The Role Of Realism In Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets

Realism can be defined as one's attitude towards life in which one takes life for what it is and does not add any glamour to the subject but instead, finds the reality of things, those being good and bad. A realistic person tends to accept life and all of its gruesome facts for what they are and find some way to maneuver around them. Stephen Crane’s novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, is a story depicting scenarios that help best portrait the ideas of realism with great proficiency. These scenarios include scenes of hypocrisy, violence, and ultimate plan of life which is survival of the strongest. Stephen Crane is often depicted as a realist due to his truthful and gruesome outlook on the world which can be seen with great detail through the pages of this novel. One of the realistically based themes found present in the novel is violence. This theme is shown to be abundant throughout the story starting from the opening scene. In the opening scene of the story, Jimmie is described as beaten and ragged due to the constant fighting between the two rival gangs of the neighborhoods Rum Alley and Devil’s Row. The next

This characteristic is shown throughout the novel. One character who embodies this characteristic is the mother, Mary, who shows this through her reactions and responses dealing with Maggie. In this, hypocrisy is present because Mary expects Maggie to be this good, well respectable lady when she, herself, has done nothing to set an example of this. Another example is when Jimmie shows hypocrisy by reacting with anger to the situation between Maggie and Pete even though he has often put several different girls in the same or similar situation as Pete has put Maggie in. Another occurrence of this theme being present is when the father tells Jimmy how he should not be fighting on the streets or with his sister while at the same time, the father is almost always fighting with