b. Marxist Literary Criticism
For Marxism, literature is a social product that was born from a specific society. To understand literature means to understand the socioeconomic system
where it is produced Tyson, 2006:54. From Marxist perspectives, understanding literature is meaningless when it ignores the cultural and social condition from
which literature is departed. Tyson 2006:64 mentions that Marxist criticism aims to identify ideology in literature and focuses on the material and historical
force or the politics and ideologies of socioeconomic system that form the psychological experiences and behavior of people. The goal of this criticism is to
see whether the ideology in literature is to support or undermine its socioeconomic system. In that case, the concerns for Marxist critics are to reveal
how ideology that is produced by society is represented in the text and how it influence the way of life. By focusing on those aspects, hopefully Marxist critics
can increase the social awareness of society since they give clear analysis how the work is biased.
Marxist literary criticism as a tool to interpret literature is open which means the theory allows the critics to have difference voices and thoughts even
they use the same Marxist concept to interpret the same literary work. Marxist theory intends to help enrich the reading of literature. It tries to make people see
the most crucial ideas in literature that may not be seen so clearly and deeply without Marxist theory Tyson, 2006:68. In this way, Marxist literary criticism is
a useful theory to discover and know the essential idea of literature.
B. The Backgrounds of the Novel
1. The Author
Upton Beall Sinclair was a son of family who suffered from terrible financial problems. He was born on September, 20, 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland.
He lived in a tiny house with his parents who sold alcohol. Although his parents were poor, he had rich grandparents who let him visit them occasionally. Thus,
sometimes Sinclair also had experiences to live as a member of wealthy family. His dual contrast living experiences both in poverty and luxury gave a profound
influence in his thinking and played a major role in his writings. Moving to New York at the age of nine, Sinclair began to admire literature
and wrote some jokes and fictions for Magazines. In 1897, he went to Columbia University and was active in writing boy’s stories. As he could pay his college fee
through his writings, he dreamed to be a successful writer. He married Meta Fuller and had a son named David. In 1901, his unhappy marriage inspired him to
write a serious novel, Springtime and Harvest. He also had written several novels but all of them were not received well by the public.
In 1903, Sinclair began to know what called was socialism. His extreme life experiences between two worlds and his reading socialist weekly newspaper
and realistic novels like The People of the Abyss by Jack London and Octypus by Frank Norris turned him into a socialist. In 1905, he decided to form
Intercollegiate Socialist Society together with Jack London and other activists. He also worked as an investigative journalist at socialist newspaper called
Appeal to Reason. His editor asked him to dig up the horrible reality behind the
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