Violence and Moral Hypocrisy
Much of this novel's power comes from the deft manner with which Crane combines
these themes into a critical, irony-driven thrust at his culture. In the first
three chapters alone, Jimmie fights a rival gang, a member of his own gang and
strikes his sister. His father kicks his son and fights with his wife. Maggie
drags the suffering Tommie down the street to the apartment where she is in
turn beaten by her mother who also does violence to her husband and destroys
the furniture. But in Maggie Crane's narrative probes deeper than a
strictly naturalistic reading would warrant. Maggie dies not because she is
surrounded by violence but because her family and the society of the Bowery
consider her unworthy of inclusion except as a whore. Mary, Jimmie and Pete
rationalize and accept Maggie's ruin by standards they pretend to uphold but
fail to achieve themselves. Mary is a drunkard and a brawler - she rains
violence upon the heads of her children and she smashes their belongings. Yet
she judges Maggie to be worthy of damnation for what society believes to be her
compromised virtue. Like Mary, Pete also believes that he's done nothing wrong
by the girl. Rather, he believes that Maggie's family is attempting to ruin his
reputation by raising "such a smoke" about nothing at all dishonorable. He
dismisses himself from responsibility for her downfall without allowing himself
to consider his somewhat less than honorable motives in pursuing the girl and
his callus abandonment of her once he had achieved his aims. Of the three,
Jimmie comes closest to recognizing the various factors that contributed to her
downfall. He briefly considers the idea that Maggie might "have been more
firmly good had she better known why" and reflects that the girls he has
pursued might also have brothers but fails to draw the parallel to his sister.
Jimmie is a product of his environment and he capitulates entirely to the
social codes of the Bowery by publicly denouncing his sister and fighting Pete
for the honor of the family. When he flees the fight he does so believing that
he has exacted the necessary revenge and his honor is intact. He comes to this
conclusion without regard to the relative valor of abandoning his friend to the
police in the process.
Social Reform
It would be a mistake to class Maggie among
the openly didactic and purportedly realistic portrayals of slum life popular
in Crane's day. Rather than seek to inspire compassion for the lower classes
by presenting their squalid lives as subjects for class pity, Crane imbues his
story with an ironical tone that implicates the middle class reader in
subscribing to the same moral hypocrisy as that being practiced in the slums.
Where other writers provided the reading public with a window to the slums
Crane sought to inspire social change by providing a mirror. Crane valued
honesty with one's self above all else and in Maggie he sought to
inspire a better society by describing the tragedy of a young girl destroyed by
not only the selfish dishonesty of those around her but the dishonesty of her
culture at large.
Survival of the
Strongest
Because the
characters in the book are products of their environment, the novel has no
villains in the traditional sense unless one counts the Bowery itself as a
perpetrator. In this manner Crane's vision is in keeping with the central
tenets of Darwinism that were coming into vogue at the time that he wrote the
novel. Individuals act according to the demands of their environment and their
actions are determined by what they learn from their surroundings. In the
environment of the slums as presented in Maggie the only guarantee for
survival is strength. Thus, Maggie becomes enamored of Pete not because she
sees him for what he is but because she's never known anything better.
Significantly, her first encounter with him is hearing him describe his prowess
in fighting. Maggie's attraction to Pete is not confined simply to her
romantic notions but also to her very real need for a protector. Similarly,
Jimmie grows up an irreverent young man without respect for the world because
"he had begun with no idols that it had smashed." As a truck driver, however,
he comes to fear and respect fire engines for their power to destroy him.
Though Pete claims great feats of strength he is ultimately undone by his
infatuation with Nell whose charms render him helpless and, in her words, "a
damn fool."
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