COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader
with an array of perspectives on the texts, as
well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The
commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as
reviews contemporaneous with the works, letters written by
the author, literary criticism of later generations, and
appreciations written throughout the works’ histories. Following
the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter
Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other
Writings About New York through a variety of points of
view and bring about a richer understanding of these
enduring works.
Comments
HAMLIN GARLAND
[‘Maggie’] is of more interest to me, both
because it is the work of a young man, and also because it is a
work of astonishingly good style. It deals with poverty and vice
and crime also, but it does so, not out of curiosity, not out of
salaciousness, but because of a distinct art impulse, the desire to
utter in truthful phrase a certain rebellious cry. It is the voice
of the slums. It is not written by a dilettante; it is written by
one who has lived the life. The young author, Stephen Crane, is a
native of the city, and has grown up in the very scenes he
describes. His book is the most truthful and unhackneyed study of
the slums I have yet read, fragment though it is. It is pictorial,
graphic, terrible in its directness. It has no conventional
phrases. It gives the dialect of the slums as I have never before
seen it written—crisp, direct, terse. It is another locality
finding voice....
The dictum is amazingly simple and fine for so
young a writer. Some of the words illuminate like flashes of light.
Mr. Crane is only twenty-one years of age, and yet he has met and
grappled with the actualities of the street in almost unequalled
grace and strength. With such a technique already at
command, with life mainly before him, Stephen Crane is to be
henceforth reckoned with.
—from Arena (June 1893)
NEW YORK TIMES
Mr. Crane pictures Maggie’s home with colors now
lurid and now black, but always with the hand of an artist. And the
various stages of her career, until in despair at being neglected
she, we are led to believe, commits suicide by jumping into the
river, are shown with such vivid and terrible accuracy as to make
one believe they are photographic. Mr. Crane cannot have seen all
that he describes, and yet the reader feels that he must have seen
it all. This, perhaps, is the highest praise one can give the book.
Mr. Crane is a master of slum slang. His dialogues are surprisingly
effective and natural. The talk Pete indulges in while intoxicated
makes one see in his mind’s eye the very figure of the loathsome
beast for the loss of whom Maggie died.... Mr. Crane’s story should
be read for the fidelity with which it portrays a life that is
potent on this island, along with the life of the best of us. It is
a powerful portrayal, and, if sombre and repellent, none the less
true, none the less freighted with appeal to those who are able to
assist in righting wrongs.
—May 31, 1896
MORNING ADVERTISER
A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane’s latest
novel, is a picture of the lowest stratum of society in its
gloomiest form. It is as realistic as anything that Emile Zola has
ever written. Though some of its chapters are enough to give one
the ‘creeps,’ none can deny that the characters which he draws with
such a master hand are absolutely true to life. The dialect is also
natural, and nothing is lacking to give Devil’s Row and Rum Alley,
slums of the darker New York, such prominence as they never had
before. It may, in fact, be said that Mr. Crane has discovered
those localities and revealed them to the astonished gaze of the
world for the first time. The reader, in going over the pages of A
Girl of the Streets, is reminded of nothing so much as the
slimy things that crawl and blink when a long undisturbed stone is
removed and the light is thrown upon them. The hero and heroine, if
such they may be called, are Jimmie and Maggie Johnson, brother and
sister, residents of Devil’s Row. Maggie is the only redeeming
character in the book, and even she does not redeem to any extent.
She is betrayed and she dies, and the mourning of Devil’s Row at
her wake is fearfully grewsome. Analytical powers are the chief
feature of the novel. It is free from maudlin sentiment. No
missionary ever ventures near Rum Alley. Its denizens are left to
their own resources, and they simmer in them.
—June 1, 1896
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
I think that what strikes me most in the story
of Maggie is that quality of fatal necessity which dominates
Greek tragedy. From the conditions it all had to be, and there were
the conditions. I felt this in Mr. Hardy’s Jude, where the
principle seems to become conscious in the writer; but there is
apparently no consciousness of any such motive in the author of
Maggie. Another effect is that of an ideal of artistic beauty which
is as present in the working out of this poor girl’s squalid
romance as in any classic fable. This will be foolishness, I know,
to the foolish people who cannot discriminate between the material
and the treatment in art, and who think that beauty is inseparable
from daintiness and prettiness, but I do not speak to them. I
appeal rather to such as feel themselves akin with every kind of
human creature, and find neither high nor low when it is a question
of inevitable suffering, or of a soul struggling vainly with an
inexorable fate.
My rhetoric scarcely suggests the simple terms
the author uses to produce the effect which I am trying to report
again. They are simple, but always most graphic, especially when it
comes to the personalities of the story; the girl herself, with her
bewildered wish to be right and good; with her distorted
perspective; her clinging and generous affections; her hopeless
environments; the horrible old drunken mother, a cyclone of
violence and volcano of vulgarity; the mean and selfish lover; a
dandy tough, with his gross ideals and ambitions ; her brother, an
Ishmaelite from the cradle, who with his war-like instincts beaten
back into cunning, is what the b’hoy of former times has become in
our more strenuously policed days. He is indeed a wonderful figure
in a group which betrays no faltering in the artist’s hand. He,
with his dull hates, his warped good-will, his cowed ferocity, is
almost as fine artistically as Maggie, but he could not have been
so hard to do, for all the pathos of her fate is rendered without
one maudlin touch.
So is that of the simple-minded and devoted and
tedious old woman who is George’s mother in the book of that name.
This is scarcely a study at all, while Maggie is really and fully
so. It is the study of a situation merely: a poor, inadequate
woman, of a commonplace religiosity, whose son goes to the bad. The
wonder of it is the courage which deals with persons so absolutely
average, and the art that graces them with the beauty of the
author’s compassion for everything that errs and suffers. Without
this feeling the effects of his mastery would be impossible, and if
it went further or put itself into the pitying phrases it would
annul the effects. But it never does this; it is notable how in all
respects the author keeps himself well in hand. He is quite honest
with his reader. He never shows his characters or his situations in
any sort of sentimental glamour; if you will be moved by the
sadness of common fates you will feel his intention, but he does
not flatter his portraits of people or conditions to take your
fancy.
In George and his mother he has to do with folk
of country origin as the city affects them, and the son’s decadence
is admirably studied; he scarcely struggles against temptation, and
his mother’s only art is to cry and to scold. Yet he loves her, in
a way, and she is devotedly proud of him. These simple country folk
are contrasted with simple city folk of varying degrees of badness.
Mr. Crane has the skill to show how evil is greatly the effect of
ignorance and imperfect civilization. The club of friends, older
men than George, whom he is asked to join, is portrayed with
extraordinary insight, and the group of young toughs whom he
finally consorts with is done with even greater mastery. The
bulldog motive of one of them, who is willing to fight to the
death, is most impressively rendered.
—from New York World (July 26, 1896)
H. G. WELLS
The relative merits of the Red Badge of
Courage and Maggie are open to question. To the present
reviewer it seems that in Maggie we come nearer to Mr.
Crane’s individuality. Perhaps where we might expect strength we
get merely stress, but one may doubt whether we have not been hasty
in assuming Mr. Crane to be a strong man in fiction. Strength and
gaudy colour rarely go together; tragic and sombre are well nigh
inseparable. One gets an impression from the Red Badge that
at the end Mr. Crane could scarcely have had a gasp left in
him—that he must have been mentally hoarse for weeks after it. But
here he works chiefly for pretty effects, for gleams of sunlight on
the stagnant puddles he paints. He gets them, a little consciously
perhaps, but, to the present reviewer’s sense, far more effectively
than he gets anger and fear. And he has done his work, one feels,
to please himself. His book is a work of art, even if it is not a
very great or successful work of art—it ranks above the novel of
commerce, if only on that account.
—from Saturday Review (December 19.
1896)
JOSEPH CONRAD
[Stephen Crane] had indeed a wonderful power of
vision, which he applied to the things of this earth and of our
mortal humanity with a penetrating force that seemed to reach,
within life’s appearances and forms, the very spirit of life’s
truth. His ignorance of the world at large—he had seen very little
of it—did not stand in the way of his imaginative grasp of facts,
events, and picturesque men.
His manner was very quiet, his personality at
first sight interesting, and he talked slowly with an intonation
which on some people, mainly Americans, had, I believe, a jarring
effect. But not on me. Whatever he said had a personal note, and he
expressed himself with a graphic simplicity which was extremely
engaging. He knew little of literature, either of his own country
or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful artist in words
whenever he took a pen into his hand. Then his gift came out—and it
was seen to be much more than mere felicity of language. His
impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface. In his
writing he was very sure of his effects. I don’t think he was ever
in doubt about what he could do. Yet it often seemed to me that he
was but half aware of the exceptional quality of his
achievement.
This achievement was curtailed by his early
death. It was a great loss to his friends, but perhaps not so much
to literature. I think he had given his measure fully in the few
books he had the time to write. Let me not be misunderstood: the
loss was great, but it was the loss of the delight his art could
give, not the loss of any further possible revelation. As to
himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by quitting so
early this world of the living, which he knew how to set before us
in the terms of his own artistic vision? Perhaps he did not lose a
great deal.
—from Notes on Life and Letters ( 1921
)
EDWARD GARNETT
Two qualities in especial combined to form
Crane’s unique quality, viz his wonderful insight into, and mastery
of, the primary passions, and his irony deriding the swelling
emotions of the self. It is his irony that checks the emotional
intensity of his delineation, and suddenly reveals passion at high
tension in the clutch of the implacable tides of life. It is the
perfect fusion of these two forces of passion and irony that
creates Crane’s spiritual background, and raises his work, at its
finest, into the higher zone of man’s tragic conflict with the
universe.... In “Maggie,” 1896, that little masterpiece which drew
the highest tribute from the veteran, W. D. Howells, again it is
the irony that keeps in right perspective Crane’s remorseless study
of New York slum and Bowery morals. The code of herd law by which
the inexperienced girl, Maggie, is pressed to death by her family,
her lover and the neighbours, is seen working with strange finality
The Bowery inhabitants, as we, can be nothing other than what they
are; their human nature responds inexorably to their brutal
environment; the curious habits and code of the most primitive
savage tribes could not be presented with a more impartial
exactness, or with more sympathetic understanding.
“Maggie” is not a story about people; it is
primitive human nature itself set down with perfect spontaneity and
grace of handling. For pure aesthetic beauty and truth no Russian,
not Tchekhov himself, could have bettered this study, which, as
Howells remarks, has the quality of Greek tragedy
—from Friday Nights: Literary Criticism and
Appreciation ( 1922)
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Writers in America who do not know their Stephen
Crane are missing a lot.
—from his Introduction to Volume 11 of The
Work of Stephen Crane, edited by Wilson Follett (
1925-1926)
JOHN BERRYMAN
No American work of [Maggie’s] length had driven
the reader so hard; in none had the author remained so persistently
invisible behind his creation.
—from Stephen Crane (1950)
Questions
1. The French phrase nostalgie de la
boue can be roughly translated as a hankering for the
gutter, the lower depths, the slums. Crane seems to have had it.
Can you sympathize? Is the attraction to the gutter simply that it
stimulates a fantasy of throwing off the burden of respectability?
What else motivates this attraction? A strange sense of
purity?
2. People who read Maggie are not likely to have
much direct experience with the lower depths of life in the slums
or with the down-and-out. Yet from the beginning, readers have
called the novel realistic or naturalistic, even without being able
to compare the actual scene to Crane’s version of it. How does
Crane achieve the effect of realism, whether or not he actually
captures a reality in words?
3. The nineteenth century was a great period for
novels about fallen women. Think of Madame Bovary and Anna
Karenina. What is distinctive about Crane’s treatment of
this theme? Is there anything fundamentally American about
it?
4. What attitude do you think Crane wanted to
create in the minds of his readers? Righteous indignation?
Repugnance? A desire to ameliorate the conditions of the urban
poor? A desire to call people like Maggie and her friends to a
prayer meeting? Scientific detachment? A sense of superiority?
Something else?