Jimmie: A Sympathetic Or A Spiteful Character?

Maggie – A Girl of the Streets, the first novela of Stephen Crane, is a book about an Irish-immigrant family in New York at the start of the twentieth century. Maggie, the main character, is a naive, young and beautiful girl who leaves her family to live with her lover but ends up being abandoned and dying without particular reasons. Apart from her story, Jimmie, Maggie’s brother, brings readers another view about the society at the time and raises the question about if one should live like him or his sister, in toughness and wrongdoing or in oblivion and romance, surviving the hardship or dying in silence. Jimmie obviously has his bad side as well as good characteristics but also creates an understanding for Pete – the supposed villain in the novel.

First of all, Jimmie, inevitably like his parents, grows up to be violent and combative. Jimmie is the first character Stephen Crane brings readers to in the book. He starts out as a young boy fighting on the street, trembling for losing the battle. As time passes by, people see Jimmie develops into a, of course, bad-tempered and aggressive man who “never conceives a respect for the world, for he has begun with no idols that it has smashed” (Crane 18). He turns to be the head of the family as his father passes away, stumbles up-stairs late at night, heavily drunk, swearing at his relations or going to sleep on the floor everyday. Jimmie has a respect for fire engines and police for its power and ability to destroy everything, something he is always striving to have. Expectedly, he gets into a lot of trouble. Jimmie frequently enters into quarrels with other truck drivers to the point that gets himself arrested at times. He even impregnates two different women and later on abandons one of them on the street.

On the other hand, Jimmie’s soft and humane side is rarely but visibly shown throughout the book by Crane. Jimmie is the head of the family, the one who is responsible for making ends meet, avoiding starving the three of them and keeping his mother in place. Thus, it cannot be hidden that Jimmie treasures and protects his sister. He believes that Maggie cannot be touched by any man: “He was trying to formulate a theory that he had always unconsciously held, that all sisters, excepting his own, could advisedly be ruined” (Crane 48). Because of this reason, Jimmie, with the help of his friend, has had a tough and brutal fight with Pete in the bar. When finding out that Maggie has been ruined, it comes down to Jimmie to put himself in the his women’s shoes: “It occurred to him to vaguely wonder, for an instant, if some of the women of his acquaintance had brothers” (Crane 47). Even though his thought was for a moment, instant and very vague, it has essentially shown that he had felt regret and sorry for the women, something readers would never expects from the violent Jimmie. In addition, the most important detail of Jimmie that reveals his humane, and even innocent character, must be what he says while looking at the moon on a star-lit evening in full of respect: “Deh moon looks like hell, don’t it?” (Crane 22). Why is it that he felts “reverent” towards the Moon but he compares it to hell? Maybe living under a family like his with drunk and violent parents, “hell” is the only word he knows and possibly all the word he has to describe the beauty, the ugliness and everything he observes. He has to be tough because the world he is living in has no space for lenience, or he would probably ends up like Maggie. Through this sentence, readers can feel sympathetic towards Jimmie for being under his parents’ influences to become a man just the same as them.

Nonetheless, if there is a sympathy for Jimmie, there should be an understanding for the antagonist in the novel – Pete. Jimmie and Pete have been friends since they were small, indicating that there is a mutual character between the two. In fact, it is indirectly Jimmie’s fault for bringing Pete home and meeting with Maggie for the first time. During Jimmie’s years of growing up, “his sneer became chronic” (Crane 18), which is what Pete has been described as in the first chapter: “the lad with the chronic sneer” (Crane 6). This signifies that Pete may suffer under the same condition growing as Jimmie’s, might even be worse for his smirk has appeared earlier than Jimmie’s. Pete abandons Maggie by saying “Oh, go teh hell” (Crane 76), the same sentence Jimmie says to Hattie, one of his women. What Jimmie has done to the women is echoed with his sister and eventually leads to her death. At least Maggie’s death is mentioned, but Hattie’s destiny was never cared about in the book. Jimmie’s character gives readers a new look about Pete; no one is really bad or truthfully good in the novel. Stephen Crane has successfully done the job of portraying each character in the book.

In conclusion, Jimmie is a man with toughness and violence but also has his positive side. He helps give a different perspective on Pete, the man who seduces Maggie, contributing a depth to the novel. Jimmie has an important role in depicting the world that Stephen Crane is sketching in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.