Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (42 page)

4
(p. 95)
One day he met Maggie Johnson on the stairs:
One can only say “poor George” and “poorer still Maggie.” If only they had stopped to chat ...

5
(p. 108)
almost the exact truth:
In other words, at least one of George’s co-workers knew what had happened earlier. George had gotten blind drunk somewhere and passed out.

6
(p. 112)
Kelcey sometimes wondered whether he liked beer:
This is one of the most telling lines in the book, and certainly the funniest. If George had thought a bit harder about the question he would have realized that he probably didn’t like beer and would be happier without it.

1
(p. 157)
Indeed, it was not until the Binkses had left the
city ...
recovered their balances:
Given that New Jersey has now become the punch line of jokes about urban sprawl and air pollution, it is hard to recall that until recently, the state of New Jersey was considered a verdant paradise compared with the smoky and cobble-bound New York City. Just across the Hudson River were green fields, fresh water, and the quiet of rural life. New Jersey supplied most of the fresh vegetables for New York and Philadelphia. It is no coincidence that New Jersey is called the “Garden State.”

2
(p. 195)
If
a
beginner
expects ...
until the next morning:
Crane steadfastly maintained that he had never smoked opium. The vividness of this paragraph suggests otherwise. When asked in open court about his opium use, Crane took cover behind the Fifth Amendment.

Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A
Girl of the Streets
(1893) was the first major work of naturalism in American fiction. The novel’s vivid, unflinching narrative, set in the inhumane living conditions in the tenements of New York City, inspired scores of other American writers to record their observations with a near-photographic realism. Crane’s material for his remarkably true-to-life novel came from firsthand experience. He had immersed himself in the very conditions he describes in
Maggie
and his newspaper articles, several of which appear in the present volume.

Three years before Maggie appeared, social activist Jacob Riis published an unfaltering depiction of life in New York City with
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
(1890), a groundbreaking work of nonfiction and photography. Riis, who like Crane had a background in journalism, wrote a startling expose of the squalid existence of New York’s immigrant poor. Riis’s work, well-received from the start, had a tremendous impact on social policy. With its publication, officials recognized the appalling living conditions of many of the city’s residents and made tenement reform a priority on the political agenda. Theodore Roosevelt, at the time New York City’s police commissioner, called Riis “the most useful citizen of New York.”

Much of the emotional appeal of
How the Other Half Lives
arose from Riis’s unforgettable photographs of the extreme misery of people living in tenements. The pictures forced readers to confront head-on the staggering circumstances of large numbers of people in a manner that prose could not possibly convey. Riis’s explicit photographs allowed him to maintain a more subdued tone in his writing that lent credibility to his call for reform. The success of his work paved the way for Stephen Crane, who in many ways tried to replicate the photographic impact of
How the Other Half Lives.
Crane’s narrative style is often referred to as “imagistic,” and in
Maggie,
his first mature work, Crane compensates for a lack of actual images with his colorful, even lurid prose impressions.

Crane and Riis are associated with the tradition of American journalism known as “muckraking.” The loose term refers to journalists who wrote expose and reform stories in the period between the 1890s and World War I. Overly sensational, condescending, and truth-distorting accounts by some journalists lent muckraking a dubious reputation, although many writers made their cases for reform with integrity. Notable “muckraking” journalists include Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Ida Tarbell. Riis’s
How the Other Half Lives
inspired socialist-leaning author Jack London to write an analogous depiction of London’s East End, titled
The People of the Abyss
(1903).

Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel
The Jungle
(1906) is singular among works of fiction for its positive effect on the real world. The novel’s horrifying descriptions of the unsanitary handling of food in Chicago’s meatpacking district caused public outrage, and the reality of rotten and diseased food being offered to consumers was confirmed by Chicago newspapers. In response to the furor caused by
The Jungle,
Roosevelt, who had become president of the United States, ordered the Department of Agriculture to investigate conditions in the stockyards, and Congress passed the Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act just months after the novel’s publication.

The term “muckraking,” ironically, was coined as a pejorative by Roosevelt in 1906, more than a decade after he had praised Riis’s work. The word comes from John Bunyan’s Christian allegory
The Pilgrim’s
Progress
(part I, 1678; part II, 1684), which refers to the Man with the Muck-rake: “the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck-rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.” In coining the term in its modern application, Roosevelt meant to discourage the sort of reckless journalism that, rather than responsibly exposing injustices, attempted to increase circulation with negative stories dependent upon hyperbole and sensationalism—methods both Crane and Riis avoided. In signing the reform legislation, however, and in his praise of Riis, Roosevelt implicitly acknowledged the usefulness of ethical muckrakers.

Later “muckrakers” include civil-rights activist Angela Davis, feminist and political activist Gloria Steinem,
Fast Food Nation
(2001) author Eric Schlosser, and filmmaker Michael Moore, whose films include
Roger & Me
(1989),
Bowling for Columbine
(2002), and
Fahrenheit
9/11 (2004).

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with
an
array of perspectives on the texts,
as
well
as
questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources
as
diverse
as
reviews contemporaneous with the works, letters written by the
author,
literary criticism of
later generations, and appreciations
written throughout the works’ histories. Following the commentary,
a
series of questions seeks to
filter
Stephen
Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York
through
a
variety of points of view
and
bring
about a
richer understanding of these enduring works.

 

[‘Maggie’] is of more interest to me, both because it is the work of a young man, and also because it is a work of astonishingly good style. It deals with poverty and vice and crime also, but it does so, not out of curiosity, not out of salaciousness, but because of a distinct art impulse, the desire to utter in truthful phrase a certain rebellious cry. It is the voice of the slums. It is not written by a dilettante; it is written by one who has lived the life. The young author, Stephen Crane, is a native of the city, and has grown up in the very scenes he describes. His book is the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read, fragment though it is. It is pictorial, graphic, terrible in its directness. It has no conventional phrases. It gives the dialect of the slums as I have never before seen it written—crisp, direct, terse. It is another locality finding voice....

The dictum is amazingly simple and fine for so young a writer. Some of the words illuminate like flashes of light. Mr. Crane is only twenty-one years of age, and yet he has met and grappled with the actualities of the street in almost unequalled grace and strength. With such a
technique
already at command, with life mainly
before him,
Stephen Crane is to be henceforth reckoned with.

—from Arena (June 1893)

Mr. Crane pictures Maggie’s home with colors now lurid and now black, but always with the hand of an artist. And the various stages of her career, until in despair at being neglected she, we are led to believe, commits suicide by jumping into the river, are shown with such vivid and terrible accuracy as to make one believe they are photographic. Mr. Crane cannot have seen all that he describes, and yet the reader feels that he must have seen it all. This, perhaps, is the highest praise one can give the book. Mr. Crane is a master of slum slang. His dialogues are surprisingly effective and natural. The talk Pete indulges in while intoxicated makes one see in his mind’s eye the very figure of the loathsome beast for the loss of whom Maggie died.... Mr. Crane’s story should be read for the fidelity with which it portrays a life that is potent on this island, along with the life of the best of us. It is a powerful portrayal, and, if sombre and repellent, none the less true, none the less freighted with appeal to those who are able to assist in righting wrongs.

—May 31, 1896

 

A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane’s latest novel, is a picture of the lowest stratum of society in its gloomiest form. It is as realistic as anything that Emile Zola has ever written. Though some of its chapters are enough to give one the ‘creeps,’ none can deny that the characters which he draws with such a master hand are absolutely true to life. The dialect is also natural, and nothing is lacking to give Devil’s Row and Rum Alley, slums of the darker New York, such prominence as they never had before. It may, in fact, be said that Mr. Crane has discovered those localities and revealed them to the astonished gaze of the world for the first time. The reader, in going over the pages of A
Girl of the Streets,
is reminded of nothing so much as the slimy things that crawl and blink when a long undisturbed stone is removed and the light is thrown upon them. The hero and heroine, if such they may be called, are Jimmie and Maggie Johnson, brother and sister, residents of Devil’s Row. Maggie is the only redeeming character in the book, and even she does not redeem to any extent. She is betrayed and she dies, and the mourning of Devil’s Row at her wake is fearfully grewsome. Analytical powers are the chief feature of the novel. It is free from maudlin sentiment. No missionary ever ventures near Rum Alley. Its denizens are left to their own resources, and they simmer in them.

 

—June 1, 1896

 

I think that what strikes me most in the story of
Maggie
is that quality of fatal necessity which dominates Greek tragedy. From the conditions it all had to be, and there were the conditions. I felt this in Mr. Hardy’s Jude, where the principle seems to become conscious in the writer; but there is apparently no consciousness of any such motive in the author of Maggie. Another effect is that of an ideal of artistic beauty which is as present in the working out of this poor girl’s squalid romance as in any classic fable. This will be foolishness, I know, to the foolish people who cannot discriminate between the material and the treatment in art, and who think that beauty is inseparable from daintiness and prettiness, but I do not speak to them. I appeal rather to such as feel themselves akin with every kind of human creature, and find neither high nor low when it is a question of inevitable suffering, or of a soul struggling vainly with an inexorable fate.

My rhetoric scarcely suggests the simple terms the author uses to produce the effect which I am trying to report again. They are simple, but always most graphic, especially when it comes to the personalities of the story; the girl herself, with her bewildered wish to be right and good; with her distorted perspective; her clinging and generous affections; her hopeless environments; the horrible old drunken mother, a cyclone of violence and volcano of vulgarity; the mean and selfish lover; a dandy tough, with his gross ideals and ambitions ; her brother, an Ishmaelite from the cradle, who with his war-like instincts beaten back into cunning, is what the b’hoy of former times has become in our more strenuously policed days. He is indeed a wonderful figure in a group which betrays no faltering in the artist’s hand. He, with his dull hates, his warped good-will, his cowed ferocity, is almost as fine artistically as Maggie, but he could not have been so hard to do, for all the pathos of her fate is rendered without one maudlin touch.

So is that of the simple-minded and devoted and tedious old woman who is George’s mother in the book of that name. This is scarcely a study at all, while Maggie is really and fully so. It is the study of a situation merely: a poor, inadequate woman, of a commonplace religiosity, whose son goes to the bad. The wonder of it is the courage which deals with persons so absolutely average, and the art that graces them with the beauty of the author’s compassion for everything that errs and suffers. Without this feeling the effects of his mastery would be impossible, and if it went further or put itself into the pitying phrases it would annul the effects. But it never does this; it is notable how in all respects the author keeps himself well in hand. He is quite honest with his reader. He never shows his characters or his situations in any sort of sentimental glamour; if you will be moved by the sadness of common fates you will feel his intention, but he does not flatter his portraits of people or conditions to take your fancy.