Stephen Crane's "Maggie" I

Like Twain, Stephen Crane, in his novella "Maggie," uses over-dramatization to imagine the dark underbelly of the immigrant lifestyle in early 20th century New York City.  Using a journalistic style, Crane moves from a position of sympathy with Maggie to a more distanced, universalist depiction of reality.  While Crane, in his use of over-dramatization, creates an attitude that is somewhat humorous in it's depiction of tenement living, "Maggie" is a profoundly dark illustration of marginalization and poverty.

Using dialect and dialogue, I think Crane effectively constructs characters that are flat yet nonetheless work to enact a vision of decadence and hopelessness.  Ultimately, I found that I wasn't particularly engaged in the lives of the characters in "Maggie"; the distance Crane establishes between his narrative voice and Maggie's family's life is too great to feel any real attachment to.  That said, I think that this lack of emotional solidarity made me see Maggie, Pete, Jimmie as more allegorical figures who in aggregate, create a more objective vision of the immigrant plight as a whole.  That is to say, while I couldn't find common emotional ground with Crane's characters, I thought that they were effective in forcing me to recognize just how truly abject the lives of immigrants were in New York.

Moreover, I thought the characters' penchant for swift and unthinking violence also helped to effectively represent the absence of legal aid and recourse for these immigrants.  In seeing the lawlessness of the tenement community, it becomes apparent for we readers just how closed-off these tenements were from the workings of wealthy society.  It is as if the tenements were a society unto themselves totally beyond the scope of the legal system (or the healthcare system and education system as well for that matter).  In any case, I thought that Crane's use of characterization, although totally allegorical and distanced, was successful in forcing me to see clearly the lives of immigrants and their horrific living conditions in a way that has altered my understanding of poverty both past and present.