Cat On A Hot Tin Roof Analysis

The novel, Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets, by Stephen Crane, takes place in the slums of New York City during the 1890’s. It is about a girl, Maggie Johnson, who is forced to grow up in a tenement house. She had a brother, Jimmie, an abusive mother, Mary, and a father who died when Maggie was young. When Maggie grew up, she met her boyfriend, Pete. In Maggie’s eyes, Pete was a sophisticated young man who impressed Maggie because he treated her better than she had been treated to all of her life. Once Maggie’s mother and brother found out that Maggie was sleeping with this man, Mary threw Maggie out into the streets, condemning her to a life of evil. Eventually, Pete decided he no longer wished to see Maggie.

The way the grandmother sneaks the cat into the car and lies about the secret panel brings irony to her beliefs of what it is to be a lady. Her views on the “old south” is established when she calls an African American boy a “cute little pickaninny.” June Star’s remark upon the boy not having britches on leads on to the grandmother’s remark on how he might not be able to afford shows her lack of sympathy towards the less fortunate. This also makes the reader wonder why she even says such a thing in the first place. Instead of reaching out to lend a hand the grandmother ends her statement by simply saying that she would like to “paint a picture” of the scene.

As hardworking women living of the prairie, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters can relate to Mrs. Wright’s situation. They know personally that long days of doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning can become very tiresome (Hedges 91). They realize that living on the prairie can force a woman to be confined to her own house for weeks at a time, and because Mrs. Wright never had children, the grueling loneliness that she suffered must have been excruciating. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters both experience the constant patronization and sexual discrimination that most women in the early twentieth century lived with. They empathize with the difficulties of Mrs. Wright’s life and almost immediately a bond is formed with a woman they do not even know.

In the detailed story of an impoverished family during the late 1900’s, Jeannette Walls describes her experience from the young age of 3, up until adulthood. The family of 6, with Rex Walls as the father, Rose Mary as the mother, and her three siblings, Lori, Brian and Maureen, were constantly moving throughout the country with little to no food or cash. The memoir shows how dysfunctional the family was, but never seemed to force the reader to condemn the parents. In a life of poverty, the have to move for own to town, and often lived in various mining towns. Although they each found something they learned to love (like Jeannette’s rock collection) in the desert, they had to leave them behind once Rex’s alcoholism only worsened, and they ran

Maggie, the daughter, is timid and little, she is a younger sister. Maggie has scars because of a fire in the house, she is like a child, and shy of her burns. She always shuffles around in the shadows of her popular older sister, Dee. She lives and works with her mother on the farm. Maggie is a respectful and innocent young woman who has not yet come to be her self.

“His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths.” (Crane 1) The definition of countenance is a person’s face or facial expression. This particular quote establishes the emotional state of Jimmie. The little gangs that infiltrate the neighborhood cause chaos within the people and often lead to brutal fights and violence.

Maggie’s life is awful; she has a perpetually drunk mother and a careless, angsty brother who often take their frustrations out on her. She sees that Pete seems to have an abundance of money and worldly experience, and thus is fascinated with him and pursues him in an attempt to alleviate herself into his world and gain what she could have by his side. Pete is likewise influenced by this desire acquire possessions in his pursuit of Nellie, “the woman of brightness and audacity” (Crane 629). Cather’s characters are also influenced by this desire to accumulate possessions. Mrs. Forrester, for example, switches her business suddenly from Judge Pommerey to Ivy Peters without warning. She does this because Ivy promises to make her more money than the Judge can. Her desire to accumulate possessions is overruling her obligation to honor her and Judge Pommerey’s friendship. Ivy himself is likewise driven by a desire to collect all that he can; he had always had an ultimate aspiration to own the Forrester’s land and henceforth is the reason why he buys out the Forresters(Cather 89). The need to accrue wealth is shown as an influence behind the actions of many characters in Naturalist writing.

Twyla is faced with the struggles of being a young woman whose mother is constantly out partying and possibly abusing drugs and abandons her at the group home. Twyla has to be the mother, and takes care of herself even at the group home. She grows to face the struggles of a poor waitress who marries into a loving family, struggling with stability. As she and Roberta age and grow apart and run into each other, their main source of contention has been Maggie. Maggie is mute and possibly deaf, and is of undetermined race, but is a mostly functional adult who is abused by the girls (Morrison 1405). How they treat her is reflective of their feelings towards their mothers, Twyla minimizing and repressing, and Roberta blames the “other” of hurting her. They can’t reconcile their past, and so they go their separate ways. She struggles to find her voice when she encounters Roberta, as their racial differences and accusations keep her from speaking out. Attempting to reconcile her memory with Roberta’s tale is too difficult, until the end of the story, as they’ve both had time to heal and realize neither was right- they didn’t assault her, but they both wanted to, picturing their mothers in her place. Twyla wanted “the right mother” one who “wasn’t deaf and dumb to her needs” (Stanley). As she comes full circle, raising a good, healthy child, and her mother long gone, Twyla can finally heal herself.

In the opening stages of the novella, Maggie tries to escape her troubling life through her relationship with Pete. As Maggie grows up, she becomes a beautiful girl who hates her life in Rum Alley. She sees Pete as a savior who could lead her away from her poverty stricken life and bring her into the world of leisure because he introduces her to popular music, dances, and dramas, all of which seem extravagant to her. Maggie “begins to note the well-dressed women she meets. She [envies the women’s] elegance (11).” Most of the melodramas that Maggie watches with Pete show the American dream of a person going from rags to riches, which is a goal that she thinks Pete will help her in achieve.

Crane continues to show the scene of Maggie's apartment as she compares her lifestyle to Pete, "Turning, Maggie contemplated the dark, dust-stained walls, and the scant and crude furniture of her home... Some faint attempts she had made with blue ribbon, to freshen the appearance of a dingy curtain, she now saw to be piteous" (Crane 1017). Her problem is that she over thinks it all and everything starts to look bad. The more she falls in love with Pete, the worse her apartment looks to her throwing her deeper into despair. Being in a lower class more often than not, comes with poverty.

Tennessee Williams’ book Cat on a Hot Tin Roof takes place entirely in the plantation home of the Pollitt family in the Mississippi Delta. The plantation once belonged to a pair of bachelors, and “Big Daddy” Pollitt had worked for them as an overseer, but he is now the owner of the plantation, which he has built into a dynastic empire. Big Daddy’s family has met at the house to celebrate his birthday. Maggie, a beautiful and witty girl, has escaped a childhood of poverty to marry into the wealthy Pollitt family, but finds herself in an unfulfilling marriage. She is married to Big Daddy’s son, Brick. He is an aging

In the book Maggie: A Girl on the Street by Stephen Crane, is about an Irish immigrant girl named Maggie who made horrible decisions in throughout her life. Maggie live in a power neighborhood called the Bowery. Maggie is an uneducated woman, who wasn’t given any great opportunities in life. Crane showed throughout the book that the poor people have no way to get out. Crane shows that poor people are always going to be poor. Throughout the book, you see Maggie trying to be get out and fight poverty. Every time she is close to succeeding, something happens and she back all the way to where she started. For example, when Maggie meets Pete, Maggie sees a way out of her horrible and poverty-stricken life. In the book it states, “The air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her. She knew she was gradually and surely shriveling in the hot, stuffy room. The begrimed windows rattled incessantly from the passing of elevated trains. The place was filled with a whirl of noises and odors.” (Chapter 8), after Maggie meets Pete and has seen a little bit of his life, Maggie doesn’t want to be at the factory, she would rather want to be with Pete and his lavish

Kenneth thinks “himself vastly instructed in the manner in which the Old Man, being rich, became richer” (Austin, 174), and is trying to follow that method toward gaining money and power. However, Kenneth is misguided, because “he was not, in any light that he could see the situation, on the way to becoming rich himself” (Austin, 174), even after a couple of years of working for the Rickard company. What Kenneth does not realize is that the company is not interested in his well-being and is using his labor instead of helping him to succeed like the “Old Man” did. Anne is the one who understands what the working class needs to do to survive, which is organize against the upper class rather than working with them and joining their companies, which are only trying to exploit the land. Anne is shown as being passionate and independent, but people like Kenneth just want her to stay in her place because she is a

The book Maggie girl on the streets by Stephen Crane work uses a Naturalistic approach to his themes when describing the the characters lives and how they playout,the authors ability to paint a world that is grungy and horrid is fascinating,we will exploit those instances in his literary work and analyze its importance. Maggie was written when factory industry was booming however,The workers during this time were not compensated enough in which the people were low income, and often suffering from these conditions. The people weren't considered civilized and they were categorized as aggressive people. This traits were perhaps due to the change from the dated agricultural lifestyle to the upcoming industry of factories, due to this change

Maggie is born into an Irish family. Maggie was the girl who mostly took care of her younger brother Tommie and was the odd one out of the Bowery kids. “She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district . . . the philosophers up stairs, down stairs and on the same floor puzzled over it” (Crane 18). As an adult, Maggie dealt with many problems like her job as a seamstress, and her relationship with Pete. As a result of her hardships and no one forgiving her