Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets

Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, by Stephen Crane, uses the conflict of romantic and realist views to show the reader why people living in slums acted with such intense violence. The main character, Maggie, lives her life through rose-colored glasses; she sees the beauty in her grim situation. While life in the slums causes most people to become hardened and cold, Maggie instead becomes distant, almost aloof, lost in her own vision. Maggie’s brother Jimmie is her polar opposite, a hardened. He sees the world as it is, grimy and dirty. Jimmie is stoic, and his view of the world is solely practical. As a romantic, Maggie has little hope of surviving in the realist world of her brother. Maggie’s environment is harsh cold, a strong contrast to her mindset. Crane writes, “The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.” (Crane, V). This entire passage shows what a unique girl Maggie is. Blossoming in a mud puddle gives a similar feeling as the story of the ugly duckling, where beauty comes from an unexpected place. While the author makes her out as a wonderful anomaly, she in fact is not
suited to her environment. As the story continues, Maggie begins to fall for Pete.
Being a romantic, she takes her relationship quite seriously. “Maggie marvelled at him and surrounded him with greatness. She vaguely tried to calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have looked down upon her.” (Crane, IV). Surrounding Pete with greatness means that Maggie is unable to see his flaws, evidence of very deep feelings of attraction. Pete also treated Maggie like a princess, further fueling her affection. When Pete quickly forgot about Maggie and dumped her for some other promiscuous women, she was devastated, to the point that she sold out her body and took her own life. A realist woman would have simply moved on, but Maggie was too attached to the romantic view of Pete she had created in her
mind.
This idea is similar to that of Frederick Douglass, who often said that he yearned the most for freedom when it was just within reach, not when he was treated the most inhumanely. Maggie loses hope after her involvement with Pete, even though the returns to the same environment in which she previously lived. Maggie’s demise is not triggered by the environment; it is a product of living with a romantic view among a population of realists. Just as Pitzer describes in his quote, Maggie is destroyed by her environment as a moral force, not as a physical force. Therefore, Maggie’s romantic views cause her to lose hope when she realizes what she was missing.