Uprising

The spiritual elevation of money is a reoccurring theme in Uprising. This theme is called out most strongly in an early scene of The Triangle strike, a strike that is being staged, in large part, to combat financial exploitation. In this scene, a prostitute is hired by the police to attack Yetta for striking. When Yetta asks the prostitute why she accepted this job, the prostitute tells her, “In America, money is God” (86). In a capitalist society with dramatic stratifications of wealth, money is uplifted to a spiritual level, a kind of deity that can deliver its subjects from poverty into prosperity.

This idea of money as a distinctly American religion is echoed on every level of the text. When Bella accepts her job at The Triangle, she contemplates the American dollar as its own language, unsure what $4 per week translates to in Italian lira. Conversely, Jane does not understand the language of money until she moves out of her wealthy home, encountering extreme poverty on the streets of New York. She realizes that without money, she has no power to help any of the people she sees, and she contemplates the ways money could transform their lives.