Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

200 Pages·2006·0.841 MB·English

by  Stephen Crane, Adrian Hunter

Maggie main 8/21/06 10:54 AM Page 1
This electronic material is under
copyright protection and is
provided to a single recipient
for review purposes only.
MAGGIE
broadview editions
series editor:L.W.Conolly
Maggie main 8/21/06 10:54 AM Page 2
Review Copy
Maggie main 8/21/06 10:54 AM Page 3
Review Copy
MAGGIE
A GIRL OF THE STREETS
Stephen Crane
edited by Adrian Hunter
broadview editions
Maggie main 8/21/06 10:54 AM Page 4
Review Copy
© 2006Adrian Hunter
All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,transmitted in any form or by
any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,or otherwise,or stored in a retrieval
system,without prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying,a licence
from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency),One Yonge Street,Suite 1900,
Toronto,ON m5e 1e5—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Crane,Stephen,1871–1900.
Maggie :a girl of the streets / Stephen Crane ;edited by Adrian Hunter.
(Broadview editions)
Includes bibliographical references.
isbn1-55111-597-2
I.Hunter,Adrian,1971– II.Title. III.Series.
ps1449.c85m3 2006 813'.4 c2006-903346-3
Broadview Editions
The Broadview Editions series represents the ever-changing canon of literature by bringing together
texts long regarded as classics with valuable lesser-known works.
Advisory editor for this volume:Marie Davis Zimmerman
Broadview Press is an independent,international publishing house,incorporated in 1985.Broadview
believes in shared ownership,both with its employees and with the general public;since the year 2000
Broadview shares have traded publicly on the Toronto Venture Exchange under the symbol bdp.
We welcome comments and suggestions regarding any aspect of our publications–please feel free to
contact us at the addresses below or at [email protected] / www.broadviewpress.com
North America
POBox 1243,Peterborough,Ontario,Canada k9j 7h5
Tel:[phone];Fax:[phone]
email:[email protected]
POBox1015, 3576California Road,Orchard Park,ny, usa 14127
UK,Ireland,and continental Europe
NBN International
Estover Road
Plymouth pl6 7py UK
Tel:[phone]
Fax:[phone]
email:[email protected]
Australia and New Zealand
UNIREPS,University of New South Wales
Sydney,nsw, 2052
Australia
Tel:[phone];Fax:[phone]
email:[email protected]
PRINTED IN CANADA
Maggie main 8/21/06 10:54 AM Page 5
Review Copy
Contents
Acknowledgements • 7
Introduction • 8
Stephen Crane:A Brief Chronology • 23
A Note on the Text • 24
Maggie:A Girl of the Streets • 25
Appendix A:Other New York Writings
by Stephen Crane • 90
1. George’s Mother (1896) • 90
2. An Experiment in Misery (22 April 1894) • 137
3. An Experiment in Luxury (19 April 1894) • 147
4. An Ominous Baby (9 May 1894) • 154
Appendix B:The Slum and Its Reformers • 158
1. From Jacob A.Riis,How the Other Half Lives
(1890) • 158
2. From Thomas De Witt Talmage,Night Scenes of City Life
(1892) • 163
3. From Charles Loring Brace,The Dangerous Classes of
New York (1872) • 167
Appendix C:Slum Fiction:From Edgar Fawcett,The Evil
That Men Do (1889) • 170
Appendix D:Crane on Realism and Maggie • 175
1. “Howells Discussed at Avon-by-the-Sea”
(August 1891) • 175
2. From a Letter to Lily Brandon Munroe
(April 1893) • 176
3. Letter to Ripley Hitchcock (February 1896) • 176
4. Letter to Ripley Hitchcock (10 February 1896) • 177
5. Letter to Ripley Hitchcock (2 April 1896) • 177
Maggie main 8/21/06 10:54 AM Page 6
Review Copy
Appendix E:The New Journalism • 178
1. From William Dean Howells,“The Man of Letters as a
Man of Business”(1902) • 178
2. From Davis G.Croly,interview (1875) • 184
3. From Lincoln Steffens,Autobiography (1931) • 186
Appendix F:Reviews • 188
1. Hamlin Garland,Arena (June 1893) • 188
2. From William Dean Howells,New York World
(26 July 1896) • 189
3. William Dean Howells,Academy (18 August 1900) • 190
4. From Unsigned,Nashville Banner (15 August 1896) • 191
5 From H.D.Traill,Fortnightly Review(1January 1897) • 193
Select Bibliography • 196
Maggie main 8/21/06 10:54 AM Page 7
Review Copy
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for
financial support during the preparation of this volume.Staff at the
Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City gave an
account of slum life that considerably altered my understanding of
Crane’s story.I was happy to act on advice given by Broadview’s
anonymous readers and editorial staff,particularly Julia Gaunce.Finally,
I thank Jennifer Ellis for reading aloud in her best Ayrshire accent.
maggie: a girl of the streets 7
Maggie main 8/21/06 10:54 AM Page 8
Review Copy
Introduction
“Ambiguity,”William Empson once said,“is a phenomenon of
compression.”He was remarking,straightforwardly enough,upon
an oddity of language,namely that the fewer words one deploys,the
greater the range of possible meanings one produces.Less is more,
if you like:not saying enough cuts uncertainty loose.It is a situation
that prompts some to superabundant talkativeness,in the hope of
making words behave themselves.Legal discourse,for example,with
its fretful proliferation of clauses,qualifiers,and correctives,is only
trying to tell it like it is,like it reallyis.But for the critic Empson,as
for the writer Stephen Crane,the volatility of a stripped-down
language made for all sorts of creative adventure.Maggie may be a
short book,but as the vast critical industry it powers attests,it is long
on meaning;Crane’s words are few,but fit.
The shortness of Maggie has always disturbed its readers.An early
respondent,Hamlin Garland,declared the book a “fragment”lacking
in “rounded completeness,”though he was broadly satisfied that it
marked an auspicious debut (Appendix F1). Other reviewers
complained that Crane told only half the story of the slum—the terri-
ble half—and was thereby derelict in the novelist’s duty to provide “an
aspiration in the uplifting of humanity’s heart”(Appendix F3).More
sharply,the English critic H.D.Traill took Maggie’s brevity as evidence
of a vapid authorial imagination and lack of expressive range.The
abstemiousness of the language was for Traill symptomatic of Crane’s
general failure to give his story a fulsome moral shape and purpose.
As a narrative,Maggiewent nowhere:it merely followed its characters
around,from one squalid intercourse to another,in a “series of loosely
cohering incidents”(Appendix F4).
And yet,for all Maggie’s transitoriness as a reading experience,it has
enjoyed a remarkable longevity within the canon of American liter-
ature.One might wonder,then,if its shortness,far from being a flaw,
isn’t truly the hiding place of its power.After all,it’s the text’s silences
and ambiguities,the things Crane left out or left unresolved,that have
kept readers wondering about Maggie,and scholars in the business of
interpreting it.There is the matter of the ending,for example.Just
how doesMaggie meet her death? Is it by suicide,foul play,accident?
8 introduction
Maggie main 8/21/06 10:54 AM Page 9
Review Copy
Moreover,what is going on in her mind as she suffers,in those final
desperate chapters,cumulatively insult,rejection,and personal viola-
tion? Crane neglects—that is,he refuses—to tell us.Maggie gets liter-
ally nothing to say for herself as her life comes apart.Condemned by
her mother and brother as a “fallen”woman,she neither defends
herself nor registers guilt:faced with their accusations and abuse,we
are told,she merely “turned and went”(77).It is still,even for the
contemporary reader,disconcerting to encounter the central charac-
ter of a novel at so impersonal a distance.Indeed,so little access to
Maggie does Crane permit that in the final chapter in which she
appears,chapter 17,she is not even referred to by name but becomes,
rather,“A girl of the painted cohorts of the city”—one of a “legion”
of prostitutes (81).As Crane presents her,Maggie is destitute of depth:
she is an entirely performative figure.Her inner life becomes a deter-
mining absence in her story.For all her narrative centrality—the book
itself bears her name,after all—we know next to nothing about what
she feels or thinks about what she says and does.
The enigma of Maggie,as of Maggie,is largely an effect of Crane’s
punishing economy of expression.Not only does he frequently
withhold crucial information from his narrative,thereby restricting
our view of the main character,but the relentless compression of his
language means that the words he does provide are exercised to
breaking point.On occasion,indeed,one might feel that ambigu-
ity—or more precisely the unsettling of the reader’s interpretative
confidence—is just what Crane intends.Take the exhilarating open-
ing staves of chapter 4:
The babe,Tommie,died.He went away in a white,insignificant
coffin,his small waxen hand clutching a flower that the girl,Maggie,
had stolen from an Italian.
She and Jimmie lived.
The inexperienced fibres of the boy’s eyes were hardened at an
early age.He became a young man of leather.He lived some red
years without laboring.During that time his sneer became chronic.
He studied human nature in the gutter,and found it no worse than
he thought he had reason to believe it. He never conceived a
respect for the world,because he had begun with no idols that it
had smashed.
maggie: a girl of the streets 9
Maggie main 8/21/06 10:54 AM Page 10
Review Copy
He clad his soul in armor by means of happening hilariously in at
a mission church where a man composed his sermons of ‘yous.’
While they got warm at the stove,he told his hearers just where he
calculated they stood with the Lord.Many of the sinners were impa-
tient over the pictured depths of their degradation.They were wait-
ing for soup-tickets.
A reader of words of wind-demons might have been able to see
the portions of a dialogue pass to and fro between the exhorter and
his hearers.
‘You are damned,’said the preacher.And the reader of sounds
might have seen the reply go forth from the ragged people:‘Where’s
our soup?’(37–38)
We travel an astonishing distance in this passage,over several years
and not a few profound happenings.I say “profound,”but it’s not as
though profundity—in the sense of things deep-seated or far-reach-
ing—is overtly signalled in the language.One must look twice to
find it.The life and death of Tommie pass by like the “insignificant
coffin”that bears him;Maggie and Jimmie “live”—but how? And
the young man’s “red years without laboring”:were those years
without profitable work,or years in which violence was readily,even
blithely borne? And yet this journey from inexperience,to tough-
ness,and finally to sneering,is only a fraction of the life of Jimmie
that Crane’s prose seems to evoke.This language,for all its compact-
ness,leaks adversative,contrary meanings from every pore:Jimmie’s
disrespect for the world as much condemns that world,and what it
considers respectable,as it does the man who once looked out with
a boy’s unpresuming eyes.And the soup-beggars,for all their word-
lessness,have throats that are full of wounded mockery.One often
feels that Crane’s writing contains much more than it is prepared to
say.His reticence captures in kind the straightened lives that are his
subject;but it renders,by layered implication,all the agony of what
those lives have lost and are without.One must lean close to hear
the words of wind-demons.
Writing of this order of brilliance lies everywhere in wait for the
reader of Maggie,and I am conscious as I compose this introduction
of wishing not to give too much away or dull the sense to Crane’s
uniquely awkward genius.But it is useful to know a little of how
10 introduction