Introduction to Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1890) by Stephen Crane

“A man is born into this world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not responsible for his vision- he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to honesty is my supreme ambition.”

Stephen Crane, like writers Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and James T. Farrell, was an early proponent of Naturalism, a ground breaking literary movement of the 1890’s which depicted the masses of poor in our booming cities in a new way. Many of these writers had cut their teeth writing at the metropolitan desks of the big urban news dailies of New York and Chicago, churning out sensational copy about crime in the lower depths: stories of murder and depravity, heavy also on melodramatic tales of ‘roses of the gutter’, fragile young women cast overboard into the frenetic whirlpool of big city life. Through the lens of Naturalism, poor neighborhoods burst with violent barbarity. The urban jungle reflected the late 19^th century’s fascination with the post-Darwinian vision of a universe shorn of any divine plan, not immoral but amoral. This intellectual response was part of the widespread reaction against liberalism and middle class values that typifies the Modernist revolt in art. The stories, sketches, and novels of the Naturalist writers were intended to stir the middle class reading public to agitate for reform but they also exploited a growing interest in ‘pulp fiction’.

The literary movement of Naturalism had originated in Paris with the novels and social criticism of Emile Zola. In his influential novel Germinal (1885), he depicted the poor as hapless victims trapped in a permanent underclass by socio-economic and psychological forces beyond their understanding. Zola depocted urban dwellers living at terrible extremes of 'nerve and blood'. Zola’s work exemplified the philosophy of hard determinism which regards humans as mere cogs in a social mechanism that produces results with the certainty of a mathematical formula. There is no room for free will or personal responsibility in such a philosophy.

Liberal realists have a different understanding of the causes of poverty. Their judgment of the poor acknowledges the difficult challenges posed by the unhealthy environment of the urban slums but insists upon the individual’s freedom of choice. The poor are capable of exercising independent action and therefore are responsible for their behavior.

Naturalists based their theories upon radical politics of class, the pseudo-science of eugenics, and the psychology of the unconscious. They argued that the poor had been overwhelmed by the structural forces of capitalism (which produce huge profits for the few but certain misery for losers in the market wars). In the 1890’s the poor were also said to be victimized by inferior hereditary traits. This was the hey-day of Social Darwinism, that bastard child of evolutionary theory which insisted that some races were marked for extinction in the battle for survival of the fittest. Naturalism’s theorists were also influenced by recent Freudian psychology which argued that the damage done in early childhood left the poor subject to uncontrollable instinctive compulsions. They portrayed the city as an urban jungle where the poor waged a fierce struggle for survival, a contest determined by amoral, unchangeable facts of life.

In 1890 Stephen Crane had just dropped out of college to pursue a literary career in New York City. When he wrote Maggie, he was working for an urban daily on the metropolitan beat. There he met many other ambitious writers, painters, and sages who had been influenced by the newest, most radical ideas current in this early phase of Modernism. Crane was sent out on to the streets to sketch the gaudy cityscape in muckraking human-interest pieces. His stories sold well and earned him a name in the newspaper business. Crane was familiar with Jacob Riis’ expose of the lower depths and imitated Riis' supercharged photographic realism in his early sketches.

These exposes of the sordid life of the poor shocked and challenged middle class readers. Genteel fiction had refused to descend to the level of the poor and allow readers to empathize with their experience. Middle class readers used moral values not just to pass judgment on the poor but also to keep them at a distance from their comfortable lives. Crane’s fiction challenges this genteel middle class morality. For him, slum life revealed the flat indifference of the universe in stark, fierce forms.

Crane reveals Maggie’s world in striking, dynamic prose. His vision of the city is hyper-real; it is pitched at an extreme psychological intensity; he is not merely indulging a love of language. Through this monstrous lens he captures the riotous sensibility of the poor. Self-esteem shredded, exhausted by the daily struggle for food and shelter, plagued by resentment, depression and anger, seeking release in drugs, violence and sex, Crane’s characters shout, bellow, roar, wail, drink and brawl. Crane’s language is full of striking metaphors, screaming diction and hyper-active prose. Its grotesque, hilarious exaggerations reveal the psychological reality of poverty.

And who are we to judge? Our disdain of the poor contributes to the problem. How would we behave in the same situation? When the safety net is withdrawn and the most basic necessities of life go un-met, our notions of civility and propriety might quickly evaporate.

The plot of Maggie is the most hackneyed in sentimental melodrama. In it the innocent slum girl suffers betrayal at the hands of those she loves most and then descends quickly into alcoholism, prostitution, and worse. The sequence of events in Maggie’s life is pre-determined by the very genre of melodrama. The action of the novel, though, focuses on whether she can overcome ignorance, self-delusion, and her own naïve innocence to achieve consciousness of the reality of her situation. Only then will she have a chance. For Maggie to survive she must recognize who and where she is. The primary obstacle to her goal is shame. Maggie must shake off the demeaning, middle class judgments of her and other poor people like her. Not only is she victimized unfairly by these judgments, but she agrees with them. Her self-esteem, and the self-esteem of her neighbors, is measured in middle class terms.

Crane said, “… the root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice- Perhaps I mean a lack of ambition or the willingness to be knocked flat and accept the licking…”

Maggie may be responsible for her fate despite the powerful social verdict that drags her down into shame and self-loathing. Crane insists that the most dangerous foe that she faces is not her monstrous mother, not her sneering brother, nor her preening, utterly self-absorbed boyfriend. Maggie’s enemies are her own deluded, romantic notions of life that are so easily knocked aside. She looks at people through the blurred lens of middle class fantasy and the mist of genteel sentiment.

Unless she changes, Maggie will be deceived. She will be devastated by betrayal, her fragile self-esteem will evaporate, and she will slide towards oblivion. Maggie’s only hope is to escape the very conventions of the popular fiction in which she has been conceived. How is that possible? If only she could see the ridiculous disparity between her thoughts and the reality of her life. If only she could see her life the way Crane’s narrator does, then maybe she could laugh, get angry, and find the will to change. Well, maybe she can’t accomplish this feat, but the reader can.