In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, author Stephen Crane paints a grim and hopeless picture of New York City’s Bowery Slum that sharply contrasts with the more glamorous image of the city during America’s Industrial Revolution.
In this poverty-stricken neighborhood, it becomes obvious that the actions of Maggie, the title character, are not entirely of her own choosing.
Crane claims that alcoholism and poverty undermine her free will and ultimately lead her toward both an inescapable future as a prostitute and ultimately, death.
Maggie’s initial decision to leave home and cling to her first boyfriend, Pete, are not made independently, but rather by the alcoholism and abuse she endures during her upbringing.
In How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Jacob A. Riis persuades his readers that the alcohol that pollutes the New York’s slums has an irreparable and damaging effect on children and prepares them for a life of misery.
“All the evil the saloon does in breeding poverty and in corrupting politics; all the suffering it brings into the lives of its thousands of innocent victims. . .the children of drunkards. . .For the corruption of the child there is no restitution,” he grimly acknowledges.
Given the irreversible nature of childhood exposure to alcoholism and destitution, it is no wonder that it has a devastating effect on all that Maggie does.
From the time she was a toddler, Maggie has observed her mother, Mary, abusing her brother while drunk.
Mary would even go so far as to hurl Jimmie into a corner of the apartment where he lay limp and helpless. Maggie realizes that she needs to move out, not because she feels ready to explore her independence, but because she needs to escape her wretched home life defined by domestic abuse and alcohol.
Her baby brother, Tommie’s eventual and untimely death can be seen as a metaphor for Maggie’s tragic departure from home, an escape from a hopeless life devoid of promise.
Furthermore, Mary’s verbal abuse of Maggie later influences Maggie’s attachment to the suspicious Pete.
Mary beats down her daughter’s ego and self-esteem so brutally and teaches her that she is worthless and undeserving of real love and support.
“Yer a disgraced yer people, damn yeh. An’ now, git out an’ go ahn wid [Pete]. Go the hell wid him, damn yeh, an’ a good riddance. Go te hell an’ see how yeh likes it,” Mary bellows in her drunken stupor.
Even though Mary is not the pinnacle of human perfection, Maggie is vulnerable and is hurt by her mother’s words. She is devastated by Mary’s harsh, verbal lashing and leaves home because she cannot bear more pain.
Since her mother believes that her soul is black, Maggie craves Pete’s affection and latches onto him as her companion primarily because there is no one at home who loves her.
The horrible effects of alcohol and abuse, as explained by Riis, have shaped Maggie’s future actions and set her up for a life of degradation and misery.
Just as alcohol and domestic violence in the tenement have unfortunately made their mark on Maggie, so does urban poverty.
The disease of poverty spreads and flourishes, and there is, thus, little hope for this young woman.
It is impossible for her to escape the effects of poverty, especially regarding her relationship with Pete.
Her infatuation with him is based more on idolization, envy and materialistic admiration of everything she does not have, rather than on true love.
Upon first meeting Pete, Maggie is immediately impressed with Pete’s supposed worldliness and distinguished air.
“His mannerisms stamped him as a man who had a correct sense of personal superiority. There was valor and contempt for circumstances in the glance of his eye. He waved his hands like man of the world. . .”
In addition to his suaveness and flattery of Maggie’s physical beauty, he also appears to act as her knight in shining armor, her ultimate mode of impenetrable protection from the evils to which she has become accustomed.
He escorts her to all of New York’s finest cultural institutions where aristocratic men and women, dressed in their luxurious finery, flock to and are eager to spend money.
Surrounded by such wonder, Maggie wonders if a poor girl like she is who works in a shirt factory can obtain the same elevated social position that Pete embodies.
Maggie pursues Pete not because she is purely attracted to him, but because she wants to get as far away from her disastrous home and boring job as possible.
While working at the factory, her only alternative to poverty, she daydreams and produces sketches of Pete, idolizing him, his admirable lifestyle and seemingly bottomless finances.
She envisions herself belonging to a man not because he supplies her wages, but because he wants her.
However, her dreams never materialize, and she finds herself on a downward spiral.
Her constant comparison to Pete causes her to hate her current social position and become even more convinced of the inferiority her mother had instilled in her.
“She began to note, with more interest, the well-dressed women she met on the avenues. She envied elegance and soft palms. She craved those adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, conceiving them to be allies of vast importance to women.”
Just as she envies Pete’s material wealth, she longs for these riches and resources she knows she lacks, and even feels shamed for being unable to participate in intelligent conversations between Pete and his friend, Nellie, at the theater.
Maggie is painfully aware of the fact that she lacks the knowledge and refinement necessary to engage either of them.
Maggie enters into a romantic relationship only to mask the inferiority and the shame of the poverty and lack of education she grew up with.
She can never truly make them disappear from her world.
In the end, Pete does not fulfill Maggie’s rose-tinted dreams and leaves her in the same poverty-stricken state she was originally in.
Unfortunately, Maggie cannot be romantically involved with a man without being reminded of her low socio-economic status.
Her self-worth depleted, choices limited and prospects scattered to the wind, Maggie is forced into a life of prostitution and ultimately, death.
Although the girl walking the city streets toward the end of the novella is never named, nor are her prostitute-like actions ever confirmed, the reader can easily infer from textual hints that Maggie has indeed become such a ruined woman.
This person is described as a girl presumably around Maggie’s age who wanders shady neighborhoods at night and plasters her face with makeup.
Men verbally respond to her inviting glances and entreaties as if she is offering up some kind of service.
They dismiss her as if she is worthless. The girl’s mannerisms, physical description and familiarity with the neighborhood indicate that she is Maggie.
Previously, Maggie’s peers had viewed her beauty as a metaphor for her potential, but her beauty is now applied to baser ideas.
Specifically, it is applied to her low opinion of herself as a machine, which traces back to her days working in the shirt factory.
She spends all night going from man to man, earning money by selling herself.
Maggie does not decide to prostitute herself because she genuinely wants to, but because she has no direction and no one to support her.
While prostitution provides her with money and does not hold her accountable to an irritating boss like the one at the shirt factory, she is not producing anything useful nor using her mind or education to earn her way.
Rather, in order to survive, she has to subject herself to the same kinds of lowly men, who, like Pete, use her for her looks and eventually discard her like garbage.
She still ends up as dirty and poor as she was in her childhood. Prostitution is her only reasonable option left in life as a woman in her low, social position, aside from being abused to death, gossiped about by the tenement women or dying.
Based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s piece, “Women and Economics,” it is safe to say that the loss of Pete was a major, contributing factor to Maggie’s entrance into prostitution.
“And, when the woman, left alone with no man to ‘support’ her, tries to meet her own economic necessities, the difficulties which confront her prove conclusively what the general economic status of the woman is...,” Gilman writes.
Without Pete’s emotional and financial support, Maggie has no hope for advancement and must make her way through immodest means.
Gilman also notes that the woman’s role has largely been defined within sexual parameters, which emphasizes not only Maggie’s low self-esteem and lack of opportunity, but also her sexualized position as an object on display for men to judge.
In The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them, Charles Loring Brace underscores the inhuman and despicable nature of prostitution.
Not only does it spoil all of humanity and undermine the traditional feminine quality of purity, but the common prostitute’s origins in poverty also make it inevitable that she will be society’s outcast.
Without the morals, male support and education that both Gilman and Brace espouse, and having violated the basic principles of womanhood, Maggie dies.
However, not even her death is by her own volition. Symbolically, it is forced due to the social forces that have plagued her since birth.
Alcohol and poverty have defined Maggie’s life so much that they not color critical actions, but also direct her to the path that leads to her death.
Although these social forces are intangible and show themselves when Maggie is just a little girl, they imprint themselves so deeply upon her psyche that define her behavior.
It is said that each person is a product of his or her own environment, and this is certainly the case with the title character in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.
