Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets

Stephen Crane’s novella, “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” deals with many difficult concepts and situations. However, the most prevalent seems to be the people that find themselves caught in a vicious cycle of violence. Although some claim that a literary label cannot possibly contain Crane’s work, his ideas certainly have much in common with other naturalistic writers of his time. He portrays poor Irish immigrants, the dregs of humanity, struggling for survival during the Industrial Revolution. Even while relating terrible events, Crane remains detached in the typical naturalistic style, seeming to view the world as a broad social experiment. As the story opens, we are instantly drawn into a heart-wrenching arena where people behave like animals,

Throughout the story, Crane treats any attachment the reader may have to his characters very roughly. Speaking of death as if he were commenting on a weather forecast, Crane simply states “The babe, Tommie, died” (954). For those readers who were clinging to this tiny bud of innocence sprouting in a dumpster, the death is a blow; yet Crane devotes only two sentences to the child’s passing. Similarly, Crane does not even announce Maggie’s death until Jimmie declares bluntly, “Mag’s dead” (988). This emotionally disconnected way of dealing with such deaths truly makes the characters themselves seem more like uncaring animals. As the two most innocent and gentle inhabitants of the Bowery, Maggie and Tommie shine as the only warm ray in the frigid blackness of absolute depravity; their death and the survival of such arrogant and manipulative individuals as Jimmie and Mary bring to mind a jungle, not a city. While driving this wedge between his characters and the audience, Crane furthers his point with Social Darwinism, constantly comparing the people to animals. When the three older boys are fighting in the bar, Crane describes them as “bristling roosters” (971) with the “bravery of bulldogs” (972). At the turn of every page it seems, Crane is describing the people as various species of wild beast. With these metaphors, he sets the stage for a battlefield where each person (or are they people?) is simply fighting to stay alive. Each one must combine his own wits with brute strength and strive to reach the top rung of the ladder before another pulls him down. In the face of such brutality, what are such delicate creatures as Maggie and Tommie supposed to do? They cannot survive, and as is true in the animal kingdom,