Life Through Hell-Colored Glasses

"Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?"



In his novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane displays a relentlessly brutal, violent and oppressive existence trapped in the bottom class strata of the New York Bowery of 1890’s. The story focuses on sister and brother, Maggie and Jimmie Johnson, and their violent, alcoholic Irish immigrant household. The family and the surrounding characters are non-empathetic, hard as flint and defensive, except for Maggie, whose sensitive nature and hopeful naivete get her killed. Although the other characters manage various sorts of physical survival, their souls, along with Maggie’s, are warped and ruined under the boot heel of class oppression.

The story opens chronicling a cyclical brutality that begins in infancy as Jimmie and Pete are introduced as small boys engaged in a bloody Rum Alley street fight. Pete exhorts Jimmie in “tones of delight” to ““Smash ‘im Jimmie, kick deh damn guts out of ‘im,” (Crane 5) . The father breaks up his small son’s fight by indiscriminately kicking at heads, yelling at Jimmie to quit fighting or “I belt yer life out” (Crane 6) . Jimmie’s response is to curse his father, whose response is to kick his child again. The father drags Jimmie home, where “a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and gutter” (Crane 6) and the tenement women “with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels” (Crane 6) . The Johnson hovel is a frightening nightmare commandeered by a drunk, abusive monster of a mother and screaming children, living up to the father’s description of home as “a reg’lar livin’hell!” (Crane 12). The prose is relentless in its description of thick, choking layers of ugliness. The inhabitants of the Bowery forsake and strike out at each other like a dog biting its own tail.

David Fitelson in his article, “Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Darwinism” quotes Crane as saying that in his writing of Maggie, his “Purpose was to show that environment is a tremendous thing in this world and often shapes lives regardlessly” (182) . This dovetails with the Marxist theory that “we are all situated historically and socially, and our social and historical contexts “determine” or shape our lives” (Rivkin 644) . Jimmie is extruded from this environment into adulthood much like everyone else in the Bowery, tough, self-serving, clinging fiercely to shreds of pride. “He maintained a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressed men. To him fine raiment was allied to weakness. He and his order were kings…over the men of untarnished clothes, because these latter dreaded, perhaps, to be either killed or laughed at” (Crane 15) . He tries the neighborhood church and “Momentarily, Jimmie was sullen with thoughts of a hopeless altitude where grew fruit” (Crane15) but the reaction was temporary. “He was afraid of neither the devil nor the leader of society” (Crane 16) .

Maggie, however, is atypical. She “grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl” and “none of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins” (Crane 18) . She is abhorred by her mother’s drunken abusiveness, and she tries valiantly to keep returning her house to order and care for her brothers. She does not sneer and gossip, nor continually spout “Teh hell wit yeh” like everyone around her.

As soon as Maggie and Jimmie are old enough they enter the workforce and start “producing means of subsistence” (Marx 653) . They are limited by their lack of education, and “What they are, therefore coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce… The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production” (Marx 653). Jimmie gets a job driving trucks, and Maggie makes collars and cuffs with “twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent” (Crane 19). Jimmie seems unwilling to grasp for anything beyond his “down-trodden position that had a private but distant element of grandeur in its isolation” (Crane 16). He and so many others in the lower working class fall into a complacency devoid of vision. According to Marx, the ruling class are “the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood) while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts” (Marx 657) .

Maggie harbors dreams of a better life. She questions her job, stuck on her stool under the command of a tyrannical boss, a “detestable creature” whose “pocketbook deprived them of a power of retort” (Crane 30). “Her dim thoughts were often searching for far away lands where, as God says, the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the trees of her dream-gardens there has always walked a lover” (Crane 21) .

Into this dreamy discontent saunters bartender Pete, with his snappy clothes and bravado attitude. To isolated Maggie, he seems a “beau ideal of a man” (Crane 27). Maggie is influenced by the Bowery code that mistakes fear as weakness, and consequently, arrogance as strength. Pete takes Maggie out and expands her world to include theaters, museums, beer halls and freak shows. Maggie is dazzled and attaches herself to Pete with dog-like loyalty and trust. Insecure that she is socially beneath Pete, she “calculates the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have looked down upon her” and she envies the better clothing and “elegance and soft palm” (Crane 21) of the new women she sees. She longs to be like these women who she imagines have “serenity as though forever cherished and watched over by those they loved” (Crane 29) . She tragically miscalculates that Pete will be her ticket to upward mobility and happiness and to this end she bargains with her one commodity, which is her only product--her looks and sex.

Women, even married ones, are particularly hit hard in the lower classes. Crane stated that “marriage was a base trick on women, who were hunted animals anyhow” (Phillips xi) and Jayne Philips comments in her introduction to Maggie, “women like Nell seem the only pray with a chance of survival. Deceit and irresponsibility of men toward women is one of the constants in Maggie” (xi). Nell capitalizes on her product, her”brilliance and audacity” (Crane 51) to control men and get their money. She manages to navigate the Bowery by her own rules, stylish, without jewelry or gaudy make-up, looking “clear-eyed through the stares of men” (Crane 52), but she is ultimately hard-hearted and self-serving.

Maggie is rejected by Pete and her family and pushed out into the streets. In a very significant encounter with a representative of middle class and religion in the form of a well heeled minister, Maggie sends up a vertical cry for help from her depths. She appeals to this figure because “she had heard of the Grace of God”(Crane 61) . It’s a pivotal moment in the narrative, for the upper classes have a chance to recognize the desperation and reach out to the lower class. But, the minister “gave a convulsive movement and saved his respectability by a vigorous sidestep. He did not risk it to save a soul. For how was he to know that there was a soul before him that needed saving?” (Crane 61) .

The novella is an examination on why the upper classes do not seem to acknowledge or take any active involvement in eradicating the miseries of the Bowery, but the narrative also magnifies the high levels of lateral violence and cruelty within the tenement life. Along with the physical fighting, the gossiping, and the drinking, both Jimmie and Pete refuse to acknowledge the plight of, or offer any restitution to the women they have destroyed. The question occurs, is this a true depiction of Bowery life, and if so, just how much of these people’s actions can be blamed on their environment?

Crane’s literary structure of Maggie is in a Reflectionist, or Pragmatic style. He aims to teach some truth. Indeed the author wrote Maggie while holed up in a New York slum. After Maggie was first written in 1893, Crane had an impossible time trying to get it published. An editor at Century magazine commented “these creatures of an environment have no tenderness and no restraint of action to excuse their callousness” (Phillips xiii) . Crane wrote it so as “to be unmistakable” (Phillips xii) in contrast to the other work around him which he considered “pink valentines” (Phillips xiii). “Characteristic early response was one of discomfort verging on shock” (Fitelson 183). The violence and moral issues bubbling like tar under the blinded upper classes was reaching a point near the end of the 19th century where it had to be addressed. The sociological issues of the Bowery intensified with the rise of immigration and urban crowding in connection with the industrial revolution. Politicians and philosophers began to focus on the causes and cures of the problems, and dialogue emerged veering into potentially dangerous concepts of Social Darwinism. “The Darwinian notion of Natural Selection rendered all questions of life immediately susceptible of amoral interpretation—and it is the amorality of the life struggle that is most visibly characteristic of Maggie”(Fitelson 185) . The upper classes had a tendency to look down long noses at the Bowery and hypothesize that these people could possibly be less moral. Morality, in the Bowery world, was weakness, and bred out of the environment by natural selection. In Crane’s novella, the only character with any ounce of compassion, atypical Maggie, cannot and does not survive. The tough survivors inherit their brutal tactics from their brutal parents and pass them on to their children. Author Howard Horwitz quotes turn of the century sociologist Jacob Riis, “conditions are the prolific parents of corresponding habits and morals. Tenements are nurseries of pauperism and crime. They breed moral contagion”(607). But Riis contended that the problems of the Bowery existed because of the inequities thrust upon them by the upper classes, and therefore the problem was a “just punishment on the community, and the evil actually belonged to the middle and upper classes, and was more in fact, displaced. The other half’s bondage to environment symbolized, although it was supposed to obscure, the middle class’ own bondage” (Horwitz 609).

Still,this does not address the Bowery’s core reactions of violence and non-empathy, and Fitelson suggests a more far-reaching philosophy, that regardless of class, “Violence is the predominant form of human communication” (186). However, Hannah Arendt in her book, On Violence, holds to the more Marxist view that violence “is neither a secret death wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression” but is rather a substitute for gaining power when no other means is available (5) . The puffed up toughness is a veneer, a self-defense mechanism heavily masking deep frustrations. The violence that explodes laterally is from pent up rage that has no vertical outlet defined by vision. The vision is still manufactured and imposed by and for the needs of the bourgeoisie.

The down-trodden life in Maggie, seems at times, on the surface, like brutal animalism, but vestiges of sentimental hope, and a sublimated form of vision, are reflected by the popular Bowery theatrical plays. The melodramatic plots depict, “triumph for the hero, poor and of the masses, the representative of the audience, over the villain and the rich man, his pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed with tyrannical purposes, imperturbable amid suffering” (Crane 32) . Even the “shady” people in the audience,”hissed vice and applauded virtue. Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for virtue” (Crane 31) .

The ubiquitous drinking is also an attempt to escape from harsh reality, and self-examination. When sober Pete disowns Maggie, he slams a door in her face and tells her to “go the hell” (Crane 61), but later, Pete is drunk and carousing, doling out money to Nell and her friends, and pathetically begging for validation that he is a “goo’ f’ler” (Crane 66).

The story tragically concludes with Maggie, who now has a hunger for finer things and a better life, trying to claw her way up by the only route available to her now, selling her body as product. As the narrative chronicles her last night on the streets, Maggie ignores the upper class as potential clients, focusing instead on the “rural or untaught.” An upper class man, with a “sublime air, a chrysanthemum, and a look of ennui,” is momentarily interested in Maggie, until he realizes she is “neither new, Parisian, nor theatrical.” Maggie’s street walk symbolically descends from the glittering upper class establishments into lower and lower realms until she reaches the oppressive black depths of the river hemmed in by factories, where, from “Afar off the lights of the avenues glittered as if from an impossible distance.” Here Maggie meets her death as “the varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence” (Crane 65) .








Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, 1970. 5. Google Books. Web. 10 May, 2010.

Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. New York: Bantam, 1984. Print.

Fitelson, David. “Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Darwinism.” American Quarterly Vol. 16, No.2, Part 1 (Summer 1964): 182-186. JSTOR. Web. 9 May, 2010.

Horowitz, Howard. “Maggie and the Socialist Paradigm.” American Literary History Vol. 10, No.4 (Winter 1998): 609. JSTOR. Web. 10 May, 2010.

Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 653, 657. Print.

Phillips, Jayne Anne.
"Introduction." Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. By Stephen Crane. New York: Bantam, 1984. xi-xiii. Print.

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Starting with Zero.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 644. Print.