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Maggie A Girl Of The Streets Literary Analysis

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“Maggie: a Girl of the Streets”, by Stephen Crane, uses the conflict of romantic and realist views to show the reader why people living in slums acted with such intense violence. The main character, Maggie, lived her life through rose-colored goggles; she saw the beauty in her grim situation. While life in the slums caused most people to become hardened and cold, Maggie instead became distant, almost aloof. Maggie’s brother Jimmie was her polar opposite, a realist through and through. He saw the world as it was, grimy and dirty. Jimmie was stoic, and his view of the world was solely practical. The contrast between these characters enables the reader to discover the cause of violence amidst dire economic situations. The first few chapters …show more content…

Towards the middle of the novella, Pete takes Maggie out to a theater. She experiences wealth and comfort such as she never knew existed. Rather than being a positive experience, the theater actually causes Maggie to see how grim her own situation is. She is rapidly exposed to the reality of life. This idea is similar to that of Frederick Douglass, who often said that he yearned the most for freedom not when he was treated the worst, but when freedom was in sight. Maggie was made aware of how hard life was, with her living in a slum and toiling day after day in the factories, but her demise was not triggered by the environment. It was a product of the harshly realist morality in the slums. Just as Pitzer describes in his quote, Maggie is destroyed by her environment as a moral force, not as a physical force. Therefore it can be determined that Maggie’s romantic view of her world caused her to lose hope when she quickly saw what she was missing out on. Stephen Crane teaches the reader in a sort of literary muckraking that romanticism is dangerous and people should only live with the utmost practicality. Furthermore, this book proves that romanticism is crucial to society. Without it we all fall into a rut of black and white. The sole reason for Maggie’s death was her romantic view amidst so much realism. A society capable of seeing the good in their lives is better suited to

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