Maggie: A Girl of the Streets | Distant Dinners in Crane’s Maggie
In the following essay, Golemba examines how Crane and other realist writers “developed a language of food in order to give an impression of being ‘inside’ the social topic, of seeing deeper than the surface,” and the problems associated with that approach.
Pete’s first words to Maggie are: “Say, Mag, I’m stuck on your shape. It’s outa sight.” Maggie’s response: “She wondered what Pete dined on.” These two quotations encode an enormous problem for Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and it reflects a crucial anxiety for American writers in the last decades of the nineteenth century who were attempting to transform new social phenomena into literary, journalistic, and photographic constructions. Pete’s words reflect the realist’s worry that aesthetic aims become “stuck on shape.” Realism’s...
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