There is a curious unity in the spirit of the arts; and 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 Judge, 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 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 affections; her hopeless environments; the horrible old drunken mother, a cyclone of violence 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 warlike 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.
In George and his mother he has to do with folk of country origin as the city affects them, and the son’s decadence is admirably studied; he scarcely struggles against temptation, and his mother’s only art is to cry and to scold. Yet he loves her, in a way, and she is devotedly proud of him. These simple country folk are contrasted with simple city folk of varying degrees of badness. Mr. Crane has the skill to show how evil is greatly the effect of ignorance and imperfect civilization. The club of friends, older men than George, whom he is asked to join, is portrayed with extraordinary insight, and the group of young toughs whom he finally consorts with is done with even greater mastery. The bulldog motive of one of them, who is willing to fight to the death, is most impressively rendered.
From “New York Low Life in Fiction,”
New York World, July 26, 1896
READING GROUP GUIDE
Taking the writings in this volume together, discuss the picture of slum life in turn-of-the-century New York that Crane gives us. What are some of its defining features? How is poverty reflected in the lives of Bowery dwellers.?
Reflect on the continuities and differences between the characters in Crane’s two Bowery Tales, “Maggie” and “George’s Mother.” For instance, how does Jimmie compare to George Kelcey?
How does “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets” speak to the constraints imposed by gender conventions? What choices are available to Maggie? Why does she go with Pete.? Why is she driven from her mother’s house?
Alcohol figures centrally in Crane’s depiction of poverty and “low life,” from the status that accrues to Pete because of his job as bartender, to the powerful hold of alcohol over the lives of the poor in general. Discuss Crane’s depiction of alcohol in his New York writings.
Critics have praised Crane’s style—especially in “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,” with its stark, minimal style—as breaking with nineteenth-century literary conventions, and in many ways anticipating major features of subsequent American writing. What makes Crane’s writing unique and innovative?
In his emphasis on the realistic depiction of the inexorable effects of outside forces—social and natural—on the lives and destinies of individual characters, Crane is often described as a literary naturalist. Is this an apt description? Discuss naturalism in relation to Crane’s New York writings, and the relationship of Crane’s work to that of other writers (like Dreiser and Norris) usually associated with the term.
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Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Other New York Writings Page 28
