Naturalism and Infrastructure of Force: Labor, Systems, and Survival in The Octopus, The Call of the Wild, and The Jungle
Document Type
Presentation
Date of Original Version
3-27-2026
Abstract
This paper argues that American literary naturalism develops into a narrative method for diagnosing how industrial capitalism organizes and distributes force across bodies, labor, and environments. Reading The Octopus (1901), The Call of the Wild (1903), and The Jungle (1906) together reveals how naturalist fiction progressively shifts the scale of explanation—from the contingencies of individual misfortune to the structural mechanisms that govern labor, value, and bodily survival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States. Across these texts, suffering appears not as the consequence of moral failure or personal deficiency but as the predictable outcome of systems—railroad networks, extractive economies, and industrial institutions—that organize life according to impersonal logics of production, circulation, and exhaustion. In The Octopus, the agricultural West no longer appears as pastoral landscape but as infrastructure: railroads, freight rates, and speculative capital reorganize land and labor within a volatile national network. Violence here does not originate in isolated villainy but emerges from systemic pressures embedded in corporate consolidation, legal regimes, and the logistical architecture of the modern economy. Jack London’s The Call of the Wild radicalizes this insight by stripping the system to its biological substrate. Within the Klondike’s extractive economy, the “law of club and fang” renders force legible without institutional mediation: bodies are disciplined, valued, and discarded according to their capacity to generate labor within a regime of survival and exhaustion. Where Norris maps infrastructural domination and London dramatizes its elemental logic, Upton Sinclair returns this force to the industrial city. In The Jungle, Chicago’s political and economic institutions operate as coordinated mechanisms that metabolize immigrant life into expendable labor within what Sinclair names a vast “army of graft.” Taken together, these novels reveal naturalism not as a pessimistic literary style but as a diagnostic epistemology of modernity. By tracing how systemic pressures distribute force across bodies, labor, and environments, naturalist fiction exposes the structural conditions that render suffering predictable, reproducible, and resistant to moral recognition alone.
Recommended Citation
Wojcik, Karolina Sylwia, "Naturalism and Infrastructure of Force: Labor, Systems, and Survival in The Octopus, The Call of the Wild, and The Jungle" (2026). Oral Presentations. Paper 31.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/gradcon2026-presentations/31