In the harsh winters of the American Midwest, the wind is personified as a "cruel" and "biting" entity that tests the endurance of Chicago’s unhappy residents:
There came cruel, cold, and biting winds, and blizzards of snow, all testing relentlessly for failing muscles and impoverished blood. Sooner or later came the day when the unfit one did not report for work; and then, with no time lost in waiting, and no inquiries or regrets, there was a chance for a new hand.
In this passage, the wind is portrayed as having agency, actively seeking out weakness, and exploiting it. The wind acts as an antagonist to Jurgis and his family, representing the harsh and unforgiving nature of their circumstances.
By personifying the wind, Sinclair creates a vivid and tangible representation of the challenges faced by the immigrant families of Packingtown. The wind appears to be working in cahoots with the cruel system of capitalist exploitation. This highlights the relentless and oppressive nature of their environment, as the wind becomes yet another powerful, large, and active force that adds to the workers' suffering. It makes “the unfit one” (a worker with “failing muscles and impoverished blood”) unable to continue working. This, cruelly, gives a “chance for a new hand.” There is no space to grieve this loss in a system this unforgiving. One person’s death or injury, Sinclair explains, is a chance for another’s survival.
In this excerpt from Chapter 7, Sinclair uses personification and metaphor to depict the cold as an antagonistic force. The cold takes on a character of its own and is personified, which Sinclair adds to by employing metaphors of hell, chaos, and torture:
They could feel the cold as it crept in through the cracks, reaching out for them with its icy, death-dealing fingers; and they would crouch and cower, and try to hide from it, all in vain. It would come, and it would come; a grisly thing, a specter born in the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. It was cruel, iron-hard; and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp, alone, alone.
The cold is personified here as a malevolent villain, deliberately trying to harm all the inhabitants of Packingtown. It is described as "cruel" and malicious, a being with agency. It is so harsh and ever-present that it seems like it wants to kill everyone it's able to touch with its "icy, death-dealing fingers."
The narrator says that the cold is a "grisly thing," a supernatural entity like a “specter” or a “primeval power.” This emphasizes its relentlessness and its might. Rather than just being a condition of the winter weather, it seems to Jurgis and his family like a cruel, “iron-hard” deity. It isn’t indiscriminately awful. Instead, it is deliberate, actively cruel and “grasping.” Indeed, the winter is so bad that even when they’re together, Jurgis and his relations can’t feel any sense of warmth or companionship. They are “alone, alone” in the claws of the freezing nights.
