Stephen Crane's "Maggie" and the modern soul. ('Maggie: A Girl of the Streets')

In Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), it is possible to read the decline of the nineteenth-century mental philosophy of "character" and the rise of a modern psychology of "self-esteem." Crane's novel represents some of the first volleys fired in what Warren Susman calls "one of the fundamental conflicts of twentieth-century America": a "profound clash between different moral orders," "between two cultures--an older culture, often loosely labeled Puritan-republican, producer-capitalist culture, and a newly emerging culture of abundance" or consumption.(1) With Maggie, Crane sets out to reinvent the slum novel, and he proceeds in a programmatic fashion.(2) The novel is a tour de force, a kind of counter-demonstration. He takes a familiar tale, keeps the plot, but redoes the characterizations or the mental action as well as the moral judgment--to get the story right.(3) And it is significant that Crane chooses the representation of the lower classes for his battle ground; he could rewrite the motives of human behavior in any setting (and he would choose many), but the Bowery gave him something extra. Crane perceives in the turn-of-the-century slums, not vice, but an alternative morality--and moral inspiration. The slums had generally appeared to the middle class as a moral foil, an ethical morass short on character; Crane discovers there instead a more advanced culture of consumption and a heterodox hero of self-esteem, the swaggering Bowery tough.(4)

Crane chose for his plot an "old story" in the literature of the slums, as Frank Norris noted in review.(5) In fact, Maggie recounts the same basic tale as Edgar Fawcett's novel The Evil That Men Do (1889) and also shares compelling resemblances with Reverend Thomas de Witt Talmage's Night Sides of City Life (1878) and Charles Loring Brace's The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872)--depending on whether one reads Maggie's death scene as suicide or homicide.(6) Like Maggie, Fawcett's Cora is a slum girl subjected to the hardships of violent parents and menial labor; she is made love to and abandoned by a man, and she ends up a prostitute and then a corpse (Cora is murdered by a corrupt and unsavory brute).(7) According to Talmage, a fallen woman must choose between the cold garret of a sewing girl and the East River; Brace includes a drawing of a woman who is about to throw herself into the same river Maggie approaches in her last moments.(8)

It is as if Crane is saying to his pious colleagues, yes, you got the basic plot elements, the basic action correct, but you completely misunderstand how it comes about. Your mental philosophy is bunk; this is not a story about temptation, fall, and remorse, but rather intimidation, self-doubt, and self-loathing. Yes, says Crane in Maggie, the slum girl has premarital sex. Yes, she becomes a prostitute. Yes, she eventually kills herself or is murdered--Crane may be so deliberate in his attempt to set the record straight that he purposefully leaves Maggie's death ambiguous in order to cover both variants of this stereotypical story. In any case, for Crane, the rough outline of the action is correct, but everything else is mistaken. The details of the sexual behavior are wrong: Maggie is not tempted and seduced, and not by a playboy of an upper class; she falls for a Bowery tough. The sexual ethics of the slum are misunderstood: there is a portion of Crane's Bowery that has no prohibition against premarital sex. The girl's inner experience is misrepresented: because her values do not correspond to those of the middle class, Maggie experiences no temptation, no sense of sin, and no remorse for her sexual activity; rather, she is awed by a tough because he is, in her ethics, a moral exemplar. Finally, she becomes suicidal, not because of mounting guilt over her fall, but because of a progressive loss of self-esteem; she is not tough enough herself to make it in her slum world.

In the usual slum story of the late nineteenth century, the slum is a hothouse of vice, brimming with temptations, and the protagonist undergoes an internal moral transformation as she succumbs to her passions or transcends them with her will. Crane, then, rejects the standard characterization of the slum, the current mental philosophy of the middle class, and its concomitant model of the interaction between the individual and the environment. For him, the slum is not filled with temptations that seduce the passions, but insults that threaten pride. The slum is not an evil place but a separate moral universe, whose alternative ethics have developed in response to its inferior social status and physical misery. The people who populate the slums have not fallen into sin or risen above temptation; they have either hardened against the hardship and humiliation of their circumstances, or they have sunk into self-loathing. In fact, Maggie--once more programmatic--tells both of these new stories: Crane shows Maggie's brother Jimmie developing a healthy belligerence and Maggie falling into self-hatred. The central facts of human interiority are not character and the passions, but self-esteem and hostility. And the internal action of the slum story is therefore not alteration in character, but transformation in confidence.

The cornerstone of nineteenth-century mental philosophy was the supremacy of the moral sense over all other parts of the mind. As Thomas Upham put it in his popular textbook Elements of Mental Philosophy (1845),

the moral sensibilities . . . hold, in our estimation of them, a higher

rank than the appetites, propensities, and passions. . . .