|
Background
to Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Date: 1893
The
story behind the origins of Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the
Streets is as turbulent and precarious as its portrayal of the
destructive nature of urban life in the 1890s Bowery. While working as
a reporter during the summer of 1892 on the Asbury Park beat, Stephen
Crane met a young and beautiful married woman, a few years older than
he, named Lily Brandon Monroe. Her husband, Hersey Munroe, was a
successful and prosperous geologist. At the time she met Stephen Crane,
Lily was staying at the Lake Avenue Hotel while her husband was away on
a Geological Survey trip. Though the frail, melancholic and oddly
prudish Crane would appear to be an unlikely suitor, Lily loved him for
his brilliance and idealism. For his part, Crane was enchanted with
Lily and relished the gossiping old ladies at the hotel who were
shocked at the scandalous nature of their relationship. When Crane
tried to impress Lily's father by speaking in French, Mr. Munroe
quickly put a stop to the affectation, stating that his daughter did
not speak French. Crane went so far as to propose marriage, but she
ultimately declined. He had also given Lily a manuscript of his
street-girl novel and when Lily's husband found out about the affair,
he destroyed the manuscript. In
the fall of 1892, without any job prospects, Stephen Crane moved into a
cheap apartment in New York City with a group of medical students.
Located at 1064 Avenue A, between the Bowery and the East River, it was
the world of the marginalized and dispossessed. And its forms of
entertainment and distraction were equally as tawdry, consisting of
saloons, dance halls, brothels and flophouses. However, his roommates
were young and optimistic, and romanticized their surroundings by
referring to the apartment as the Pendennis
Club (in all probability a reference to Thackeray's novel of a spoiled
young snob who wrote novels). It was here that Crane continued to work
on Maggie, a story of the seduction and abandonment of an
impoverished Irish girl, set in the fictional world of Rum Alley.
Anxious to see Maggie in print, Crane was advised that the
profanity and vulgarity of speech in his novel would make it difficult
for him to find a publisher. During
this time, Crane was also forced to contend with the very real
hardships of his own impoverished life. "While Maggie's fate
lay undecided, winter arrived with a vengeance. One night Crane and
Phil May, a British artist and illustrator, borrowed a tiger skin
belonging to illustrator William Francis 'Frank' Ver
Beck. A policeman found them under the skin, walking up and down
Broadway at 3:30 a.m., and brought them into the Tenderloin station. He
released the young men but kept the skin." (Davis, 56–57) By January
1893, Crane had still not found a publisher, although the rejections
were accompanied by praise for his work. Accordingly, upon the advice
of Willis Fletcher Johnson, Crane resolved to publish Maggie
anonymously, under the pseudonym Johnston Smith, at his own expense.
Crane then sent copies to social reformers and editors, and Hamlin
Garland, a writer and literary scholar, as well as a personal friend of
his. Crane's friends also devised their own schemes for getting his
name into the public domain. His "friends tried to help sales by
conspicuously reading copies in the elevated train 'so that passengers
would think the metropolis was Maggie-mad.'..." (Davis, 59) In fact, in
their enthusiasm to help the young novelist, his roommates threw a
party designed to promote his book. "On the night of the party, in late
February or early March, Maggies
lined the wall, held up the wassail punch bowl, filled in the empty
spaces where furniture should have been." (Davis, 59) The party
eventually became rowdy, causing the landlady to complain. But, despite
all the fanfare and his friends' best efforts, Crane was left
discouraged about the lack of interest in his book. By
the time Stephen Crane arrived in New York City, the Bowery had become
a notorious hangout for New York's gangsters in the 1890s, often
referred to as a den of vice and dissipation. In his description of the
cheap flop houses which proliferated in the seventies and eighties,
Harlow states that the newly-arrived and unsuspecting boarders, along
with the downtrodden regulars, were easy prey for the Bowery crooks.
"Here the crook or the fence, looking for allies, found them more
readily than did the missionary, and the
lodging houses became nurseries of crime. It was calculated in 1890
that nine thousand homeless young men lodged nightly along Park Row and
the Bowery...." (Harlow, 407) In its more prosperous days, the Bowery
had been one of New York's most elegant streets at the end of the 18th
century. After a fire in 1835 destroyed most of the old Dutch
townhouses, the Bowery lost much of its elegant charm. By the Civil
War, beer gardens and the like had replaced the mansions and shops in
the neighborhood. At the middle of the century, after the Astor Place
Riot of 1849, many of the more exclusive enterprises moved uptown,
leaving the Bowery to become known for cheap trade and entertainment. The
Entertainments of "Rum Alley" For
their first date, Pete takes Maggie to a beer-garden, "a great
green-hued hall," where the clientele is comprised of factory workers
and manual laborers, "people who showed that all day they strove with
their hands." In his edition of Maggie, Thomas Gullason suggests that the specific locale is
the most famous beer hall in New York, the Atlantic Garden, located at
50–54, the Bowery. Occupied on the site of an old factory and coal
yard, the Atlantic Garden, established in 1858, was owned by the sons
of William Kramer. It was a respectable establishment, bedecked with
plants and flowers, and served up to four thousand customers an
evening. Brooks McNamara describes the Atlantic Garden as a venue
dedicated to family entertainment and allowing for no improprieties. As
a testament to its propriety, the entertainment was likewise
unobjectionable, and the women singers were well-trained and suitably
dressed. "As a matter of fact, the Atlantic Garden seems to have
specialized in rigidly proper female entertainers." (McNamara, 102)
Citing James D. McCabe, Jr.'s Lights and Shadows of New York Life,
or, Sights and Sensations of the Great City, McNamara includes the
following description of the Atlantic Garden. "On an instant the
orchestra breaks forth in some wonderful German melody, or some deep
voiced, strong lunged singer sends his notes rolling through the hall.
The auditors have suddenly lost their merriment, and are now listening
pensively to the music, which is good." (McNamara, 102) The various
forms of entertainment offered by the German beer garden also included
dancing, comedy, opera singers as well as popular singers and
mechanical music. As a social phenomenon, the patrons of the 1890's
beer halls reflected the ever-changing immigrant population. In the
1890s, German immigrants were the predominant group, with a population
of 370,000 in New York City by 1880, and would remain so until 1900.
The Bowery and the Lower East Side were referred to as "Kleindeutschland," where the rents were low and
where there already existed a group of German-speaking inhabitants.
Crane is careful to include this demographic detail in his description
of the beer hall that Maggie and Pete attend. "Quiet Germans, with
maybe their wives and two or three children, sat listening to the
music, with the expressions of happy cows.... [while only] an
occasional party of sailors from a war-ship, their faces pictures of
sturdy health, spent the earlier hours of the evening at the small
round tables." Nevertheless, the concert saloons that Pete takes Maggie
to are devoid of the aforementioned respectability. The
other entertainments described in Maggie are likewise steeped
in baseness and corruption. Crane makes numerous references to the many
grotesque aspects of life in the Bowery, and the distractions offered
to its unfortunate inhabitants consistently and emphatically underscore
the inhumanity of the urban slum. Although
Crane does not specifically name them, between 1880 and 1900 dime
museums were a flourishing business in the Bowery. The typical late
nineteenth century New York City dime museum, with its ten cent
admission fee, catered to a working-class and lower-middle-class
clientele. Recalling the "cabinets of curiosities" that had been
popular among the wealthy and learned elite in Europe during the
Renaissance, dime museums capitalized on human and animal anomalies,
the freak shows whose antecedents in America were the circus and P.T.
Barnum's American Museum (1851), which, under the guise of
entertainment and education, became the foremost venues of spectacle
and popular culture. Dime museums also displayed everything from
historical relics and wax figures to clever automatons. One feature
that separated the dime museum from such genuine institutions as the
Metropolitan Museum of Art was the dime museum's emphasis on live
performance. The various freaks and working acts of the dime museum
were guaranteed fifteen to twenty hours of work a week, and were often
able to live a comfortable life in retirement. While their frequent
exploitation cannot be overlooked, many freaks used personal exhibition
as a means to financial security, education and meaningful
self-expression. Far more than just a "freakery"
or a circus, the dime museum of the late nineteenth century was an
assortment of artifacts and curiosities from travel to exotic lands,
dioramas, panoramas, stuffed animals and mechanical contraptions, a
combination of popular entertainments and quasi-educational exhibits,
all with a fair share of hoaxes as well. Worth and Huber's Palace
Museum claimed to offer wholesome entertainment suitable for children
and ladies with such bizarre attractions such "Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced
Boy," "Baby Bunting, the Smallest Living Horse," and Ajeeb, a mechanical chess player. (Dennett, 58)
Though they would eventually vanish from the urban landscape, the
exhibits and performances which took place at American dime museums
continued to influence stage entertainment and traveling shows for
years. Typically
housed in a two or three story structure, customers would buy a ticket
and proceed to the top floor to view the permanent collection of
artifacts. From there they would proceed to the second floor curio hall
where freaks and circus acts were performed and, finally, to the ground
floor which contained a theater offering a variety show. Other
attractions were also available. "In many of the so-called medicine or
anatomical museums on the Bowery, gullible patrons were lured into the
office of the 'doctor' or 'professor' for blood pressure or lung tests,
a phrenological examination, or a palm
reading." (Dennet, 61) The agenda was to
frighten the patron into requesting a cure, for which the patient would
have to pay a considerable sum. To add to the scam, this hidden fee was
never mentioned until the patron was already into the procedure he so
desperately believed he now needed. A number of these "professors" were
often disbarred physicians or untrained confidence men. (Dennet, 63) Dime museums were a class of cheap
entertainment establishments against which 1890's tourists were warned
categorically by the guide books. Indeed, Crane's disparaging
comparison of Jimmie as a "glib showman at a museum" is a clear
reference to the unsavory characters who
owned or supervised these establishments. Devoid of human compassion,
these entrepreneurs capitalized on other people's misfortune. Essentially
bars that presented low-cost shows to attract customers, concert
saloons are another important cultural phenomenon of late 19th Century
Bowery life and are important venues throughout Maggie.
Chapters 10 and 14 present particularly frightening glimpses of the
inherent danger and degradation of the Bowery concert saloon, evoking
images of corruption and ultimate despair as they beckon seductively to
passersby. A common feature of many of these establishments was the
female waitress, mostly a part-time prostitute, who served drinks to
male customers. Concert saloons featured variant forms of variety
theatre, including an early form of burlesque, and performers from
other types of establishments such as the dime museums, minstrel shows
and circuses, became part of the saloon circuit. "Entertainers sang,
danced, and played musical instruments, and often presented non-musical
material—usually simply rhymes or couplets—as part of their acts."
(McNamara, 51) In addition to these acts, a number of entertainers from
the minstrel theatres introduced blackface songs and sketches,
performing on banjos, bones, guitars and violin cellos. Although
illegal, gymnastic acts also began to appear, as well as exhibition
boxing matches. As the demographics of the Lower East Side changed
during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a new focus
emerged regarding the objects of satire—specifically the Irish and
Germans—the new immigrants of New York City. Nevertheless, while the
variety of live performances increased with the passage of time, the
proprietors of these establishments were primarily interested in
turning a profit rather than becoming a platform for creativity in the
theatrical arts. Added
to this lack of interest in artistic performance, concert saloons were
notoriously involved in illegal activities. Accordingly, the physical
structures which housed the concert saloon were generally shabby, with
the owners and managers preferring cheap and unobtrusive quarters that
kept their establishment in the shadows. "In the final analysis, the
spaces in many concert saloons were probably fairly crude and badly
adapted to performance—they were often an afterthought designed to turn
an ordinary saloon into a theatre of a sort. But drinking remained the
chief business of the concert saloon. Shows—like waiter girls—were a
novelty designed to bring in customers." (McNamara, 76) When
Maggie and Pete are together on weekday evenings, they attend the
conventional melodramatic plays so popular in the 1890's Bowery.
Stephen Crane had a low opinion of these melodramas with their
elaborate crises and overblown emotional displays in which a
"brain-clutching heroine [is] rescued from the palatial home of her
guardian." Maggie, on the other hand, is completely given over to
sympathy for these exaggerated characters and plots. Tragically, she is
laboring under the blind-sighted belief that she will be able to escape
her poverty. "She rejoiced at the way in which the poor and virtuous
eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked." The
defining elements of melodrama, a genre that arose in the late 18th
century, are an elaborate plot with many twists and turns selected for
maximum stage spectacle, a clearly defined hero, and villainous
characters. Melodramas packed theatres throughout the nineteenth
century during a time when cities were growing rapidly and theatres
were the most popular entertainment for the growing middle and working
classes. The melodramas of the 19th Century mark the peak of popularity
of live theatre, with more people attending the theatre than at any
other time in western history. One of the largest theatres in New York,
The Bowery, became known as "The Slaughterhouse" because of the gory
spectacle that it frequently produced. Other enormously popular topics
of melodrama were frontier stories, rags to riches stories, and stories
about race relations. Central
Park The
Central Park Menagerie, which Pete and Maggie visit one Sunday, had an
interesting history by the time Crane wrote Maggie. When the
Park began to receive animals as gifts in the 1860s, some of the
animals were tethered to poles outside the Arsenal. For a brief period,
live animals were even kept in the basement. During this time, the
British sculptor and educator, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, had planned
to construct a Paleozoic Museum featuring sculptured dinosaurs as a
distinct institution within Central Park. After 1827, Hawkins devoted
himself to the study of natural history, and in 1852 included the
subject of geology. Mr. Hawkins was assistant superintendent of the
World's fair in London in 1851 and, in 1852, was appointed by the
Crystal Palace Company to restore the external forms of the extinct
animals to their natural gigantic size. He devoted three and a half
years to the construction of thirty-three life-size dinosaur models
which were placed in the Crystal Palace Park. Following this, Hawkins
came to New York in 1868, lectured on popular science in the hall of
the Cooper Union and began to assemble a new menagerie of sculptured
dinosaurs. At that time, Central Park was being landscaped under the
direction of Frederick Law Olmstead. Unfortunately, in 1871, before
either the park or the dinosaurs were finished, New York City politics
intervened. The corrupt Tammany Hall-Boss Tweed machine took control of
city politics, and Hawkins's dinosaurs were destroyed. Sadly, those
dinosaur models were broken up and buried in the south end of the park,
never to be found. Hawkins left New York an embittered man. That same
year, the Tweed administration asked Jacob Wrey
Mould to design temporary structures
for the Menagerie on the Arsenal grounds. By November 1871, a deer
house had already been completed, but Olmsted and Vaux ordered it to be
demolished. Another
important cultural phenomenon associated with the Central Park
Menagerie is the influence of Charles Darwin's theories of human
evolution. Late nineteenth century visitors were both drawn to and
repulsed by monkeys. Pete, on the other hand, would not be aware of
Darwin and his response to the monkey is one of great admiration, based
on his observation of the monkey's hostility. "Once at the Menagerie he
went into a trance of admiration before the spectacle of a very small
monkey threatening to trash a cageful
because one of them had pulled his tail." Incorporated
in the year of Crane's birth, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is another
venue which Pete and Maggie visit. "Dese little jugs" about which Pete
explodes were part of the Cesnola
Collection of Cypriote Antiquities, at that time the largest and most
famous collection of its kind in the world. The exhibit included
sculptures, bronzes, vases, terracottas,
gems, glass, and jewelry from Cyprus dating from ca. 2500 b.c. to ca. a.d.
300. Acquired by Luigi Palma di Cesnola
(1832–1904), a Civil War veteran and American diplomat in Cyprus, the
collection was purchased by the newly formed Metropolitan Museum
between 1874 and 1876. The reference probably would have been
understood by a contemporary reader of the novel. And, since admission
to both the Zoo and the Museum was free on Sundays, the contemporary
reader would also have recognized that Pete was not being extravagant
in taking Maggie to this popular uptown museum. Further
Information Works
Cited Citation
Information Text
Citation (Chicago Manual of Style format):
Bloom, Harold, ed. "Background to Maggie:
A Girl of the Streets." Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,
Bloom's Guides. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2004. Bloom's
Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.
http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin=
BGMAGOTS03&SingleRecord=True (accessed February 22, 2013). Record
URL: |