Although Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is full of disheartening scenes in which
uplift seems impossible. There is one
scene that I especially detest, because it made me optimistic for Maggie’s
circumstance; even though in the end it was just a cruel mirage of hope. This passage is at the beginning of Chapter V
and commences thusly, “The girl, Maggie blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production
of a tenement district, a pretty girl.
None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins. The philosophers up-stairs, down-stairs and
on the same floor, puzzled over it” (Crane, 16).
I love this description, because Maggie has promise! Has kinetic-like agency! By that I mean here is the possibility that
her divinely-given good looks and disposition (despite her environment) could
releaser her from her expected fate.
However, this glimmer of hope is (in all actuality) a dreadful mistake. In the end, it proves to be a cheap trick
that only temporarily puts off her now even slower demise. For me, this was the most disheartening scene
in the book, because it build up the good things of Maggie’s character, but all
this made Maggie’s fall in the end all the more tragic.
I totally agree with you that that scene in chapter 5 is interesting and disheartening at once. I think that quote is a perfect illustration of why the text is an example of anti-sentimentalism, especially when taken in context with the rest of the book, as you do here. That is agency through which Crane writes: a contrast of the actual fact (a pragmatic, naturalistic look at poverty and the literature about it) and the emotional hopes of the reader (sentimentalism; we root for Maggie, the underdog, to succeed despite her surroundings).
ReplyDeleteHer beauty, I think, outlines her innocence and stubborn defiance of the pragmatic (her family's anger and the rejection of Maggie). After Pete's rejection of her and when she becomes a whore, I think we can pretty literally see that she is hawking the one thing that she had been blessed with after everything else had failed: her looks. This kind of baseness underlines the kind of flaw evident in the dream of the wage laborers and impoverished classes (that is, the American dream): if you work hard and believe in yourself, you can get yourself out of any situation. In Crane's world, though, we can see this type of belief (extensively portrayed in works like Horatio Alger's) is mythological at best, and false at worst.
Completely agree! I think that by making Maggie out to be this sweet and innocent little girl Crane make's her downfall seem so much worse. Something I thought was really interesting though is that Crane write with some sentimentalism toward Maggie at the beginning of the book and it just steadily decreases until the end where he doesn't even call her by name. At the same time though sentimentalism toward Maggie's mother actually increases. At the beginning she is just shown as this horrible person who beats on everyone and causes Maggie's downfall and then at the last scene of the book she is shown crying over loosing the daughter that she abandoned. I'm not exactly sure why this is but I thought that it was kind of interesting.
ReplyDelete