Chapter+15

Chapter 15 [35 Minutes]

QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT...

Winter arrives again, and with it comes the grueling rush season. Fifteen- and sixteen-hour workdays are frequent. Twice, Ona does not return home at night. She explains that the snow drifts kept her away so she stayed with a friend. When Jurgis discovers that she is lying, he wrangles a confession out of her. Sobbing hysterically, Ona confesses that Phil Connor, a boss at her factory, continually harassed her and pleaded with her to become his mistress. She tells Jurgis that Connor eventually raped her in the factory after everyone had gone home and threatened to arrange the firings of every wage earner in her household. Moreover, he threatened to prevent them from obtaining work in Packingtown ever again. With these threats, he forced her into accompanying him to Miss Henderson’s brothel in the evenings for the past two months. Jurgis, livid, storms to Ona’s workplace. Upon seeing the coarse-looking and liquor-reeking Connor, he leaps at him and sinks his fingers into Connor’s throat. He channels all of his outrage about the rape into such a thrashing frenzy that he doesn’t even notice the pandemonium in the factory. A half-dozen men finally tear Jurgis, blood and skin dripping from his teeth, from the unconscious Connor and take him to the police station.
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