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.

Literary Naturalism, Tenement Life, and the Bowery

Writers living in nineteenth-century New York City were witness to the tumultuous conditions that the lower class was forced to endure. According to E. R. L. Gould, poverty and displacement of the lower classes in late nineteenth-century New York City were widespread:

"Reformers in New York saw in tenement housing the chief source of urban social evils — ill health, immorality, and poverty. Owing to overcrowding, inadequate provision for clean air and water, and lack of public sanitation, dwellers in tenement blocks on the Lower East Side were ridden by tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, and scarlet fever; rates of infant mortality there were among the highest in the western world. In such an environment, criminals and paupers multiplied while immigrant families found it impossible to maintain a healthy home atmosphere." (pp. 378–393)

Crane drew on this firsthand knowledge through a literary approach in the opening paragraph of chapter two, where he begins describing the tenement Bowery — a slum area of New York City where Maggie and her family live:

"Eventually they entered into a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against a hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. In all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, rags and bottles. In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels. Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure corners. A thousand odors of cooking food came forth to the street. The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels." (Chapter 2)

Readers notice immediately that the Bowery receives a far fuller description than any human character in the novel. Through attentive detail, Crane used this novella to raise America's consciousness of the desolate conditions present in urbanized cities, particularly New York City.

Crane was also exposing the neglect and child abuse experienced by the Johnson children. Maggie's mother, Mary, beats the children at will and never comes to terms with her abuse; Crane gives her no opportunity for redemption. She is a product of her times — a villain to her children. Yet Mary's villainy is not without justification or explanation. She incarnates villainy in the novel, but only because villainy exists to be personified, as a set of forces larger and more powerful than any one person. As much as Jimmie and Maggie are products of Mary, Mary herself is a product of the Bowery — a breeding ground for violence and savagery. Indeed, the novel implies that Mary herself may well have started out as innocent and naive as Maggie before the inevitable corruption of her environment took hold.

Industrialization, Sweatshops, and Child Labor

During this important historical period in America, the Industrial Revolution had made production more efficient but was making life increasingly unlivable for those in low socioeconomic situations. Industrialization brought change and growth to cities such as New York, but mechanization in the workplace led to harsher working conditions. Open factories gave way to cramped and unsafe institutions. Many of the new machines were crude predecessors of what we are familiar with today — often improperly designed and dangerous to operate without proper training. This resulted in many deaths and disfigurements among workers. Furthermore, the sudden availability of mass production created greed among entrepreneurs, leading to longer and more difficult hours for those employed.

Buildings were also poorly ventilated, and many workers became ill from inhaling charcoal fumes. These crowded conditions also caused horrible accidents, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 (Houle, pp. 1–10). One of the most notorious of these institutions was the sweatshop, named for its close and stifling quarters. This labor-intensive model could only function with a large number of workers. Many of those in sweatshops were lower-class women with few, if any, other options. Forced to accept these grueling jobs out of desperation, they were exploited by proprietors who raised hours and lowered wages.

Sweatshop conditions were detestable. Men worked in small basement rooms, poorly lit and ventilated. The room may or may not have had a proper floor, and many workers labored on bare earth. In another room, approximately twelve by fifteen feet, was the women's work area — filled to overflowing with sewing machines and pressing equipment, making movement nearly impossible. This space was adjacent to tenement bedrooms, separated only by a flimsy partition. Some shops had heating, cooling, and electric lighting; others were aided only by the dim glow of a poor gasoline lamp. Factory organizers also did everything possible to avoid expenditures on rent, ensuring that the structure was only "strong enough to sustain the jar of the machines" (Annals of America 1884–1894, 379). It is entirely understandable why Maggie "never achieved popularity among general readers" (Otfinos, p. 126) — it treats poverty in all its viciousness without offering any moral relief.

Maggie was like many of these unfortunate women, forced to work at a collar and cuff manufactory in order to support her parents' alcohol addiction and help keep food on the table.

History shows that child labor laws were on the books but not enforced when Crane wrote Maggie. According to journalist Mary Van Kleeck's 1908 article in Charities and the Commons, the child labor law was routinely ignored:

"In the most thickly populated districts of New York City, especially south of Fourteenth Street, little children are often seen on the streets carrying large bundles of unfinished garments, or boxes containing materials for making artificial flowers. This work is given out by manufacturers or contractors to be finished in tenement homes, where the labor of children of any age may be utilized."

These facts resonate with the Romantic poet William Blake's observation that "the world exists in two fashions, innocence and experience." In Blake's vision, the unavoidable passage into experience is always traumatizing to the individual.