The Father of Reality

In fiction, the protagonist almost always wins. In reality, no one does. As seen in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets the impendingly doomed protagonist, Maggie, draws the shortest of life’s sticks. Although sweet and innocent, her naivety ends up beating her. As sad as it is, this is the reality of life in America. Before Crane, no one dared comment on the negative customs and realities of America. To explicitly create a work that shows what happens in the shadows and how hard it is to climb out into the light was ingenious. Crane wanted people to accept that maybe life is not always fair.

To deliberately show the reader this, he ended the novella with Pete, rich and almost in a state of drunken comatose, surrounded by beautiful women whose only intention is getting drinks. At the other end of the spectrum, Maggie winds up on the streets and, in time, dies. By contrasting the rich and poor, Crane expresses the underlying pain that, at the end of the day, everyone has. Pete, now unable to form a full sentence, clearly regrets the way he treated Maggie, and tries to make up for it by spoiling these other girls. Maggie regrets the way she acted in her and Pete’s relationship and pushes the blame onto herself, therefore destroying her self-worth, but not before it destroyed her reputation and mental stability. 

Pete, although quite wealthy, wastes his riches on drinks and loses it to women. “Overwhelmed by a spasm of drunken adoration, he drew two or three bills from his pocket, and, with the trembling fingers of an offering priest, laid them on the table before the woman ” (126). Many people believe that money is happiness, but Crane knew better. By displaying Pete’s extreme wealth and the drunken state he is in, Crane illustrates the fool that Pete is making out of himself. The underwhelming amount of respect Pete gets from these girls shows the reality of how the world really works. 

Nearing the end of the novella, Maggie is only referred to as “the girl.” In the eyes of the reader she has lost all individuality and could be one of many. “A stout gentleman, with pompous and philanthropic whiskers, went stolidly by, the broad of his back sneering at the girl” (107). No longer is she special, but now sad, lonely, and creeping closer and closer towards the inevitable. “Crossing glittering avenues, she went into the throng emerging” (106). Only a few lines after: “She went into the blackness of the final block” (112). After wandering down streets of decreased lighting, she ends up in “the blackness.” Not only is this foreshadowing her death, but alluding to her past and how the lighting represents her journey through life. 

Crane, by providing the reader varying paths and endings of life, shows that in America, everything plays a factor in life. Gender, origin, race, appearance, wealth, and personality all play a factor in where an individual ends. Maggie, a poor immigrant girl, too naive to understand her choices, was destined to lose the game of life in America at the time. Having been dealt a bad hand, fate overpowered her free will. Many events in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets could very realistically have happened. Despite the backlash Crane received, he was right, and that was why many people despised the book.

By the way Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was written, the reader can infer that Stephan Crane did not have the most positive outlook on life, but a quite depressing perspective instead. Although dreary, most of the events in the book were quite realistic in the hardest way possible. Even though the length of the book is sparse, it touches on many compelling topics such as birth, death, living, sadness, love, guilt, abuse, and many more aspects of being human. 

By showing an inside look at the life of an American, Crane emphasizes the lie of the American dream. Not only for foreign people, but the denizens of America. Many immigrants were told that no matter who they were, in America, they could thrive. Instead, they were met with hard labor, bad living conditions, low pay, discrimination, and overpopulation. Crane, even if somber in writing, reveals the reality of America at the time and how immigrant families were treated. He tells the story of deceit and corruption, using Maggie and her companions as his vessel.