Analyzing Crane's 'Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets'

In the early 1800s life in Ireland wasn’t easy, Irish citizens got by day to day by farming and relying on the potato. The potato was their main source of food and money. With out the potato the Irish would have nothing. No one was prepared for what was about to happen in 1845, the beginning of the Great Irish Potato Famine.

The Irish began immigrating to North America in the 1820s, when the lack of jobs and poverty forced them to seek better opportunities elsewhere after the end of the major European wars. When the Europeans could finally stop depending on the Irish for food during war, the investment in Irish agricultural products reduced and the boom was over. After an economic boom, there comes a bust and unemployment was the result. Two-thirds of the people of Ireland depended on potato harvests as a main source of income and, more importantly, food. Then between the years of 1845 and 1847, a terrible disease struck the potato crops. The plague left acre after acre of Irish farmland covered with black rot. The failure of the

In the second part, “High SchooI,” Anne starts becoming more politically active. She develops a new understanding of race in the south, something that is kicked into high gear with the murder of Emmett Till, supposedly for whistling at a white woman. His death becomes a defining moment for Moody. Her mother tells her that an evil spirit killed Till, but Moody realizes just how far white people in Mississippi will go to protect their way of life, and how powerless black people are. In Chapter 6 of “A Different Mirror” by Ronald Takaki, the account of the Irish migration to the United States is discussed. The beginning of the chapter tells of the horrid conditions that the people of Ireland faced when it became colonized by the British. Takaki describes how the people of Ireland were so poor that they lived in mud huts that were one room and wore rags for clothing. These hardships were the cause for many Irish to look for new opportunities in America.

Stephen Crane’s analysis of life is spawned from his point of view about the world. These opinions correlate alongside naturalistic train of understanding. He applied a legitimate law of the universe, “ one can either accept the laws determining the social order or become their victim,” which is applied to the novel Maggie: Girl of the streets. The book is an example of Naturalistic and a Realistic novel that offers an accurate and specific illustration of life and was portrayed based on people living in a poor society, and how they were affected emotionally, physically, psychologically, and mentally. The novella serves as a medium of drama that occurs,

Stephen Crane, the author of “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” was born and raised during the nineteenth century. He was a naturalist writer and visited the New York Bowery often. These visits inspired him to write “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” (“Stephen Crane” 1). Naturalisistic writing emphasized heredity and environment as important forces which shaped individual characters fate. These characters are often presented in special and detailed circumstances, where life was shown to be ironic even tragic. Stephen Crane used themes that were considered forbidden by others. Some of these themes are extreme poverty, terrible conditions, murder, rape, and no happy endings. “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” is a novella about a girl Maggie, who

The stories of “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” by Steven Crane and “My Bondage and My Freedom” by Frederick Douglass directly answer the essential question of what is the relationship between American literature and place. First of all, the South and North of America are excellent places to prove there is a connection between those locations and American literature. Due to events, different views, different lifestyles, and current issues within the North and South, that is what forms the relationship. In the story, “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” a family of five live in an overcrowded and dangerous city where violence is at every turn. Even children, such as Jimmie, are constantly fighting and witness violence on the streets and even at home.

The potato helped create this jump but caused people to be more dependent on the potato. Beginning in 1845, a potato fungus that began in Belgium, spread across Europe and had devastating effects in Ireland. The poorest farmers were the first to feel the effects. In hard-hit areas people were dying of starvation. Many tried to eat grass to ward off hunger. When potato crops failed farmers could no longer pay their rent. Scores of poor Irish were evicted from their homes. Landlords themselves faced bankruptcy and starvation. Cabbage became an even more important food staple during the Great Potato Famine. When potatoes begin to rot many farmers turned to cabbage. As the famine continued to rage, eventually killing more than a million people in Ireland over the course of a little more than five years, waves of Irish immigrants began to hit America’s shores. They brought with them their food preferences and recipes from home, including potatoes and cabbage boiled and mashed together. For better or worse, the Irish were now permanently planted around the

During the 17th century the growing of potatoes was greatly encouraged in order to replace expensive imported grains as the staple food of the peasantry. However in Ireland the policy had disastrous consequences because crop failure from 1845 – 52 as a result of potato blight caused the death of millions during the Great

The circumstances under which a community unites may range from poverty to the desire for freedom. In the case of the tenets of Rum Alley, unity of the community comes from a need to establish a social hierarchy, and dominance. The events of unity occur in strange circumstances throughout Stephen Crane’s novel Maggie: a Girl of the Streets. The novel tells the story of a young girl in her teenage years, and her development in society. Maggie undergoes a difficult upbringing with the death of her younger brother, a drunk for a mother and father, and an older brother who follows in the footsteps of his father.

After the Civil War, realism became a dominant form of writing in the United States, with writers attempting to write about everyday life. After realism came naturalism, a form of writing similar to realism, but with more pessimism. One of the reasons for this pessimism stems from free will and the question of whether people possess it or not. In realism, it is definitely true, while in naturalism it seems less so, but the options are often less than ideal. Because choices do exist for characters, free will is still there, which indicates that naturalism is a derivative form of realism. In Stephen Crane’s “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” the characters may have little chance to escape the world they inhabit, like Maggie, Jimmie, and

In Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell, she captures the hardships that the mill workers experience during the 1800s by including imagery and contrast. The author writes about the workers’ conditions by explaining their lives and differences to the ones who do not suffer, and she also vividly describes the experiences of the workers to make the readers see the hardships and their distressing lives. Therefore, one can predict that the author feels sorrow and sadness for the mill workers.

Johnson, the mother of Maggie and Jimmie, is another example of someone who is a product of their own environment. Ms. Johnson is the complete opposite of an ideal mother. She is an alcoholic and has no regard for her children. Distinctly this is seen when Crane states “The mother’s massive shoulders heaved with anger. Grasping the urchin by the neck and shoulder she shook him until he rattled” (Crane 8). The urchin, whom she is grabbing, is her own son Jimmie. This shows that she does not even care for her own kids. When Ms. Johnson is being too abusive for Maggie and Jimmie to handle, they go to the old lady in order to keep safe from their mother. Also, Ms. Johnson rejects to take in Maggie when she is wandering the streets. When Ms. Johnson fins out the Maggie is dead, she weeps for her daughter. This is moral hypocrisy because she is trying to express her morality when she has no morals. But Ms. Johnson cannot act any different. She is trapped in a living hell, also known as the Bowery. The way she acts reflects her surroundings, which makes her a product of her own

Crane in one chapter describes what became of Maggie by giving her no worth and what would be assumed as her death by suicide or murder he left it to our imagination. Maggie’s mother was an example of who not to be like a fearful drunk. Maggie tried her best to make it out and be something but the easy way is never the best

Maggie: a girl of the streets by Stephen Crane tackles several different social problems from the time when it was written. He addresses the issue of immigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the welfare of people during the Industrial Revolution. The story is about two children, Maggie and Jimmie, who grow up in the Irish neighborhood of Browery, New York. Both struggle through a life filled with false hopes, crushed dreams, and drunk parents. As much the children would like to escape the cycle of poverty, they cannot, and end up in the same situation as their parents.

Today in modern America, it has become almost impossible to avoid the tales of horror that surround us almost anywhere we go. Scandals, murders, theft, corruption, extortion, abuse, prostitution, all common occurrences in this day in age. A hundred years ago however, people did not see the world in quite such an open manner despite the fact that in many ways, similarities were abundant. People’s lives were, in their views, free of all evil and pollution. They assumed they lived peaceful lives and those around them lived the same flawless lives untouched by corruption as well. Many were too blind to see beyond their own homes and into the lives of others who dealt with a