Stephen Crane's "Maggie" II

When I was in seventh grade, my parents took my brother and I to Ellis Island off New York City to see my mom's grandfather's name, Andrew Nortagiacomo, inscribed on the wall outside of the building.  The wall is famous; it carries the name of all the immigrants who passed through Ellis Island on the way to the United States, and as a thirteen year old just beginning to appreciate my heritage, seeing his name was akin to seeing the origins of my family's beginnings as Americans.  Looking back, the experience was both enlightening and uplifting, but it was also ironic.  All the names on the wall are inscribed uniformly, all in the same font, same size and with the same lack of further information beyond first and last name.  And yet, the experiences of those who passed through the walls of Ellis Island, the immigrant experience, was anything but uniform.  Andrew came from Naples, Italy, but the names above him, below him, and on either side may have been from anywhere.  The people his names has come to share a space with may have never even seen Italy, or him for that matter, and in this way, the wall seems to alphabetize the immigrant journey rather than honor it. Regardless, the wall is a wonderful testimonial to the immigrant experience of a vast array of cultures all funneling into the same arena all at once, and of course, it would be impossible to honor the lives of every immigrant individually, but what the wall ultimately does not reveal is the inevitable chaos that occured with the mixing of so many ethnicities, cultural practices, and ideologies.

Stephen Crane, in his novella "Maggie," works to capture some of this chaos as he describes the lives of immigrants living in New York City after they have come into the United States.  When immigrants first entered New York Harbor, they were greeted by the statuesque beacon, the Statue of Liberty, but what they could not see were the far-from-glamorous realities that lay beyond the picturesque city-scape.  For Crane's characters, the city, and more specifically, the tenement community, is an insular world of violence, ignorance, and hopelessness.  As baby Tommie and Maggie fall victim to untimely deaths, Crane's objective and journalistic narrative voice, moreover, creates a sense of regularity to this morbid mortality.  In fact, Crane discusses tenants' suicides as if they are an escape from a nightmare rather than an untimely tragedy.  Ultimately, Crane's imagination of the tenement community becomes a vision of hopelessness and dead ends: with the inevitability of an early death or prolonged misery in life, we readers come to see beyond the facade of possibility that famous emblems like the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island have come to represent and see the dark underbelly of America's rich past.