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Introduction
to Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1890) by Stephen Crane “A man is born into this world with his own
pair of eyes, and he is not responsible for his vision- he is merely responsible
for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to honesty is my supreme
ambition.”
Stephen Crane, like
writers Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair,
was an early proponent of Naturalism,
a literary movement of the 1890’s which depicted the masses of
poor in our booming cities in a new way. Many of these writers had cut
their teeth writing at the metropolitan desks of the big urban news
dailies in New York or Chicago, churning out sensational copy about
crime in the lower depths: stories of murder and depravity, heavy also
on melodramatic tales of ‘roses of the gutter’, fragile young women
cast overboard into the frenetic whirlpool of big city life. The urban
jungle reflected the late 19th century’s fascination with a post-Darwinian vision of
a universe shorn of any divine plan, not immoral but amoral. Their critique of liberalism
and middle class values is typical of the Modernist revolt in art. The
stories, sketches, and novels of the Naturalist writers were intended to stir
the middle class reading public to agitate for reform, but they also exploited
a growing interest in ‘pulp fiction’.
The literary
movement of Naturalism had originated in Paris with the novels and social
criticism of Emile Zola. In his influential novel Germinal
(1885), about a coal mining strike in Northern France, Zola depicted urban dwellers living
at terrible extremes of 'nerve and blood'. Zola’s work exemplified the
philosophy of hard determinism which regards humans as mere cogs in a social
mechanism that produces results with the certainty of a mathematical formula.
There is no room for free will or personal responsibility in such a
philosophy.
Liberal realists
have a different understanding of the causes of poverty. Their judgment of
the poor acknowledges the difficult challenges posed by the unhealthy
environment of the urban slums but insists upon the individual’s freedom of
choice. The poor are capable of exercising independent action and therefore
are responsible for their behavior.
Naturalists
based their theories upon radical political ideologies of class,
the pseudo-science of eugenics, and the psychology of the unconscious.
They argued that the poor had been overwhelmed by the structural forces
of capitalism. The 1890's was the hey-day of Social Darwinism,
that bastard child of evolutionary theory which insisted that some races (rather than species)
were marked for extinction in the battle for survival of the fittest.
Naturalism’s theorists also took notice of Freudian psychology which
argued that the trauma inflicted in early childhood can leave the poor
subject damaged. Naturalists portrayed the city as an urban jungle
where the poor waged a fierce struggle for survival in a contest
determined by unchangeable facts of life.
Stephen Crane:
In 1890 Stephen
Crane had just dropped out of college to pursue a literary career in New York
City. When he wrote Maggie, he was
working for an urban daily on the metropolitan beat. There he met other
ambitious writers, painters, and sages who had been influenced by the newest,
most radical ideas current in this early phase of Modernism. Crane was sent
out on to the streets to sketch the gaudy cityscape in muckraking
human-interest pieces. His stories sold well and earned him a name in the
newspaper business. Crane was familiar with Jacob Riis’ expose of the lower
depths and imitated Riis' supercharged photographic realism in his early
sketches. These exposes of the sordid life of the poor shocked and challenged middle class readers. Genteel fiction had refused to descend to the level of the poor and allow readers to empathize with their experience. Middle class readers used moral values not just to pass judgment on the poor but also to keep them at a distance from their comfortable lives. Crane’s fiction challenges this genteel middle class morality. For him, slum life revealed the flat indifference of the universe in stark, fierce forms.
Crane's Style
Crane reveals Maggie’s world in striking, dynamic prose. His evocation of the riotous sensibility of the poor is pitched at an extreme psychological intensity. Self-esteem shredded, exhausted by the daily struggle for food and shelter, plagued by resentment, depression and anger, seeking release in alcohol, violence and sex, Crane’s characters shout, bellow, roar, wail, drink and brawl. Crane’s language is full of striking metaphors, screaming diction and hyper-active prose. Its grotesque, frequently hilarious exaggerations reveal the psychological reality of poverty. In the followiing passage a tenement building 'quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels.' Eventually they entered into a dark region where,
from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of
babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised
yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long
streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. In all unhandy places
there were buckets, brooms, rags and bottles. In the street infants
played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of
vehicles. Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress,
gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels.
Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat
smoking pipes in obscure corners. A thousand odors of cooking food came
forth to the street. The building quivered and creaked from the weight
of humanity stamping about in its bowels. (Maggie (1892) And who are we to
judge? How would we
behave in the same situation? When the safety net is withdrawn and the most
basic necessities of life go un-met, civility and propriety
might quickly evaporate. Melodrama: The plot of Maggie is the most hackneyed in sentimental melodrama. Melodrma were the most popular theatrical entertainments of the era. They are typically full of action,effects (trains, guns, ropes) and extravagant histrionics. An innocent slum girl suffers betrayal at the hands of those she loves most and then descends quickly into alcoholism, prostitution, and worse. Maggie must overcome the momentum of the melodramatic action. Thesis: Can Maggie overcome ignorance, self-delusion, and her
own naïve innocence to achieve consciousness of the reality of her situation.
Only then will she have a chance. Crane said, “… the root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice-
Perhaps I mean a lack of ambition or the willingness to be knocked flat and
accept the licking…” |
