The Glittering Avenues of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

In the novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane uses the concepts of light and color to move the plot and set the tone of the scene. Three examples of this in the work are the dance hall scenes, the descriptions of Maggie and Jimmie’s home, and Maggie’s progression through the city in chapter XVII. Crane uses recurring phrases and concepts to better show the perceived opulence of the wealthier areas, juxtaposed with the dreary darkness of the slums.

In this novella, when Crane chooses to add a description of color or light, it is purposeful. Color and light signify opulence, monotone descriptions show poverty, and red specifically is used to show anger and demonstrate the tie between their house and hell. One of the places where this is most clear is in descriptions of Maggie and Jimmie’s home, and the tenement house. “A glow from the fire threw red hues over the bare floor, the cracked and soiled plastering, and the overturned and broken furniture” (Crane, 15). This use of red light succeeds in making the house feel Hellish, and clearly showing the threat that Mary is to the family. This is a recurring theme, in Chapter VI, Mary is described as “Maggie’s red mother”(Crane 30), again to show the anger and fear that Mary imposes on the family.

Another instance of Crane’s use of light and color to set the tone and move the plot forward is the direct juxtaposition of the tenement house and the dance halls. At the end of Chapter VI, Pete comes to the apartment to pick up Maggie after she and her mother have had a fight.

When Pete arrived Maggie, in a worn black dress, was waiting for him in the midst of a floor strewn with wreckage. The curtain at the window had been pulled by a heavy hand and hung by one tack, dangling to and fro in the draft through the cracks at the sash. The knots of blue ribbons appeared like violated flowers. The fire in the stove had gone out. The displaced lids and opened doors showed heaps of sullen grey ashes. The remnants of a meal, ghastly, like dead flesh, lay in a corner. Maggie’s red mother, stretched on the floor, blasphemed and gave her daughter a bad name. (Crane 30)

These descriptions of various items around the tenement, all in tones of gray barring the blue flowers and red mother, are set in place to show the hopelessness of the situation, with the blue flowers a jarring effect to show the stark contrast to the home with any source of light and color, and the red of the mother to show her anger, while the absence of light from the fireplace furthers the desperation. In contrast, the very next paragraph, the beginning of Chapter VII, juxtaposes this entire section to the light and colors of the dance hall. “An orchestra of yellow silk women and bald headed men on an elevated stage near the centre of a great green-hued hall, played a popular waltz”(Crane 31). While color, or lack thereof,  was used to show desperation and impoverishment just before, the descriptions of the dance hall invoke a sense of opulence. The vivid colors show a brilliance and hope for the first time in the story, and further the plot by opening Maggie’s eyes to the ‘riches’ that she is so certain Pete holds the key to. Setting these two paragraphs one after the other shows a stark difference between Maggie’s home life and Maggie’s life with Pete, and is used to show us as the readers why Maggie chooses to leave her house and family for him. Where at home she has darkness, shades of grey only broken by the red of her mother’s ferocity, with Pete she is exposed to color, light, and hope.

One final example of Crane’s use of light and color to show development and tone is in Chapter XVII. In this chapter, we are shown Maggie for the last time, as a prostitute looking desperately for work. She begins her search watching higher-class people exit a show. They are merry, chattering among themselves as they forge their way through the rain, and Crane describes “electric lights whirring, shedding a blurred radiance”(78). Following this, Crane focuses the reader’s attention to a “handful of wet wanderers, in attitudes of chronic dejection”(78), under “mingled light and gloom”(78). Already the difference between the brilliance of the show and the dejection of the people in the park is clear, using just this difference in lighting. Following, Crane uses the recurring phrasing of ‘glittering avenues’ to show Maggie’s descent through the city. “She passed more glittering avenues and went into darker blocks”(Crane 79). He is using the light to directly show her path from the evident light and happiness of the theatres to the rougher, more impoverished and dangerous areas of the city. As she descends further, she comes across “gloomy districts”, “tall black factories”, and eventually, “the blackness of the final block”(Crane 80). The use of gloom first, and then blackness, shows the desperation and danger of her job, and what she is forced to do to survive. In the last paragraph of this chapter, the river appears a “deathly black hue”(Crane 81). This last use of blackness in Maggie’s experiences shows us her hopelessness, and eventual downfall.

Maggie’s descent, both physically into the depths of the city and metaphorically, is clearly marked by the ongoing and slowly creeping darkness described by Stephen Crane. He uses gray tones to set a bleak tone for the tenement housing and show the anger of Mary, and juxtaposes this with the apparent radiance of the dance halls. He uses to color to forge sympathy for Maggie and lead the reader to understanding her choices and how hope was given to her at the dance halls, and uses light to signify her eventual downfall.