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Maggie: A Girl of the Streets | Introduction

Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was first published at his own expense in 1893. Literary critic William Dean Howells was so impressed with the novel that he helped get it published by D. Appleton and Company in 1896. Maggie came to be regarded as one of Crane’s finest and most eloquent statements on environmental determinism.

The story centers on Maggie Johnson, a pretty young woman who struggles to survive the brutal environment of the Bowery, a New York City slum, at the end of the nineteenth century. Abused by an alcoholic mother and victimized by the overwhelming poverty of the slums, Maggie falls in love with a charming bartender, who, she tells herself, will help her escape her harsh life. Maggie’s relationship with Pete compounds her suffering, however, when her family and her neighbors condemn her. Eventually abandoned by her lover, as well as her family, Maggie is forced to make a living on the cruel city streets. Crane’s unblinking depiction of the devastating environmental forces that ultimately destroy this young, hopeful woman was celebrated as one of the most important documents of American Naturalism.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Summary

Part 1
The novel opens with young Jimmie in the midst of a street fight “for the honor of Rum Alley,” a tenement street in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century. Jimmie is caught up in the “fury of battle” as he is continually assaulted by a gang of children from nearby Devil’s Row. He alone defends his street after his compatriots have run off. Some workmen watch the bruised and bloody-faced boy with mild interest and no intervention until a sixteen-year-old boy named Pete approaches and, after recognizing Jimmie, pulls the assailants off of him. When Jimmie’s friends return, the child upbraids them for leaving him to fend for himself until he gets into a fight with one of them. Jimmie’s father soon arrives and breaks up the fight by kicking his son and his combatant. The battered boy then sullenly follows his father home. On the way, they meet his younger brother Tommie and his sister Maggie. When she complains that his fighting angers their mother, Jimmie slaps her.

At home, their drunken mother explodes in anger after seeing Jimmie’s bruises and begins to inflict some of her own on the boy. When Mr. Johnson complains that she beats the children too often, she turns on him, and they engage in a fierce quarrel that ends with his departure to the local pub. During this brutal scene, the children cower in the corner. Mrs. Johnson flies into a new rage after Maggie accidentally breaks a dish and Jimmie escapes to the hallway, where an elderly female resident joins him, listening to the shrieks emanating from the Johnson’s apartment.

The old woman asks Jimmie to slip down to the pub and buy her some beer. After completing his mission, his father spots him and steals the beer from him, drinking in down in one gulp. When Jimmie returns to the apartment later that night, he discovers that his parents are engaged in a new fight, and so he waits in the hallway until the noise dies down. After returning home to find his parents passed out on the floor, Jimmie and Maggie sit in fear, watching their mother’s prostrate body until dawn.

Part 2
Some years later, Tommie has died and Jimmie has grown into a hardened young man who has “clad his soul in armor.” He takes a job as a truck driver, which gives him a measure of pride, and gains a reputation as a troublemaker with the police. Jimmie easily lives up to that estimation, determining “never to move out of the way of anything, until formidable circumstances, or a much larger man than himself forced him to it.” After his father dies, he becomes the head of the household.

Maggie “blossomed in a mud puddle” into a rare sight in the tenements—a pretty girl. She gains employment at a shop where she makes collars and cuffs along with several other young women of “various shades of yellow discontent.” The “eternally swollen and disheveled” Mrs. Johnson has become famous in the neighborhood, especially at the police station and the courts, where she offers a continual stream of excuses and prayers for her troubles.

One day Jimmie brings Pete home, and Maggie is immediately impressed by his dress and his confident air, as he gestures like “a man of the world.” She is an attentive audience for his... » Complete Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Summary