Taming Southern California Wilderness

Despite David Fine’s consideration of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1926) as the most ambitious novel about Los Angeles in the 1920s (2004), the novel received limited critical attention, except for an early reading of the novel as a debunking of Los Angeles’ crooked capitalist monopoly, and a recent renewed interest in ecocritical perspectives related to the oil industry and oil trade. Venturing beyond these two main threads, the essay offers a reading of the novel that focuses on human interaction with the Southern California flora and fauna and explores how human/animal relationships influence the social dynamics between the protagonists and oil workers. The analysis is thus structured in two main parts. First, it briefly situates the novel within literary transitions: as a “new frontier” novel and as one of the earliest examples of extractive fiction (M. S. Henry 2019). Second, drawing on “animality studies” (M. Lundblad 2013), it analyzes several instances of humans’ animalization and animality – the construction of the human/animal categories based on Darwinist-Freudian terms – and interrogates the application of the “survival of the fittest” discourse to the conflict of capital (oilmen) versus labor (socialist workers). Ultimately, it demonstrates that the conflict is instead resolved on the grounds of Christian piety and morality, due to the religious component with which the narrative imbues Socialism.