Comparing The Awakening And Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets

In the novellas Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane and The Awakening by Kate Chopin the main characters, Edna and Maggie, come to a tragic end. Crane’s novella follows the life of a young girl named Maggie who grew up in the Bowery of New York City. In Chopin’s novella, Edna Pontellier is a young woman living in the Victorian Era with her wealthy husband and children. To conclude both novellas, Edna from The Awakening and Maggie from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets commit suicide. While Maggie and Edna live extraordinarily different lives, the suicides at the end of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Stephen Crane’s novellas can easily be compared.

At the end of both novellas, the main characters commit suicide for similar reasons.

Maggie grew up in the Bowery of New York City where she was surrounded by abuse, poverty, and isolation which led to her suicide at the end of the novella. It has been discussed that Maggie may have been murdered by a “huge fat man in torn and greasy garments…” but other sources in the text say differently (Crane 743). Maggie committed suicide to get out of her bad habits just like Edna did. She became a prostitute because her mother and brother kicked her out of the house and her boyfriend cheated on her. Her life had always not been the best, but from that point on it slowly crumbled apart. At the point in the novella when Maggie is kicked out by her mother and brother, she “began to tremble” at the fact that her mother said to her, “Go t’ hell an’ good riddance” (Crane 726). When Maggie was kicked out of her house, she had nothing. She was scared, poor, and alone. The only thing she had to go to was prostitution. Maggie began to notice that she was following the footsteps of her mother and she knew that if she continued on with her life, it may not get any better. This is what makes Edna and Maggie’s deaths so similar. Both characters came to the realization that making the choices they had made wasn’t bettering themselves or anyone around. Their decisions to commit suicide were in hope to save themselves from what goes on in the world

Most of the differences had to do with where they lived and what they did for a living. To start out with, Maggie was a prostitute living her life on the streets of the Bowery walking “glittering avenues and… into darker blocks than those where the crowd travelled” (Crane 742). Maggie lived her life walking the streets, where no one dared to enter, to make a living. In contrast, Edna lived with her husband in an extravagant house of New Orleans maintaining her husband’s reputation and taking family trips to Grand Isle. The characters were exposed to many different situations even though the reasons for their suicides were oddly similar.

In conclusion, Maggie and Edna each committed suicide for similar reasons even though they were exposed to very different environments. The characters made the decision to kill themselves based upon the fact that they assumed that their lives could no longer get any better due to the decisions they had made that made them who they had become. Edna and Maggie had opportunities to get out of the hole they dug themselves but took the easy route out. The characters of both novellas gave up on themselves and the people surrounding them without thinking of other