"Cliff Notes - Jungle, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Marija, Ona's cousin, is one of the most striking characters
in the novel. She is the one we'd bet on if asked to predict
which member of the family had the best chance of surviving.
When we meet her on the first page, she is in charge of the
wedding feast, seeing that "the best home traditions" are
respected. Later we learn that she has a "face full of
boundless good nature and the muscles of a dray
horse"--characteristics that helped her get her first job in
America, painting cans.

Yet she has a softness about her, as well. Tamoszius
discovers this and falls in love with her.

By the end of the novel, however, she is a whore and dope
addict, burned-out at the age of 24 or 25. Her remarkable
health has disappeared with the Old World values that served her
so poorly. She now takes "the business point of view";
prostitution is simply a way of making a living in the new
world--of surviving. "When people are starving," she says, "and
they have anything with a price, they ought to sell it, I
say."

What has happened to bring down this female counterpart of
Jurgis? She has had a lot of discouragement: job injuries,
layoffs, her family's dissolution. The final blow must have
been Tamoszius's disappearance after he lost a finger and could
no longer play the violin. We see her in the final chapter,
having given herself up to her fate. "I'll stay here till I
die, I guess. It's all I'm fit for."

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE: ONA LUKOSZAITE

Ona is her husband's opposite, and Sinclair introduces her as
such. She is "blue-eyed and fair, while Jurgis had great black
eyes with beetling brows." She has some education: he has none.
She is tiny "small for her age, a mere child"; Jurgis is huge,
with "mighty shoulders" and "giant hands." Clearly, she's going
to need protection in the predatory environment of Chicago. The
question from the start is whether Jurgis can provide it. In
the end, he cannot. She dies in childbirth at the age of 18,
four years after they'd met and two years after they'd married,
having lived less than three years in America.

The years between are brutal and take their toll on her body
and mind. Too timid to assert herself, she is cheated out of a
trolley transfer and must walk through rain to her job sewing
covers on hams. After childbirth, she returns to work too early
and suffers "womb trouble." Her coughing suggests she may have