My least favorite scene in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, is without a doubt the final seen which ends at the river. It isn't my least favorite scene because Maggie dies, but because it is a microcosm of her entire story. It depicts repeated interactions, which begin with some promise, but only lead to something darker and more sinister.
This scene begins promisingly enough, as Maggie crosses "glittering avenues," with the sound of music halls in the distance. She initially spots a well dressed man. He has some interest in her, but "gives a convulsive start," when he realizes who she is. This is a great example of how many react to Maggie due to her early situation, and is part of the reason she can't find any social advancement. Maggie then moves through town, with the men she sees, and who see her, becoming less attractive, and more sinister, just as their environment does. She passes a stout gentleman, a belated businessman, a young man, a laborer, a drunken man, and eventually a man who has disfigured features. Again this perfectly follows her broader story. Each attempt she makes to "ragged being, with shifting, bloodshot eyes and grimy hands." After he denies her, she walks into the "blackness of the final block," here the analogy and the current narrative line up, as Maggie meets her end. The blackness of the block is both figurative in terms of the analogy, and literal in terms of the setting. Within this setting Maggie meets the fat greasy man who looks like "a dead jelly fish." He chuckles at her and leers. This man is essentially a symbolic representation of society. Like society, he doesn't realize how Maggie has gotten to this dark place, or that people like him have in fact driven her to it. Instead he judges her by her assumed profession and leads her to her death. But it is the greasy man, not Maggie, who is actually disgusting and blameworthy.
The change in the environment in the final chapter from the wealthy part of town into the darkest of the slums also shows Maggie's downfall throughout the story. She starts out as the beautiful and Innocent little Maggie and in this final scene she has become a prostitute and Crane doesn't even call her by her name anymore. She has become a product of her environment and the change in environment kind of sums up Maggie's life in a few paragraphs.
ReplyDeleteI think it is interesting how Crane relays Maggie’s death to the reader. The novel does allow the reader to see how the characters are hardened, brutalized, and transformed by social forces that they cannot control. I felt sympathy for the characters that were born into a life of horrible circumstances, and I believe Crane writes so in order for the reader to feel that, but he is not condescending the horrible things they do throughout their life by showing sympathy towards them, he is simply exposing their misgivings for what they are and letting the reader decide whether or not to forgive. Maggie’s death is described with a high degree of anonymity. Crane never comes out and says the girl roaming the dark streets on her last night on Earth is Maggie. I think he uses this anonymity to show that Maggie has become just another “girl of the streets” and so many are indifferent to whether she is alive or dead. It shows the harsh reality that the world simply does not care to a large degree about these unforgivable people that walk the streets selling their body and knowing no bottom. In chapter 17 Crane writes, “A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street. She threw changing glances at men who passed her, giving smiling invitations to men of rural or untaught pattern and usually seeming sedately unconscious of the men with a metropolitan seal upon their faces”. I believe Crane does not outright state that this girl walking the streets soliciting men is Maggie because she has reached such a low that the world does not even view her as an individual anymore, just another girl of the streets as the book is so aptly titled. Our class handout Naturalistic Period (in American literature) refers to Maggie as “a protagonist who commits suicide after being abandoned by a man and becoming a prostitute” (331). The handout notes Maggie as a key work in the Naturalistic Period, which I entirely agree with. The anonymous nature Crane describes Maggie’s death with is just another indicator that the novel is written in a naturalistic theme and the Bowery is a pessimistic world filled with “products of heredity and environment” (331).
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