The Environment of Maggie in Crane's "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets"

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Wuppertal, course: Hauptseminar - New York in American Literature, language: English, abstract: Stephen Crane published his first novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in March 1893 on his own expenses under the pseudonym "Johnston Smith". As a young author "who was yet to find a public he was cautious about immediately identifying himself with a work that he himself regarded as shocking" (Ziff x) because it tried "to show that environment is a tremendous thing [...] and frequently shapes lives regardless" (Sorrentino 82). That Maggie is one of the major works to criticize the environment of late 19th century New York City becomes obvious when the reader notices that the protagonist Maggie does neither occur in the first, nor in the last chapter of the novella. Looking more closely at the word "environment" itself one can observe that the term is ambiguous. On the surface the term seems to describe the external living conditions, namely where and under which circumstances the characters live. But it is not the life in the Bowery and the tenements Stephen Crane is referring to since Maggie does not die of starvation or diseases, but of the mental influences, such as the Church and the theater that constantly affect the people. Exactly this environment, Jacob Riis argues, "is indeed a ¿tremendous thing in the world¿ and it frequently shapes the lives of children who grow up in it" (LaFrance 42). Nevertheless, the external living conditions determine the way people are and act. "Crane depicts the influence the city exerts upon the perception of reality of its inhabitants, and this perception differs very much already from one member of the Johnson family to the other" (Schaetzle 19). This is the reason for me to argue that the bad circumstances in the Bowery of New York City contribute to the decay of the moral values and shape lives, as well. The very title of the 1893 version illustrates that the city is also an important factor in the novella: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York). [...]