People and Society

People from any society or culture can become negative products of their environment if their environment and families are built on negative foundations. Stephen Crane, and Toni Morrison show examples of women who have unstable backgrounds and are affected in their lives by constant negativity. Maggie, and Florens share the constant struggle of negative environments and unstable families that cause lasting effects on them mentally. Many may argue that there is no such thing as being a “product of the environment,” but rather the choices individual make is what affect their lives. On the other hand critic Nicholas Rescher believes that we are all products of our environment, although some of us are luckier than other. Through analyzing the backgrounds and families of these three women, it can prove that a lack of stability is what causes poor choice making.

Bowery is in the southern parts of New York City in the Manhattan borough. During the beginning of Realism during the 1860’s, Bowery streets were the war grounds for the first street gangs in New York City. Bowery also known as the “slums” was a neighborhood full of prostitution and catered to the wild gay community. Many lower class white in New York City during this time settled in the dangerous streets of Bowery. Bowery held scenes of depression and generations of the hopeful. Although Stephen Crane’s Maggie: a Girl of the Streets is a fictional story, Maggie’s environment is devastatingly real. From the first chapter of the novel, it is obvious that Crane conveys the Bowery neighborhood in the fictional piece in the same light of the realistic Bowery of New York.

Before Crane introduces the reader to Maggie, Crane introduces Maggie’s environment of...

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...t and Florens is sent away broken heart and off centered as the environment she must return to.

Maggie and Florens’s both are flowers grown from poverty and the eagerness of wanting too be loved. Trials and struggles lie in their way because of their unstable environments and families that causes them to suffer from broken hearts and unhappy endings. Even though Maggie is a white character from the Bowery slums of New York and Florens’s, a black female from slavery times of the seventeenth century their different worlds are made parallel by Crane and Morrison. The authors sets their main character in unstable environment and allows the readers to witness their paths to self destruction. Through Maggie and Florens, the readers are able to witness how negative environments and the absent of a family foundation may lead to a life of unhappiness.