Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Gilded Age Poverty

The Gilded Age and New York's Divided Social World

Stephen Crane's novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was written during America's Gilded Age, the era stretching from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century. The name was given to the period by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, who poked fun at its rampant corruption. During this formative time in American development, New Yorkers were categorized into two distinct social classes, a division similar to the social stratification occurring simultaneously in England. As Homberger writes, "the tone of social life in New York [City] was shaped by a distinctive passion for aristocracy" (p. 6), which suited the people of the upper side of New York City well enough, but the poverty-stricken people of the lower East Side were generally concerned with only one thing: surviving another day.

Crane felt compelled to expose the topic of poverty and tenement life — realities familiar to both sides of the city, yet seldom discussed or written about. It is immediately clear to the reader that Crane stresses a key point: the importance that people place on sitting higher than someone else in the social hierarchy often distorts the delicate scales of morality and immorality when those scales are called upon to guide life choices.

Differences between social classes have been a subject of scrutiny for thousands of years and are a central focal point in Maggie. Crane unwaveringly focuses on the determinism of social and economic forces on the lives of individuals. As a literary naturalist, Crane was interested in depicting the social ills of his time, showing that despite an individual's best efforts, the forces of society will overcome her and determine her fate. Because momentous changes were occurring in the United States and Europe, significant social conflicts arose involving race, class, and gender, transforming both cultural and literary landscapes.