Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets Essay

Imagine being born into a family that has no love and doesn’t care much for their children. That's how it was for Jeanette Walls and her siblings. Her parents did love her but didn’t show it much. They were not very helpful and were not great parents. Her father Rex and mother Rosemary didn’t have a great parenting style, but their children still grew up to be good people.

In “Maggie: A girl of the Streets” Maggie was the timid, shy, conventional, girl that ended up being treated as a possession (like a fancy wristwatch a man may wear to showoff) rather than the individual she was, by her boyfriend Pete, and wasn’t treated much better by her family as well. Pete was a character that showed his masculinity best through fighting

In a time when women were thought of as airheaded and unconcerned with matters of importance by men, a woman’s compassion and intuition can hold incredible power. “In a Jury of Her Peers”, Minnie Wright is judged by her peers, and by their knowledge of her prior life, her current circumstances, and forced destitution, she is found innocent. In the story, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters accompany their husbands to the Wright home in a quest to find evidence implicating Minnie Wright in the murder of her husband. From the moment they enter the home, Mrs. Hale is sympathetic to Minnie Wright. When the county attorney looks over Minnie Wrights kitchen and states, “Not much of a housekeeper, would you say ladies?” Mrs. Hale’s stiff reply is, “There’s a great deal of work to be done on a farm.” Although Mrs. Peters begins the story with a firm stance of support for her husband saying, “Of course it’s no more than their duty,” in response to Mrs. Hales comment about the men snooping. However; as the story progresses, Mrs. Peters views begin to match with Mrs. Hale.

Maggie comes from a very strained family life, living in poverty. She lives in a horrific tenement in the Bowery neighborhood of New York’s Lower East Side, with her two younger brothers, Jimmie and Tommie. Jimmie is hardened against any sympathy due to the years he spent on the streets fighting with gangs and is currently working as a truck driver. Tommie was the infant of the family who passed away at a young age. The tenement is filled with argumentative feelings amongst her parents. Mary Johnson, Maggie’s mother, is an alcoholic and very aggressive. She has been noted for torturing Maggie with hateful words over actions that she has done. Mr. Johnson, the father, was also very aggressive with his children and an alcoholic like his wife, he too passed away. Maggie had a relationship with a friend of

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a novella written in 1893 by Stephen Crane, focuses on a poverty stricken family living in the Bowery district of New York City. This novella is regarded as one of the first works of naturalism in American literature and it helped shape the naturalistic principle that a character is set into a world where there is no escape from one’s biological heredity and the circumstances that the characters find themselves in will dominate their behavior and deprive them of individual responsibility. Throughout the story, the primary goal of the main characters is to escape the lives they lead and to find more comfortable lives away from their current problems, which differs from the romantic ideal that the main characters usually turn inwards to solve their problems.

Moral Hypocrisy in Maggie A Girl of the Streets “Hypocrisy is the mother of all evil and racial prejudice is still her favorite child.” In the novel Maggie: A Girl of the Street (MGS), the individuals is not only alcoholics but also hypocrite, who only thinks of themselves. They live a rough life in the slums, the streets is fill with waste and everyone is trying to drink their sorrows away. Only the protagonist, Maggie, have a dream of getting out of the atrocious environment. In Stephaney Crane’s novel MGS, crane shows a mountain of moral hypocrisy in Jimmie, in order to demonstrate the cause of naturalism.

We first meet Maggie. Maggie is not so bright, shy girl, scarred for life in fire which burned their house about ten years ago, who still lives with her mother. She is ashamed of the way she looks, hiding in shadows. Ever since the fire she walks with “chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle” (240). She envy her sister Dee, smart, bright, educated, young women who likes nice thinks. Distant maybe even ashamed of her family, never brings friends for visit. Dee’s mother doesn’t even know if the men she come to visit with is her friend or husband.

In Stephen Crane’s novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, men prowl the poverty-stricken streets of Rum Alley, looking for girls to use for sex and to eventually abandon when they receive what they want. Rum Alley is a place of danger and women live in fear of the men who inhabit it. A double standard is present with regard to sex. Women are frowned upon for having anything to do with sex, while men are able to shamelessly impregnate women and then leave them. Crane refutes the sexual double standard established by society through his often cynical tone towards the actions of men, such as Jimmie and Pete, contrasted with his empathetic tone towards the actions of women, like Maggie.

Maggie's younger sister, Janelle, has been in a horrific car accident that's left her badly physically damaged. Maggie is nursing her own inner wounds, having been driven to the very brink of sanity by their mother, who has come to live in Maggie's attic.

Jeanette has lived a sheltered life with no influence on her except for the church. Her mother is a strict Christian with a deep resentment for things and people not within her fold. Being brought up in a society where going against the norm is a sin. A society that shakes its head at acts of individualism and

To begin, a person’s roles and statuses they occupy influence them to behave a certain way. Johnson explains that “ the point of occupying a status is that it connects us to social systems and provide us with paths of least resistance that shape how we experience and participate in those systems” (p.68) . This means that the certain status a person has, whether it be mom, wife, or daughter, has an impact on how that person decides to make decisions and how they act in certain situations. For example, in Far Away From Heaven, the wife, Cathy, is the homemaker. She takes care of the children and her husband every day. They are a wealthy, successful, white family. Her role as a mother and a wife is to make sure her family is happy and seems perfect from the outside. This influences her to hide the mark that her husband, Frank, put on her

Elders, especially elder women, are expected to not contribute to the community, they can be perceived as a burden on the family or that they don’t offer much after a certain age. John saw Maggie only as an old woman, who was going to slow him down, and be a burden on him; it wasn’t until later that he even learned her name. When John also found the blind girl, again he saw her as a helpless person, who was going to be a burden to him, eat his food up, and slow him down. John put these helpless roles onto the old woman and blind girl, while putting a role and expectation on him which was caretaker, leader and provider.

Later on, Maggie, the daughter, breaks a plate and that’s what sets the mom loose to which Jimmie runs out of the room. In the story, the narrator describes him by saying, “He floundered about in the darkness until he found the stairs. He stumbled, panic stricken to the next floor” (7). It is proven that many young kids who lived in places such as the cities in the North led to a not so bright future due to the fact that living in unsafe and crowded area created more problems within already broken families. In this case, Jimmie and Maggie’s parents were a mess already and living the lifestyle they did made things worse that created a sense of hopelessness and fear.

The new age of industry was upon the nation, but harbored rash economic consequences. With a surplus of migrants from all across the world arriving at such a reformative point in our nation’s history, instead of being granted opportunity, they were granted toil and poverty. Stephen Crane’s short story “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” portrays life of a family, but ultimately the introspective experience of Maggie, who lives in a New York tenement in the early 20th century. Maggie grows up in abject poverty, subject to a life of constrained living conditions based on her social class and the work that is available to people within her social order. She is witness to the luxuries of wealth throughout the book, which augments her understanding of being under the

While the play develops you may see Mrs. Hale’s act of empathy toward Ms. Wright due to the fact that she knew her and knew how hard It was to be a stay at home wife and how hard it was to run a farmhouse. In a moment where Mr. Henderson inside is sexist mind judges Mrs. Wright as to failing in her performance to keep a clean and good working farmhouse, Mrs. Hale defends Minnie against his judgment demonstrating how women are united by common experiences and men fail to understand their