’s depiction of Black of strikebreakers to W.E.B. Du Bois’s introspective question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” What do you notice?
To answer this question, here is one of the passages describing the black strike breakers in The Jungle:
“We] might see brawny negroes stripped to the waist and pounding each other for money, while a howling throng of three or four thousand surged about, men and women, young white girls from the country rubbing elbows with big buck negroes with daggers in their boots, while rows of woolly heads peered down from every window of the surrounding factories. The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa; and since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time they were free—free to gratify every passion, free to wreck themselves. They were wanted to break a strike, and when it was broken they would be shipped away, and their present masters would never see them again; and so whiskey and women were brought in by the carload and sold to them, and hell was let loose in the yards. Every night there were stabbings and shootings; it was said that the packers had blank permits, which enabled them to ship dead bodies from the city without troubling the authorities. (Sinclair, Chapter 26)”
and here is the passage from “Of our Spiritual Strivings” in The Souls of Black Folk:
“Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word (Du Bois, Chapter I).”
“She was a “settlement-worker, she explained to Elzbieta—she lived around on Ashland Avenue…Elzbieta was glad to have somebody to listen, and she told all their woes—what had happened to Ona, and the jail, and the loss of their home, and Marija’s accident, and how Ona had died, and how Jurgis could get no work. As she listened the pretty young lady’s eyes filled with tears, and in the midst of it she burst into weeping and hid her face on Elzbieta’s shoulder, quite regardless of the fact that the woman had on a dirty old wrapper and that the garret was full of fleas,” (Sinclair, Chapter 21).
This quote shows the reaction that “outsiders” have to the lives of immigrants during this time. Upon hearing about the horrible working conditions and unfair treatment that the family has to face, the settlement worker can hardly handle the reality of it and breaks down crying. I believe that this is a response Sinclair would hope to get from the his readers. I originally thought Sinclair’s book was successfully able to expose the cruelty and inhumanness of the meat packing industry and the effects that it had on workers and immigrant communities, by making his characters very sympathetic. However according to the article Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle:
Muckraking the Meat-Packing Industry, Sinclair was dismayed when the public reacted with outrage about the “filthy and falsely labeled meat but ignored the plight of the workers.” He states, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” As discussed in class it seems like a lot of people were more concerned with how their food was being handled than they were concerned with the actual safety/health of the workers.
“There were those who made the tins for the canned-meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood-poisoning . . . their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats . . . sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard” (Sinclair, Chapter 9).
Orm Øverland argues The Jungle is “an immigrant bildungsroman with a radical twist” despite its flaws and says this “naturalist” novel was written as a journalistic piece that allowed Sinclair to talk about his own experiences with meatpacking while understanding the society they live needs to change (Øverland, 4, 21). It’s not necessarily about the story, the novel is about everything else.
Upon publication, critics claimed the novel was exaggerated, but Sinclair stood by his depiction of Chicago’s meatpacking district with his editors’ support (Øverland, 3). Øverland said conservatives thought the novel was full of harmful lies, whereas liberals believed in its truth (Øverland, 3). For historians Louise Carroll Wade and James R. Barrett, Wade argued immigrants were “not passive victims of exploitation” and agrees with Barrett’s claim the novel failed to include how immigrants “built stable communities in the midst of this jungle through their secular and religious ethnic organizations and through trade unions” (Øverland, 2).
The Jungle is controversial and working conditions in the meatpacking district needed to be exposed. It’s not just about our consumption but the abuse of laborers. People are taken advantage of, exposed to dangerous chemicals every day, cut up as they work, infected by the meat they handle (e.g., “blood poisoning”), “f[a]ll into vats,” disintegrate and are ultimately eaten by the public. There is no care for laborers and consumers; so long as those in power profit, the public’s health is of little importance. It’s a blatant disregard of human life for monetary gain. Unfortunately, laborers need to hustle to get by in the society they live, and this relates back to Sinclair’s call for change regardless of the historical and literary context, and the critiques it received once published.
Øverland, Orm. “‘The Jungle’: From Lithuanian Peasant to American Socialist.” American Literary Realism, vol. 37, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27747149.
I would cast Hugh Jackman as Jurgis and Anne Hathaway as Ona in a movie adaptation for Jurgis. My main reason? I’m a massive sucker for how they worked together in the film adaptation for Le Misérables but I wish they had more time with each other, so here we are. Obviously this would be more preferable if the actors themselves were younger, because “She was so young—not quite sixteen—and small for her age, a mere child; and she had just been married—and married to Jurgis”, and Jurgis himself isn’t over a decade past her, but ya know, let cgi be cgi. Anyway, Hugh Jackman seems like the perfect guy to play a hardworking strong man to be a hopeful provider and also the perfect guy to watch it all fall apart.
As in how to adapt it, I would like the movie to be as close to the source material as possible, but I don’t make movies for a living, so how should I know what works and what doesn’t.
Florence Pugh as Ona (Credit: JA/Everett Collection [Photo via Newscom])Barry Keoghan as Jurgis (Credit: Photo by Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP/Shutterstock)
I would cast Florence Pugh as Ona, and Barry Keoghan as Jurgis. I believe they’re both talented actors whose interpretations of their characters could have as much of an emotional effect on their audience as Sinclair’s novel.
Ona is described as small, “blue-eyed and fair,” and Jurgis even feels “she [is not the] sort of woman” who should have to work (Sinclair, Ch. 1 & 3). In comparison, the narrator describes Jurgis as someone with “mighty shoulders,” “giant hands,” and “beetling” brows, but also says he “was like a boy” that bosses liked to get a hold of (Sinclair, Ch. 1 & 2). He was also called impatient and restless (Sinclair, Ch. 2).
These descriptions set Ona and Jurgis’ appearances against each other. Ona is the ideal woman physically, and the same goes for Jurgis as the ideal man (based on social conventions)—sort of like a match between the masculine and feminine. Pugh and Keoghan are about the same size; in other words, Pugh is not the “small” little woman Ona is described, and Keoghan is not this huge muscular man Jurgis is supposed to be. Their image is based on the narrator’s perception of them, but Ona and Jurgis are both normal children getting married in this film.
The film could be a musical adaptation, with a similar vibe to Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I expect the musical will feature large dance numbers, especially in the rain. It’d be extravagant, but the story would not change. We would also witness how disgusting Chicago’s meatpacking district is while Jurgis works there, and see how the couple struggles.
“Were the packers to let the union stewards march into their places and bind them to a contract that would lose them several thousand dollars a day for a year? Not much!
All this was in June; and before long the question was submitted to a referendum in the unions, and the decision was for a strike. It was the same in all the packinghouse cities; and suddenly the newspapers and public woke up to face the gruesome spectacle of a meat famine.” Sinclair – Chapter 26
This passage builds up suspense for the realities of what is to come after taking a stance against the horrors they have faced. Upton Sinclair created a public outcry of the horrible conditions in which workers slaved away their lives as civilians also trust the food they consumed is not contaminated. To be faced with the reality of your situation in the way this scene does as they break down their situation, one can’t help but be appalled and take action. These men see how unjust and inhumane their situation is so they chose to fight for themselves.
An article written by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) states, “In fact, the nauseating condition of the meat-packing industry that Upton Sinclair captured in The Jungle was the final precipitating force behind both a meat inspection law and a comprehensive food and drug law. Since 1879, nearly 100 bills had been introduced in Congress to regulate food and drugs; on 30 June 1906 President Roosevelt signed the Food and Drugs Act, known simply as the Wiley Act, a pillar of the Progressive era.”
It is incredible to know that such a large amount of bills were waiting 27 years. In those 27 years men like Antanas gave their lives to their work, meat was pumped with chemicals, and rooms flooded with blood no matter the time of day. It could have been prevented, however, what is most appalling is the thought that if Upton Sinclair didn’t expose the meatpacking industry, then how many more years would it have taken the government to pass those bills? The people of the United States were faced with the bitter truth that their food was primarily poison and was packed in a place that many feel resembles hell. Upton Sinclair opened the people’s eyes and they chose to take a stance and fight for what is just. This quote affirms the idea that receiving a reality check can create visceral responses, reading in detail how the industry functioned was what the people needed so that now, in today’s society there are these acts in place that not only protect the workers but everyone as a whole.
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