Maggie a Girl of the Streets Stephen Crane

Maggie

Determinism in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

Stephen Crane's novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets paints a very vivid and dismaying picture of what life for the lower classes in New York City was like. The rough, largely angry, and ultimately hopeless individuals that fill the streets of the Bowery and the pages of this novel can be described in a variety of ways, and their actions are easy to judge as rash, unthinking, an even animalistic by a reader not given to more careful and full consideration. When this type of consideration and long-term perspective is applied to the novel, however, it becomes clear that Crane saw these characters as victims of circumstance, inexorably and inevitably drawn to their ultimate conclusion and left without real recourse for bettering their situations. The determinism that is so evident throughout Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is expressed through the characters' interactions with each other and comments about each other, through the actual presentation of their actions, and through the overall plot of the novel and the plight of the novel's central figure, the tragic and hapless Maggie.

When Maggie first meets Pete in adulthood (or at least near adulthood), she is taken aback by how different he seems from the other people she knows. She thinks that he appears "elegant and graceful" due to his job as a bartender, which is more upscale than he jobs she is used to performing and seeing performed. At another point, the attitude of indifference that Pete strikes impresses Maggie into thinking he, "must be accustomed to very great things" (Crane, Chapter 5). In short, the limitations of Maggie's experience have led her to regard anything even slightly out of the ordinary as truly extraordinary, and this creates feelings for others that might not otherwise exist.

In reality, of course, Pete is as rough, brutish, and even violent as anyone else in the Bowery, and words like "elegant," "graceful," and "great" would hardly be the first to come to mind in the average reader when trying to describe him. Pete is driven by his passions -- primarily his lust and his rage, it would seem -- and the way he ultimately treats Maggie is clear evidence of this. After he makes it clear that his affections are not limited solely to Maggie, she leaves him and heads to her mother's for a night, and when she approaches him in an attempt to work things out, and to live the life of love that had been promised, Pete responds, "with the anger of a man whose respectability is being threatened" (Crane, Chapter 16). In other words, he has used Maggie and is now done with her, and the fact that she expects more from him or that she is now faced with serous problems, having been ruined for other men, is completely alien to him. Pete does not understand the consequences of his actions because he does not live in a world where men are forced to deal with these consequences, and her expectations are not something he can respond to in any other way.