Maggie and Naturalism: A cursory, contextual glance

While reading Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, one comes upon the sort of bitter (early industrial) realism which is evident in naturalistic writings. His implication is that once you are born into poverty, you stay there for life.  Maggie's life at first provides a contrasting, contrary opinion. She is constantly looking for ways out and chances to improve her situation. Take, for instance, her job at a garment business where she works as a wage laborer, churning out collars. In this we see the wage laborer's struggle against overwhelming odds to succeed in a harsh (her family, tenement dwellers, Pete, etc.), dirty world (Crane's "streets"), making clothes for others though she can barely clothe herself.

Destined for failure financially, she seeks another way out of the slums in Pete. Maggie hopes that her ideal man will take her to a pseudo-idyllic setting as a simple married woman (at least; Crane says at the end of chapter 5, "Under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover."), but we can also look at her parents as an extremely unsuccessful analogue. She combines these sorts of dreams later (end of chapter 8) when Pete takes her to the theater: "She wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen imitated, perhaps grotesquely, by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory." That is, Maggie wonders if emulation can itself bring the culture and refinement. We can see this echo (or echoed in) Jacob Riis' photographs. In tenements and slums in the midst of industrialization and urbanization we see in Riis' work a sense of maintenance of tradition, culture, and "refinement", despite the conditions of work, streets and home. Later, though, we can see that even this emulative view is flawed, as Maggie, not being able to control her family, continues to live in squalid environs (ch. 6 and onward) with her drunken mother and brother.