Social and Political Goals in Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Upton Sinclair

Mark Twain's short story, "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again," Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, tell the story of an oppressed group. The goal of each of these writers is to bring attention to and make the audience aware of the group he or she highlights. With the exception of Sinclair, the works do not call for a specific solution to the situation, instead simply showing in extreme detail the negative aspects. However, the need for change is certainly demonstrated by all the writers. Twain illustrates the struggles of Chinese immigrants to the United States in the late 19th century, Gilman shows women's lack of control over their lives in the late 19th century, and Sinclair writes the harsh conditions that face the working class in the early 20th century.

Twain's story, "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again," focuses on the plight of one Chinese immigrant to America, Ah Song Hi. The structure, language and plot all serve to illustrate the oppression of the Chinese immigrants. By telling the story through the eyes of Ah Song Hi, using the letters he writes to Ching-Foo about his experiences in America, Twain is able to take the audience inside Ah Song Hi's head and show his thoughts and feelings. This allows Twain to create a stark contrast between Ah Song Hi's idealistic thoughts about America and the reality of the America he discovers upon his arrival. Ah Song Hi, in his first letter, calls America "that noble realm where all are free and equal, and none reviled and abused. . . whose precious privilege it is to call herself the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave." He repeatedly praises America throughout the story. If Twain were to tell the story from an outside point of view, he would not be able to give as strong a voice to those who are oppressed because he could not tell as effectively their dreams about finally being in a country whose citizens, "having suffered themselves, . . . know what suffering is, . . . (and) long to be generous to other unfortunates."

Twain uses the elevated language of Ah Song Hi to illustrate the imagined America and the local color language of the Americans he meets to depict the real America. When Ah Song Hi is attacked by a dog, the dog's owners remark, "This Ching divil comes till Ameriky to take bread out o' dacent intilligent white men's mouths, and whin they try to defind their rights there's a dale o' fuss made about it." Twain uses the accents of the locals to distance them from the precise language of Ah Song Hi, who clings stubbornly throughout the story to his ideal of America, almost as if the real America still exists and all his experiences are mere aberrations. Even at the close of the story, Ah Song Hi seems more bewildered than he seems disillusioned. When he learns Chinamen cannot testify, he thinks to himself, "I felt the indignant blood rise to my cheek at this libel upon the Home of the Oppressed, where all men are free and equal," as if he were experiencing the exception and not the rule. He says he "had not fared well" in court, as if some other outcome to the trial besides being found guilty were a possibility. He even ends his last letter without any complaint or sense of injustice, simply relaying the events instead. This tone intensifies the argument that Twain makes for the rights of these Chinese immigrants because it shows the absolute faith that Ah Song Hi has in what America should be.

The plot of the story is a series of examples of Ah Song Hi being taken advantage of or lied to. Even before he steps foot on land, he is swindled out of some of his money by the American Consul for a certificate of passage. The captain of the boat scalds the Chinese passengers mercilessly with hot steam for quarreling, but Ah Song Hi says, "we do not complain, for my employer says this is the usual way of quieting disturbances on board the ship, and that it is done in the cabins among the Americans every day or two." As he leaves the boat, Ah Song Hi is beaten and his belongings are taken, then he loses the last of his money for a vaccination he does not need. He ends up without a job, is set upon with a dog, arrested, and sent to jail. The lone American who dares to stand up for him in the obviously corrupt court gives in and does not defend him at the trial. Twain makes it very clear through all of Ah Song Hi's experiences that he is an innocent immigrant taken advantage of in America and leaves the audience no choice but to agree.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman argues in "The Yellow Wallpaper" for women's rights. Like Twain, she tells the story from a first-person point of view. She uses the narrative structure, a mood of helplessness, and the speaker's eventual insanity to make this argument. The narrative structure takes the audience inside the mind of the speaker, who tells the story to her journal. This makes her words even more intimate than Ah Song Hi's, who were also written, but to another person. The speaker's thoughts are the only thing in her life that is completely her own and she does not share them with anyone, even hiding her journal from her husband, John. Gilman uses the journal to show the speaker's desire for a bit of control in her life. She writes, "I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way -- it is such a relief!" The speaker tells about her frustrations with her husband for making her rest because she thinks "congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good." She is confined to the hideous yellow room instead, forced to stare at a pattern that "is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide -- plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions."

The tone of the entire story carries a sense of helplessness. The speaker constantly writes in her journal her desires to go outside and her loathing of the room. But her pleas are continually ignored by her husband. She writes: "He says . . . I must use my self will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me." Whatever is wrong with her, John places the blame squarely on her shoulders, pressuring her to make herself well, while giving her no say in her treatment and confining her to a room with bars on the windows. He does not listen to her pleas to move downstairs or venture outside, chiding her for her foolishness.

The audience witnesses a decline in her mental state as she fails to improve in her health and begins to see a woman in the wallpaper. This disintegration is quite disturbing and shows the severity of her plight: she is in such an unhealthy situation that she is driven crazy. The conclusion is very disturbing and makes quite an impact. She spends the last few days obsessing about the wallpaper, watching the woman, and even notices the yellow smell of the wallpaper, which "creeps all over the house." She writes: "I don't sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments." Finally, the woman in the wallpaper begins "to crawl and shake the pattern," so the speaker tries to help her, and "before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper." She deteriorates quickly, locking herself in the room, trying to move the bolted down bed, biting off a piece of it, peeling off all the paper she can reach and wanting to jump out the window. John finds her creeping along the wall in the groove, perhaps worn there by a previous creeper, and the shock of his wife gone mad sends him unconscious. The speaker is obviously a lunatic by this point. What Gilman leaves open to interpretation is whether she was like this the whole time, or driven to it by her husband. But, whatever John did, it certainly did not work. Yet he, in all his wisdom, would not even let his wife give input into her own health.

Upton Sinclair writes The Jungle to illustrate the struggles of the working class in industrial society. His specific solution to the woes he describes is socialism, but his work more effectively exposes the hideous working conditions than it pushes socialism. Sinclair is a naturalist writer and he uses the naturalist philosophy to frame the lives of his characters. He tells the story from a third person point of view, unlike both "Goldsmith's Friend" and "Yellow Wallpaper." This narrative technique works with the naturalist style in that Sinclair writes of his characters almost distantly. The workers are tiny cogs in a huge wheel that revolves without a care for the individual pieces. They are parts of an impersonal machine and there is no higher purpose to their lives than the random events that are dropped on them. This makes Sinclair's argument for worker's rights more convincing because until they wrest control of their lives from the men on top, they will never have it. There is no justice or fairness to life, but they must make their own way despite its randomness.

Sinclair's tone reflects his belief in an impersonal world. He relates the gruesome details of life in the meat-packing plant with a stoic resolve. Of the sausage, he says, "there would come all the way from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white -- it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption." Elsewhere, he writes, "There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it." Sinclair writes pages of these inside glimpses of the meat-packing industry, yet he tells the worst details without any emotion. He tells of all the different afflictions the workers have: sores, finger joints eaten by acid, missing fingers, hands laced with cuts, rheumatism, and tuberculosis. These afflictions are just a part of the job according to Sinclair, and he includes them to show how miserable the lives are of those in the industry.

The plot of the story also makes a case for worker's rights and shows the impersonal world these workers struggle through. Sinclair says of Jurgis: "There was too much health in him." Jurgis laughs at the tales of men broken by the meat-packing life in a few short years, saying, "'but my back is broad.'" Despite his strength and the record-speed in which he is hired, he randomly sprains his ankle one day, an event "so utterly not to be forseen." Even the youngest, strongest men are not immune to bad fortune. Jurgis never regains his earlier form after this: "In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job the first day; but now he was secondhand, a damaged article, so to speak, and they did not want him." Sinclair calls these rejected men "the worn-out parts of the great merciless packing-machine." They were used until they had nothing left to offer, then discarded. "They were lost, they were going down -- there was no deliverance for them, no hope; for all the help it gave them the vast city in which they lived might have been an ocean waste, a wilderness, a desert, a tomb."

Each of these authors writes to bring attention to a group that is being somehow exploited. By structuring the story to show Ah Song Hi's thoughts, contrasting the idealistic imagery of Ah Song Hi with the local dialect of the Americans, and providing a steady stream of examples of oppression, Twain makes an argument against the corrupt system that takes advantage of Chinese immigrants. Gilman uses the narrative structure of the journal, the speaker's feeling of helplessness, and her decline into insanity to bring to light the lack of control women have in their lives and to argue that this is very unhealthy and unnatural. Sinclair brings attention to the plight of the working class by writing of his characters caught in a huge machine, with an impersonal tone in describing the details to reinforce the idea of the workers as tiny machine parts, and a story line that shows the machine using them and leaving them broken and discarded. Although none of these writers are very successful in forwarding a feasible solution to the obvious problems they describe, they do succeed in calling attention to oppressed groups.