Maggie
A man said to the universe: ‘Sir, I exist!’
‘However’, replied the universe,
‘The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.’
This excerpt from War Is Kind (1900) perectly portrays the spirit of Maggie – A Girl of the Streets.
Stephen Crane wrote this novel between 1891 and 1893. Because he could not find an interested publisher for his novel he tried to publish it using his own money, and probably a loan from his brother. To publish it, he used the pseudonym Johnston Smith. At first, society took little notice of the novel. A possible reason for that could have been that the novel does not take any interest in “analyzing the causes of, and offering solutions for, urban poverty” (Sorrentino 2006: 43). However, in 1896 the novel became successful following the publication of The Red Badge of Courage, which made Crane an international celebrity. Maggie was revised and objectionable passages eliminated. “The numerous changes softened the language and made it less offensive” (Sorrentino 2006: 46). Nowadays, Maggie belongs to the American canon of literature. The Heath Anthology of American Literature – Volume C describes the novel to be “a powerful portrayal of the blighted, poverty-stricken lives of the Bowery” (Lauter 2006: 489). Crane’s interest in extreme environments is also expressed in his later sketches An Experiment in Misery and An Experiment in Luxury dealing with life in a flophouse and in a millionaire’s mansion. The “interest in environmental determinism links him to late-nineteenth-century naturalistic writers such as Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, but he avoids their often heavy factual documentation; instead he usually defines his characters with sharply focused comments and vivid images” (Lauter 2006: 489).
The seminar on Stephen Crane focused on various aspects and topics of the novel. This website displays the most significant issues in the following order: Brief analysis of the main characters, the bowery, working environment in New York’s 1890s and the role of language in Maggie – A Girl of the Streets.
· Maggie
Until Maggie meets Pete, her life is marked by living in a ghetto and working in a sweatshop. She is obviously naïve, but not at all innocent, since she steals flowers for her brother’s funeral and does a lot of cursing. On the positive side, she is the only person in the family who cares for others, which becomes remarkably clear when she offers help to her brother although he treated her badly before.
Pete introduces her to an unknown New York, but once her experience widens, her social status diminishes. In her dreams she sees herself turning from a poor girl into a heroine, although she clearly knows that that is impossible, since she is a member of the underclass. Her dreams are directed by uptown values: “The theater made her think. She wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory.” (p. 35). Eventually, she is rejected in both parts of the city.
· Jimmie
Jimmie’s path is predetermined. First he becomes one of the notorious street-corner boys in the Bowery and later the drunken head of the family: “Jimmie grew large enough to take the vague position of head of the family. As incumbent of that office, he stumbled up-stairs late at night, as his father had done before him. He reeled about the room, swearing at his relations, or went to sleep on the floor.” (p. 20). Even his experience outside of the Bowery as a truck driver does not disrupt his bounds to the Bowery. In the Bowery jimmie survives because he is cruel, selfish and good at fighting. From the beginning,fists are the language of Jimmie’s world.
· Pete
For tenement people, Pete is a “man of the world” (p. 21), introduced as a Bowery member who knows places beyond the Lower East Side. Eventually, Pete is overcome by women he has exploited. Despite the frequent trips outside the Bowery, Uptown remains barred to him. Pete and Jimmie’s city horizon is small, but it expands much further than Maggie’s. Both men live double standards, since they ruthlessly exploit their advantage over women, but blame women for disgracing their families when they go out with men like themselves.
· Mary
She is merely a wreck: “The saloon door opened with a crash, and the figure of a woman appeared upon the threshold. Her gray hair fell in knotted masses about her shoulders. Her face was crimsoned and wet with perspiration. Her eyes had a rolling glare” (p. 35). Maggie’s mother can be regarded as the personification of the mess, the dirt and the filth of the ghetto, but also as the personified hopelessness and cruelty or inhumanity of reality. Moreover she is the typicall uncaring brute of a mother, abusive, careless and irresponsible. She seems to find salvation in alcohol, since it leads (not only for her)to a drugged perception of reality, a compensation of people’s pursuit of happiness and a numbness which can be used as an excuse not to care about anything anymore.
- The Bowery
The Bowery is a mile long street cutting through tenement areas in the Lower East Side. As wages were low, children faced filth, hunger, and disease and helped illegally in sweatshops. With the depiction of the Bowery, Crane wants to show sophisticated readers the other side of society without romanticizing life there. He records views from inside the Bowery and projects his own impressions of its people. In contrast to the expanse and the related seemingly endless opportunities of the other New York, the Bowery is an enclosed world. Constant quarrelling and fighting cumulate into a vision of violence and a pervasive chaos; only the ‘fittest’ survive in this ‘urban jungle’. Personifications and onomatopoeic devices emphasize the feelings of the characters and the situation they are stuck in. For examples: “The shutters of the tall buildings were closed like grim lips” (p. 68).
- Working environment in New York’s 1890
Work in textile manufacturing, the major occupation for female workers in New York, was not regulated by labour legislation: Long working hours in dull, overcrowded and claustrophobic rooms and the absence of safety regulations often caused an early death. The life expectancy was age thirty to thirty-five. Maggie's workplace depicts the actual conditions of the time. She received a stool and a machine in a room where twenty girls sat; all of various shades of yellow discontentment. She perched on the stool and treadled at her machine all day, turning out collars […]. At night she returned home to her mother” (p.20).
- Role of language in Maggie
The formality of the language spoken is determined by the social status of the speaker, “I beg you pardon” (p. 67) spoken by a belated man in business clothes in comparison to Pete’s “Ah, what deh hell?” (p. 30).
The language also shows the physical or mental state the particular person is in, e.g. Pete’s inability to express words when he is absolutely drunk. During his last appearance in the novel Pete’s language becomes more and more restricted in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, culminating in a linguistic breakdown. The impression the reader gets of the language of the Bowery is empathy, but not sympathy. The reader feels a morally superiority to the characters.
Crane. Stephen (1969). The Portable Stephen Crane. Penguin Books.
Worksheets
2. Maggie and Working Environment
Further reading:
Gandal, Keith (1997). The Virtues of the Vicious : Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the
Spectacle of the Slum. New York, NY : Oxford Univ. Press.
Hurm, Gerd (1991). Fragmented Urban Images: the American City in Modern Fiction
from Stephen Crane to Thomas Pynchon. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
Morgan, William (2004). Questionable charity : Gender, Humanitarianism and
Robertson, Michael (1997). Stephen Crane, Journalism and the Making of Modern
Slotkin, Alan Robert (1993). The Language of Stephen Crane's Bowery Tales :
Developing Mastery of Character Diction. New York : Garland Publ.
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