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COPYRIGHT 1993 Johns Hopkins University Press
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. . . .
The moral sensibility appears to hold . . . the position of a consultative
and judicial power; it stands above . . . and over . . . , in
the exercise of a higher authority; it keenly scrutinizes the motives
of action; it compares emotion with emotion, desire with desire; it
sits a sort of arbitress, holding the scales of justice, and dispensing
such decisions as are requisite for the due regulation of the empire
of the passions.(9) Conscience, the moral sensibility, was supposed to act as a judicial power; its decisions were to be executed by the will. Moral character was practiced or habitual will; John Dewey explains in his Psychology (1886) that "character . . . is will which . . . has turned its force in one direction."(10) If good, character was then something like conscience automatized in will. The character--or the conscience with the aid of the will--was to control the passions and appetites; this was the ethical relationship one was to maintain with oneself
Most novels of the poor were centered around a moral struggle and transformation. This drama usually involved a battle to resist the bad influences of the slums and its pressures of physical misery. One of the first, Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861), documents the struggle for health and survival in appalling living conditions, and the climax is a moral struggle with the temptation to commit a criminal act. The main character, a mill worker, must decide if he will keep stolen money, and the inner battle drags on for a half-dozen grueling pages:
The great temptation of his life came veiled by no sophistry, but
bold, defiant, owning its own vile name, trusting to one bold blow
for victory.
He did not deceive himself. Theft! That was it. At first the word
sickened him; then he grappled with it. . . .
The money,--there it lay on his knee. . . . A thief! Well, what
was it to be a thief? He met the question at last, face to face, wiping
the clammy drops of sweat from his forehead. . . .
He folded the scrap of paper in his hand. As his nervous fingers
took it in, limp and blotted, so his soul took in the mean temptation,
lapped it in fancied rights, in dreamed of improved existences. . . .
The trial-day of this man's life was over, and he had lost the
victory.(11) After his moral defeat, it is only a few short pages before he is sentenced to prison and dies.
The moral transformation at the center of a slum tale might also be for the good. The title character of Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick (1867) swears off his bad habits, gives up his "vagabond life," seeks out an education, and makes himself into "a respectable man."(12) In "Slob Murphy," one of James W. Sullivan's Tenement Tales of New York (1895), the young title character experiences a "miracle of the spirit" as he approaches an untimely death. A fatal accident with a horse first leads to his metamorphosis from a "dirty, sneaking, suspicious, deceitful rogue" to "a cherub boy--confiding, honest, open-eyed, innocent."(13)
The late nineteenth-century morality of character was sexist, and the ultimate sin in slum literature was a woman's loss of purity. Bad habits were supposed to leave a deeper stamp on women and feminine vice was of greater repugnance; there was for the middle class a hierarchy of virtues, and a woman's chastity, even a poor woman's, was highly fetishized. Charles Loring Brace, for instance, could sympathize with street boys, romanticize their pluck and resourcefulness, and admit that they often have "a rather good time of it," but he states plainly that "with . . . girl-vagrant[s] it is different." According to Brace, slum boys' characters could be redeemed with a change of environment and refined influences, but girls, in losing their purity, experienced a "deeper" "fall," from which they could never recover.(14) Thus in the story of the slum girl, the moral stakes were higher, the fall greater, and the chances of redemption less probable. The transformation of a girl into "a girl of the streets" (a prostitute) provided the most dramatic moral action.
Dime novels of slum girls would of course climax with a scene of moral resistance; the heroine would manage to resist temptation. The Bowery girl of The Detective's Ward; or The Fortunes of a Bowery Girl (1871) defies her tempter:
I am but a poor shop-girl; my present life is a struggle for a scanty
existence; my future a life of toil; but over my present life of suffering
there extends a rainbow of hope. . . . Life is short, eternity endless--
the grave is but the entrance to eternity. And you, villain, ask me
to change my present peace for a life of horror with you. No,
monster, rather may I die at once.(15)
If a sexual sin occurred, the girl's subjective response would be swift and dramatic. Sullivan's Tenement Tales of New York includes two stories about slum women who get innocently caught up in the snares of sexual immorality, and, in both, the women contemplate suicide--and properly so. Minnie Kelsey is spared and her story ends happily when her would-be seducer suddenly proposes to marry her. Ernestine Beaulefoy's tale is a "Tragedy": she throws herself down a hatchway in a sweatshop after being physically molested by her "lascivious, brutal, and gloating" boss, and the narrator applauds her action:
Insult and temptation had followed her wherever she looked for
employment; . . . she had chosen between death and degradation.
So I rejoiced with her in her choice.(16) For the fallen slum girl, redemption can only come in marriage or suicide.
Edgar Fawcett's The Evil That Men Do is exhaustive in its description of the slum woman's moral transformation; it becomes a lesson in mental philosophy. The urban slum in his tale is filled with bad people who the heroine Cora, the good and honest woman from the country, has no choice but to "mix" with. As she puts it, "I can't get rid of 'em; I sometimes wish I could."(17)...
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