Stephen Crane - Maggie, a Girl of the Streets

Maggie, a Girl of the Streets is an early novel of Stephen Crane's. It sits firmly within the tradition of naturalism created by Emile Zola a few decades earlier. It is the story of Maggie, a pretty girl born into poverty, ignorance and dirt, and how her life must, due to her environment and her family, end unhappily. The heavy-handed nature of the novel's message makes for poor reading, and there is the sometimes uncomfortable realisation that the moral of the story is not particularly relevant today.

Maggie's family is abhorrent, drunken and mean, their world-view comprised of alcohol, beatings, and back-breaking work. Her brother Jimmie is a thug, growing from a scrappy young kid into a sullen, violent young man. “After a time his sneer grew so that it turned its glare upon all things. He became so sharp that he believed in nothing. To him the police were always actuated by malignant impulses and the rest of the world was composed, for the most part, of despicable creatures who were all trying to take advantage of him and with whom, in defense, he was obliged to quarrel on all possible occasions. He himself occupied a down-trodden position that had a private but distinct element of grandeur in its isolation.” Their father dies early on and their mother becomes more and more a drunk, incoherent by dusk and raging by night. Maggie, though, is something different. She is pretty and looks forward to loving and being loved. Crane writes, “The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.”
She wants a better life for herself and her family, and she possesses a tenderness not seen in any of the other characters. This, of course, sets her up for her fall.

Maggie falls in love with Pete, an uneducated young man who speaks in rough dialect and disdains most everything – something Maggie interprets as him having seen it all, and demanding better. Maggie, unfortunately, confuses ignorance and apathy for worldliness. On their first date, they enter a cabaret club and, “[l]eaning back he regarded with eyes of superiority the scene before them. This attitude affected Maggie strongly. A man who could regard such a sight with indifference must be accustomed to very great things.” Crane makes it clear, however, that this indifference stems from ignorance, not intelligence. But how is Maggie to know? She herself is ignorant, though in a touching manner. She wants love for herself, the love she instinctively feels is her due as a woman.

But Maggie's innocence is painful. Consider the following two paragraphs:

“He was extremely gracious and attentive. He displayed the consideration of a cultured gentleman who knew what was due.

'Say, what deh hell? Bring deh lady a big glass! What deh hell use is dat pony?"'”

The first paragraph is Maggie's impression, and seems reasonable. The reader is to assume that Pete is attentive and kind, and knows how to treat a lady. The immediately following paragraph, which is Pete speaking to a waiter, shows us, but not her, the truth of his character. This sort of irony runs through the novel, and is painful to read because Maggie's heart is truly good. She deserves better, we know, but her social status allows for little beyond beatings and drunkenness.

For all that, though, Pete loves Maggie and Maggie loves Pete. Maggie's brother, Jimmie, is unhappy with this, and consider that his friend has betrayed the family, making Maggie a girl 'that gone to hell'. It remains unclear to a contemporary reader why Maggie is considered fallen, though presumably her fate would be understood by someone from the late nineteenth century, when the book was written. The talk of going to 'hell', and Jimmie and Pete's fight, comes from the strength of a few dates. The two did not share even a kiss, though Pete asked. What, then, caused such a stir? Presumably Pete talked behind Maggie's back, or, as is so often the case, things were assumed. Later, she lives with Pete a while, which would explain some, but not all, of the hostility toward her.

As Maggie's fall continues, her brother Jimmie grapples with something resembling a conscience. He will firmly denounce his sister, hate his friend, and swear up and down she is fallen, but then he will wonder – do the girls he likes to tumble with have brothers, too? How would he feel if these things were being said about them? Crane ends a number of chapters with Jimmie thinking such uncomfortable thoughts, though invariably he shakes them off and Maggie's unbroken fall continues.

Maggie is a story of a young girl battered by the society in which she lives. She is accused of many things, and instead of being helped by her family, she is forced to become the very thing she is criticised for supposedly doing. If you are called a thief your entire life, what harm, then, in finally actually stealing something? None, Maggie supposes. She is a victim of her circumstance, forced to be what others think she is simply because she is never given a chance to be otherwise.

The plot of the novel is rather simple. Maggie falls in love with Pete, things go wrong, and then her family and friends turn against her until she is forced into leaving home. Crane tells his story largely through dialogue written entirely in dialect, which makes for difficult reading. One character says to another, “Dere was a mug come in deh place deh odder day wid an idear he wus goin' teh own deh place! Hully gee, he wus goin' teh own deh place! I see he had a still on an' I didn' wanna giv 'im no stuff, so I says: 'Git deh hell outa here an' don' make no trouble,' I says like dat! See? 'Git deh hell outa here an' don' make no trouble'; like dat. 'Git deh hell outa here,' I says. See?" And that is a typical section of dialogue. We are told the story at first from Maggie's perspective, but as her fall continues the viewpoint shifts to Jimmie and, at times, Pete. We rarely come back to Maggie, but when we do we learn of her confusion and her complete lack of understanding as to how her life ended up the way it did.

This sort of naturalistic literature, where the fate of a character is determined by their environment and not their will, has fallen out of fashion in the last hundred years. It is easy to see why – for all naturalism's claim at possessing the real truth of the matter, it is hard to swallow such blatant puppet-mastery. Maggie, no matter her heart, or skill, or determination, or talent, is doomed from the very start purely because that is how things are when you grow up in such a place. Zola was very much of the same belief, which coloured his writing unfavourably. How are we to believe the truth of the story when the machinations behind its creation are so clearly evident? Maggie might be a sympathetic person, but she is constantly shoved in a direction we cannot easily believe she would take. So to for the other characters. They may not like it, but they are firmly attached to their path, and the only direction they can travel is one determined by the winding of their tracks. My viewpoint of this form of literature is that it is fundamentally dishonest. We cannot believe in any of the characters, because by definition they cannot be anything other than types to show off an aspect of the author's thought, or to fit, like a puzzle piece, into the working of the novel as a whole. They are never allowed to be themselves, or to deviate from their clichéd beginning – the fallen girl, the stubborn brother, the suitor, the drunken mother.

See Also

Sienkiewicz, Henryk - So Runs the World (Contains an interesting essay on Zola and Naturalism)
Zola, Émile - Thérèse Raquin

Links

Wikipedia
Project Gutenberg - free online text