In the first few paragraphs of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is the image of children whom the reader can already tell are doomed by their environment. When we are introduced to children who join in the fighting “dodging hurling stones and swearing in barbaric trebles” it becomes clear that the horrors of tenement life extend far beyond adults and their squabbles, but due to proximity, also include children. These children have already been indoctrinated into a culture in which violence is an everyday, if not anticipated part of existence and Crane equates these children to be more akin to savage animals with a thirst for blood rather than young people who posses any kind of innocence. As the fight in the streets grows bloodier, “In the yells of the whirling mob of Devil’s Row children there were notes of joy like songs of triumphant savagery. The little boys seemed to leer gloatingly at the blood upon the other child’s face” (Crane 3). These children are clearly the victims of their environment and while the reader is horrified that these children have no pity for any of the bloody parties, the reader actually feels sympathy for the children as they do not know anything different, thus cannot be accused of being evil inherently. This notion of the environmental impact of tenement life is introduced right at the beginning of the text and the author makes it clear that children, from the beginning of life, are exposed to this routinely and know little else.

In this environment, children are raised to have a savage association between violence and honor and this element of violence that pervades the old and young is seen as just as important as money. For instance, although Maggie wishes to have a part of Pete’s money and appearance of wealth, equally important is his ability to take part in the violent struggle for survival that plays out daily. While observing Pete, she sat in a “smoke-filled atmosphere [which] made the girl dream. She thought of her former Rum Alley environment and turned to regard Pete’s strong protecting fists” (Crane 102). What is remarkable about this passage is not only the fact that Maggie sees physical prowess and the possibility for violence (or protection) as the keys out of her condition. Equally importantly, although she sees an opportunity to move beyond her circumstances through Pete, she does not recognize that Pete embodies the worst characteristics of Rum Alley, not anything different. In other words, her very perceptions about how to get out of a life in Rum Alley are marked by her environment.

Instead of seeing better education (for example) or some higher way of getting out of her negative environment, Maggie sees only hollow options that are manifestations of the same dire conditions she has been raised around (Gandal 109). This is one of the critical ways she is flawed as a character (in such shallowness) which leads to her tragedy but also, it indicates the inevitability of her conditions; she knows nothing different, much like the children who grow up with nothing different, and thus has no idea how to truly emerge from the dire conditions.“She contemplated Pete’s man-subduing eyes and noted that wealth and prosperity were indicated by his clothes. She imagined a future, rose-tinted, because of its distance from all that she had experienced before” (Crane 103). These “rose-tinted” glasses Maggie sees through repeatedly are indeed because of her experiences before, but in the sense that she thinks. While Maggie seems to understand in this passage that one reason why she thinks Pete is so great is because she has been subjected to so much horror, the meaning of this quote goes far deeper. It is not just her recent experiences that are deluding her, but her whole life in Rum Alley. The environmental impact of growing up in such a devastating, depressed area has made someone who is just part of the same dismal life seem better than he is. Maggie is doomed by her conditions because she knows nothing different and is unable to see the real ways she is deluding herself.

In a book that came out just before Maggie: A Girl of the Streets called How the Other Half Lives by Riis, which took a non-fiction approach to exploring the same kinds of slums and filth in the American urban centers, there is an equal dismal portrait painted of the American urban tenement landscape. This book acted as a quasi tourist’s guide to a place that few people wished to visit and was valuable in changing perceptions, especially among the wealthy in America, about life in such areas. One scholar argues that Crane was “attempting to transcend the tourist-guide narrative perspective that Riis has used in his expose of New York City tenement life” (Giles 17). If readers are to see Crane’s novel as a fictionalized account with the same intent—to comment upon some of the social ills and problems present in tenement districts –Maggie emerges as more than simply a novel with a social message, it becomes naturalism in American literature with a purpose. It is not simply presenting a Darwinian struggle for the purposes of objective analysis or as a plot device, he is having a literary conversation with some of the most pressing social issues Riis uncovers in his text. In the end, this is a realistic portrayal of New York City tenement life that not only reveals the horrors of poverty, but the inevitability of the fates of those who live within it.

Related Article

Canto 30: Symbolic Characterization and Dante’s Naturalism as Animalism

Socialization and Women’s Political and Gender Equality

References

Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.

Fudge, K. “Sisterhood from Seduction: `Charlotte Temple,’ by Susanna Rowson, and `Maggie Johnson,’ by Stephen Crane.”Journal of American Culture 19(1996): 43-52.

Gandal, Keith. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Giles, James Richard. The Naturalistic Inner-city Novel in America. Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Horwitz, Howard. “‘Maggie and the Sociological Paradigm.”American Literary History 10.4 (1998), 606-638.

Hunter , Adrian. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Preface). New York: Broadview Press, 2006.

Salemi, Joseph S. “Down a Steep Place into the Sea: Suicide in Stephen Crane’s Maggie.” ANQ 1.2 (1988), 58-61

Stallman, Robert Wooster. “Stephen Cran’s Revision of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.” American Literature 26.4 (1955), 528-536.