Agency in Maggie

In Stephen Crane’s Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, agency is used to describe characters in order to give the reader a better idea of their characters and ideas. For example, Jimmie and the boys he fights with early in the book are described as being from either Devil’s Row or Rum Alley (the latter being where Jimmie lives), and the two groups fight with each other (Crane 4). Jimmie lives in Rum Alley, and belongs to seemingly a child’s version of a gang, and gets into fights. These events give the picture of him as a kid who lives in the slums and gets in a lot of trouble, giving the reader an idea of Jimmie’s character as well as what can be expected of the other characters living in that area. Another example is that of Maggie herself; being the older sister of Jimmie and living in the same household, she lives in similar circumstances. She is shown, however, to be more reserved, more likely to avoid conflict if possible, quiet, and submissive, such as when her brother starts to fight with her (Crane 7). This agency becomes more important later in the book, when it causes her to see Pete as her way out of her situation, when she is afraid to trust him at times, and when he eventually stops caring for her as he once did, causing her to lose all of her sources of support (Pete and her family), and eventually leads to her demise. In the book, agency not only gives the reader sense of the characters and their characteristics, but the agency that the characters embody affects their actions consistently through all the events of the book.