Maggie: A Girl of the Streets - Book Report/Review Example

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets The central character of the story ‘Maggie: A Girl of the Streets’ written by Stephen Crane, the young and lovely Maggie is born and grown up in the slums of America witnessing a harsh livelihood and environment in Bowery, New York City. The novel was published when the United States of America was in the phase of rapid industrialization. The scenario was changing from an economy depending on agriculture towards an industrialized country during the nineteenth century. There was a large inflow of immigrants which led to a growth of the cities’ size in terms of population. One of the outcomes of this uncontrolled rise in population density was poverty and people could not have full faith in the fluctuations witnessed around the world. The time is around the late nineteenth century when the society was surprisingly poor and the average annual income of an urban family was very low. There was lack of flourish in formal education and technological developments as well as health care and medicines. The stark reality was not a sight to cherish. However the technological scenario and industry was on the verge of a change and transformation. In this background Maggie is an ordinary young girl who faces torment and abuse at her home especially from her mother who is taken to alcohol. She thinks of escaping her troubled fate when she falls in love with the enigmatic bartender. However this relationship made her life worse as her family and the unreasonable society and neighbors condemned her. Thus her family isolates her and even her lover left her for good. Now she is forced to gruel in the dark unprotected reality. The street life is cruel to her and the author finally portrays how all the adversities finally managed to quench the spirit out of this optimistic and young woman. She is finally destroyed by the various elements of American naturalism. The novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets exemplifies the theme of naturalism typical to America through the reality encountered by the female protagonist of the story. Plot The novels opens to introduce the readers to the scene where we find a young boy named Jimmie engaged in a fight with a number of street urchins in the Rum Alley, a street in New York City. The children who attack him are from Devil’s Row, which is a nearby locality. The little boy tries to protect his street alone but in vain. His companions have fled from the spot. Later a sixteen-year-old boy Pete rescues him. Meanwhile the readers come to know of his father who is cruel and scares the children to a great extent. The female protagonist and the central character of the play, Maggie is Jimmie’s sister. She also has another brother named Tommie who is the youngest. With the passing time, Jimmie turns into a tough, bullying and aggressive youth and secures the work of a teamster – “He lived some red years without laboring.  During that time his sneer became chronic. He studied human nature in the gutter, and found it no worse than he thought he had reason to believe it.  He never conceived a respect for the world, because he had begun with no idols that it had smashed.” (Crane, 14) This reflects the lack of hopes and ambition in the people of Rum Alley. It also helps us to find the stark contrast in Maggie who is off course ambitious, as she wants to filter out of that filthy locality. However Jimmie also had his share of dreams and he often fantasized seeing the pretty women passing by on the streets – “On the corners he was in life and of life.  The world was going on and he was there to perceive it.” (Crane, 15) Therefore Jimmie’s hopes were shattered in the face of reality too. He later becomes a truck driver. Something similar happens to Maggie too despite her sincere attempts to leave the place. Maggie is strong and wants to escape the poverty of the locality. Maggie grows up to be amazingly attractive although during childhood her looks were mostly covered with filth – “Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle.  She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.” (Crane, 18) Meanwhile their father and the youngest sibling of Maggie die. Maggie on the other hand had a world of her own to live in. She totally resents and therefore turns away from the life stricken with poverty in the streets of Rum Alley. She looks for a way to escape this place when she meets Pete. Pete manages to impress Maggie who finds him “a very elegant and graceful bartender”(Crane, 19). As he sat with Jimmie and told him stories, “His mannerisms stamped him as a man who had a correct sense of his personal superiority…. Maggie perceived that here was the beau ideal of a man.  Her dim thoughts were often searching for far away lands where, as God says, the little hills sing together in the morning.” (Crane 21) She began to date him with the hope of marriage. There were other reasons for admiring the man. Maggie had lived in the filth and witnessed the raw face of misery for long. Now here she sees a man who rejected the world just like her and hence respected him. His money and ability to spend was also another attraction –“Petes elegant occupation brought him, no doubt, into contact with people who had money and manners.  It was probable that he had a large acquaintance of pretty girls.  He must have great sums of money to spend” (Crane, 22). She saw the world in terms of material comforts which they had none – “To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults.  She felt instant admiration for a man who openly defied it.” (Crane 22) Maggie hence begins to date Pete and here again her family in interferes by accusing her of corruption. Even the person who raised her hopes for marriage and hence a new life ditched her soon as he had taken her only as a reason of entertainment and gradually got tired of dating her. Maggie was therefore left back to the very first square from where she began her step. This made her an object of contempt for the family and the society. They were not angry with Pete but abused her for breaking the Puritanical rules. Therefore, the author wanted to write about an ordinary girl who simply wanted to find the right man to love. Yet she met the fate of a prostitute and destroyed all the dreams in the face of reality and against the wave of naturalism. He showed how human beings were at the mercy of nature and her ways and these natural circumstances were not very cherished in America during 1893. In this case Maggie’s own family, which she had got by the aid of nature itself, she could not avoid being the child of such a brutal drunkard father and abusive mother. (Cady, 172) According to Cunliffe (1955), “Maggie falls into place – for literary historians- as a prime exhibit in the history of naturalism.” (Cunliffe, 1955, 33) No matter how much she tries to change her destiny fate has something else in store for her. It is this very fate that she was born with. This initial fate has changed her future prospects and thus forced her down in the grueling dust. It is from here that the impact of naturalism is realized. The ending is tragic as Maggie drowns herself into the East River. Crane chooses Maggie as the victim of the various factors of naturalism as she is positioned against a background, which is infested with hostile, frustrated people who make life difficult for Maggie. The instances of naturalism and reality bring out the stark contrast between the faith exercised by the Victorians and the harsh world around Maggie which gave her little space to retain her piety and virginity - “The discrepancy between the Victorian pieties and the jungle reality of the world is conscientiously explored [….] The story [….] presents the exact reality with an intensity that defies indifference” (Walcutt, 69-72) Eric Solomon (1955) expresses his observations about the elements of naturalism and reality in the story as follows, “Maggie involves a complete reversal of the sentimental themes of the nineteenth-century best sellers that dealt with the life of a young girl. These novels […] displayed a manifest religious bias; Maggie is scorned by a clergyman and Jimmie finds organized religion abhorrent” (Solomon, 22). Usually literary works treat romanticism and preservation of the dignity of women. Maggie is betrayed sexually and sinks into trenches of misery and darkness. According to Solomon, “The villain in the sentimental novel was generally regenerated by the heroine’s good influence; Crane’s Pete the bartender becomes increasingly degraded and ends in a drunken stupor, mocked by thieving streetwalkers.” (Solomon, 23) The lesson that this naturalism delivers to the readers is that happiness is derived from surrendering oneself to suffering and misery. Here Maggie does suffer but she ends up solely in misery, poverty and finally a pitiful death. Literary historians have a common trend of generalizing common events and facts. In literature such attempts sometimes lead to oversimplification of events and facts. Here the author’s work has been referred as an exemplification of naturalism. (Cunliffe, 31) Also, Crane was supposed to be a follower of French Naturalism. People off course look for some approved features in case of naturalism. Following the common attributes of naturalism, his characters have common traits of poverty and uneducated set up. The power of the environment is acknowledged in such a manner that the surrounding seems to have a never ending and unavoidable impact on the young heroine. The work of Solomon supports the idea that naturalism is dominant in the novel. Scrive Gullason comments on the reality outlined in the plot of the story, “ [Crane] tries to impress on the reader his responsibility for the existing conditions. He makes the reader see and feel the slum reality with suffocating closeness […] in order to lead him from ignorance to awareness.” (Gullason, 253) Through the elements of naturalism Crane helps to expose the raw reality to the public in general and open our eye to the light of truth and the wisdom which enlightens us regarding the underlying cause of the transformation and the destiny of a member of the slums. However according to Fitelson, in his work, “Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Darwinism”, “the most arresting critical problem posed by Stephen Crane’s first novel is that of the disposition of mind that lies behind and shapes it – the ideology, so to speak that it communicates.” (Fitelson, 182). As quoted in his work, Stephen Crane had once explained his work and motive by saying, “I had no other purpose in writing Maggie than to show people to people as they seem to me” (Fitelson, 182) the story has made its way into the typical American tradition in a strange fashion and hardly bears any similarity with the other literary works of his time. (Fitelson, 183) perhaps to demonstrate the hardcore natural elements and the reality in his eyes, the author Stephen Crane uses vivid descriptions and symbolic factors to highlight the feelings, emotions and behavior of the particular social group under study in his novel. For instance, Crane mentions, “mother’s massive shoulders heaved with anger” (Horwitz, 606). Here he indicates the mother’s shoulders and personifies them to generate the emotions of the mother herself. Thus the author uses dramatic attenuation and displacement of agency in describing the ambience and the interactions of the social entities. According to Horwitz, “Crane’s language is dramatizing and inflecting a maxim of late nineteenth century social reform and sociology.” (Horwitz, 607) The story can be compared with the fate of Esperanza in ‘The House on Mango Street’ written by Sandra Cisneros. The House on Mango Street, written by Sandra Cisneros and published in 1984 narrates the life of a young Mexican-American girl, Esperanza who lived in a house on Mango Street with her family and equally desperate to move out to a less crowded place as the Latino locality. Her experience with the local people, sexual encounters and experience with friends and other families have helped her form a definition about her existence and mental set up. Her long formed desire about leaving the neighborhood was never fully realized as she vowed to return and help the people out in future. (Campbell, 6; Ciscernos, 77-79) The conditions of the slums and the language used by the characters in the novel also signify the reality and the natural factors of the United States of America. The readers are introduced to the shattering of innocent dreams, coming of age of the characters like Maggie and Jimmie, the art of survival as we find in Pete who managed to put up a show of glamour and shine to the poor deprived people and especially in the ambitious yet innocent mind of Maggie. The conflict of naturalism with human desires and will is the theme to study in the plot and the craft of the story. The author successfully puts up the theme of naturalism and through a number of characters shows how this ambience determines the fate of an innocence young girl. References 1. Cady, Edwin H. "Stephen Crane: Maggie, a Girl of the Streets." Landmarks of American Writing. Ed. Hennig Cohen. New York: Basic Books, 1969. 172-81 2. Campbell, Bebe Moore. "Crossing Borders," New York Times Book Renew, May 26, 1991, 6. 3. Ciscernos, Sandra. “Do You Know Me?: I Wrote The House on Mango Street.” The Americas Review. Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 1987, 77–79. 4. Crane, Stephen, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Kessinger Publishing, 2004 5. Crane, Stephen, and J. C. Levenson. Prose and Poetry. The Library of America ; 18. New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the U.S. and Viking Press, 1984 6. Cunliffe, Marcus, Stephen Crane and the American Background of Maggie, American Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring, 1955), 31-44 7. Edelstein, Arthur. “Three Great Novels by Stephen Crane: Maggie, Georges Mother, the Red Badge of Courage”. New York: Fawcett, 1970 8. Fitelson, David, “Stephen Cranes "Maggie" and Darwinism”, American Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2, Part 1 (Summer, 1964), 182-194 9. Horwitz, Howard, “Maggie and the Sociological Paradigm”, American Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), 606-638 10. Solomon, Eric, Stephen Crane: from Parody to Realism, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966 11. Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism: a Divided Stream , Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1956 Read More