Maggie A Girl Of The Streets
(Steven Crane)
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was written in 1893 and is Steven Cranes first novel. Maggie is a brutally realistic portrayal of life on the tough streets of New York during a time of unprecedented industrial prosperity for the upperclass in North East America. The work follows the life of Maggie, a lower-class girl with misguided high-class dreams. Maggie introduces the reader to the seedy underworld of New York's working-class and this is a world dominated by violence, alcohol and desperation. The character Maggie grows up in a family devoid of love. Her parents are cruel drunks who have been corrupted by the dark environment around them. Maggies mother is an especially frightening drunk who subjects her children to physical and mental abuse, which is born out of her own frustration with life. Maggies brother Jimmie is effected by the abuse in such a way that he effectively becomes an abuser himself. It is only Maggie who continues to shine out of the darkness, believing that she can escape her harsh environment and find a better life. She believes that she has found the answer with Pete, a charming but pretentious boy who proceedes to seduce her with his plastic charm and feigned wealth. However, Pete is not what he pretends to be and he proceeds to seduce and abandon our naive protaganist. An attempt to return to her family is met with a cruel reception as her mother and brother take delight in ridiculing the helpless Maggie infront of the entire apartment block. A dejected Maggie turns as the rotten world around her closes in. Maggie rapidly sinks into the slums and with no-one to turn to she becomes everything she tried to escape. Unfortunately her destiny was inevitable, for in this naturalistic world the external forces are too powerful to escape.
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