Stephen Crane's Maggie

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature grade: 20 University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar) course: Progressivism Modernity and the 'New Woman' - US-Literature and Culture 1880-1910 language: English abstract: Stephen Crane's first novel Maggie - A Girl of the Streets (1893) is a characteristicspecimen of Naturalist or New Realist Literature. The plot is quite different from VictorianRealist literature as well as the Symbolist literature by the likes of Kipling and T.S. Eliott. Infact Crane purposely wanted to get away from that sort of writing as he states in one of hisletters: If I had kept to my clever Rudyard -Kipling style the road might have been shorterbut ah it wouldn't be the true road. While the early Realists still concentrated on peoplefrom the middle class upward Crane's characters belonged to the lowest scale in terms ofsocial standing. This meant that the young author had to break with some taboos installed byVictorian writers and as a result from that he had difficulties in publishing the novel in thefirst place and also received a lot of hostility from critics.The most basic feature that distinguishes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets from Symbolist orAestheticist works is its focus on the concept of 'truth'. For Symbolist authors the highestprinciple of art was 'beauty' whereas Naturalists saw the need of objective descriptions of lifeand nature in order to portray them as close to reality as possible. Helga Quadflieg sees this asa replacement for the divine which both Symbolists and Naturalists did not believe in:Im Gegensatz zum Ästhetizismus stellt der New Realism aber nicht'beauty' an die Stelle früherer Gottheiten sondern 'truth' die [...] denhöchsten Stellenwert hat. While Symbolist literature in some cases still contained supernatural apparitions e.g. inKipling's The Mystery of Purun Bhagath or The Bull that Thought and Hardy's ForConscience'