Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane includes the idea of Naturalism into the story and the figure of the characters. I think it must be seen in some specific remarkable chapters, especially through chapters 1-4 because these scenes indicate how Maggie and Jimmie are constructed in their figures as children in poverty and violence. They are involved in violent circumstances, including not only slum alley but domestic violence by their parents. In order to live through these circumstances they have no choice but to decide their own way. They just adopt their own situations to survive. Its is hard to say that this is free will because instead of considering their behavior they just obey the circumstance they were put into.
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I definitely agree that Naturalism is present in "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets." However, it took a while for me to understand why the book used naturalism and not realism, because I had to figure out the difference between the two. Maggie's life is a perfect example of Naturalism because of her inability to improve her situation. Our handout says that Naturalism "shows man caught in a net from which there can be no escape and degenerating under those circumstances; that is, it is pessimistic materialistic determinism." The handout also points out the difference between Realism and Naturalism: "naturalists differ from realists in their deterministic outlook. Naturalists view all individuals as being at the mercy of biological and socioeconomic forces, whereas realists hold that humans have a certain degree of free will that they can exercise to affect their situations." As you said, this "degree of free will" is exactly what the characters in "Maggie" are lacking. For example, although there is nothing wrong with Maggie--she is, in fact, an amazing result of her environment--as Crane puts it, she "blossomed from a mud puddle." It is merely Maggie's environment that destroys her, even though she tries to better her social situation by going out with Pete. It becomes even more evident that Maggie has been "swallowed up" by her environment in chapter 17, when she is a prostitute wandering the streets. In this chapter, Crane never calls her "Maggie", thus implying that she has lost her identity to her environment. Furthermore, Crane writes that she goes from a dark street to a darker street, each experience getting more dark and grotesque, giving the impression that she is being swallowed up by the "blackness" of the surrounding streets and her environment.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you both that Crane heavily includes naturalism in the story. Our class handout defines naturalism as, "a literary movement that represented people in a deterministic and generally pessimistic light as products of heredity and environment (331)." I believe that Maggie and Jimmie are products of their environment, as you refer to slum alley and domestic violence by their parents as being keys. I believe Crane displays the ultimate point of naturalism by beginning the novel with the naive Maggie as a small child born into a family filled with violence, abuse, ridicule and neglect. As the story progresses Maggie evolves to become "red" and "crimson", just as her mother is described, inferring that she is tainted with the same sins as her mother. Finally, Maggie has become just another "girl of the streets", and dies ultimately. Her death is the only thing that stops the cycle of strong social forces that produced her. It can be assumed by the reader that Maggie would bear children whom would start out naive and innocent just as she did, but due to their mother and the world they were born into they too would be sucked into the naturalistic cycle of the same abuse, violence and neglect that turned Maggie into a "girl of the streets". Crane implies that death alone stops the vicious cycle. This illustrates naturalism in its darkest sense in my opinion.
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