Everyone, I think, has read Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, which, if memory serves, was only this young author’s second novel. Maggie was his first, and although imperfect, is considered by many critics to be the first work of American literary Naturalism.
Here’s what Crane himself said about the novel, written on a copy of the work sent to his friend and fellow author Hamlin Garland.
It is inevitable that you will be greatly shocked by this book but continue please with all possible courage to the end. For it tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless. If one proves that theory one makes room in Heaven for all sorts of souls (notably an occasional street girl) who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people.
Naturalism was a literary movement that sought to show people as they were, not as they had been idealized to be for decades in drama and fiction. Maggie is definitely a novel that embraces that trend. Its characters are raw and unfocused creatures, as susceptible to their own foibles and the cultural snares that surround them as any of us. But in writing Maggie in this style, Crane is attempting something more than just fidelity to an emerging movement. As Eric Solomon says in one of the volume’s pieces of analysis and criticism:
Maggie involves a complete reversal of the sentimental themes of the nineteenth-century best sellers that dealt with the life of a young girl. These novels, from such active pens as those of Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and E. P. Roe, displayed a manifest religious bias; Maggie is scorned by a clergyman and Jimmie finds organized religion abhorrent. The conventional novels treated romantic love and the salvation of female honor; Crane’s heroine is sexually betrayed and falls to the lower depths. A key scene in the sentimental novel was the slow, beautiful death of the heroine’s mother; here, Maggie herself dies, off stage, and her drunken, blaspheming mother survives. The villain in the sentimental novel was generally regenerated by the heroine’s good influence; Crane’s Pete the bartender becomes increasingly degraded and ends in a drunken stupor, mocked by thieving streetwalkers. The essential lesson of the sentimental novel was that happiness (and wealth) came from submission to suffering; suffer Maggie does, but the result of her pangs is only further misery, poverty, and death.
It was interesting for me to find out that the tradition of what Solomon calls above the “sentimental novel” was very real -- with he and many other critics providing numerous examples of both authors and titles dedicated to the theme. As shown above, it puts the plot of actions of Maggie into sharp relief, a sharpness that may very well be lost on a modern reader without this background understanding. As, indeed, it seems to have been lost on many of Crane’s literary contemporaries.
Missing the Point
Here, for example, is the first long paragraph from the original review of the novel than ran in the May 31, 1896 issue of the New York Tribune.
Mr. Stephen Crane in “Maggie” studies New-York tenement-house life with the pretence of aggressive realism. He puts on paper the grossness and brutality which are commonly encountered only through actual contact with the most besotted classes. Oaths, drunkenness, rags, stained walls, cut heads, black eyes, broken chairs, delirious howlings, the flat staleness of a police report are his properties. In his finished book they are still raw materials with the edge of their offensiveness in no way taken off; for Mr. Crane entirely lacks the ability which has enabled some other men to deal with sordid, disgusting and vicious themes in a way that made them at least entertaining. He has no charm of style, no touch of humor, no hint of imagination. His story is one of unrelieved dulness in which the characters interest neither by their words nor acts, are depraved without being either thrilling or amusing, are dirty without being picturesque. There is nothing enticing in their lives nor uplifting in the contemplation of their sorrows. There is nothing alluring in the evils they exhibit. They are not even piquantly wicked, and their talk is as dreary as their lives are empty. Mr. Crane has attempted the accurate reproduction of the tenement dialect, but has succeeded in presenting only its brutal side. He has learned its billinsgate. He does not know anything of the quaint idiom and odd inflection which made Mr. Townsend’s slum talk at once alive and pleasing. Nor does he show any knowledge of the interesting human traits, the quick wit, the self conceit, the local sense of the cockney which make the Bowery Boy a character. He sees only dulness and dirt. The book shocks by mere fact of its monotonous and stupid roughness. To read its pages is like standing before a loafer to be sworn at and have one’s face slapped twice a minute for half an hour.
Talk about missing the point. One can well imagine Crane with a crumpled piece of newsprint in his fist, shouting “Exactly!” over and over again. The world, at least the one caretaked by the New York Tribune, was clearly not ready for literary naturalism.
Just as others were not ready for the inversion of the sentimental novel about young girls. Here’s a passage from a longer work by Charles Loring Brace, a theologian famous for his missionary and charity work among the poor children of New York.
A girl street-rover is to my mind the most painful figure in all the unfortunate crowd of a large city. With a boy, “Arab of the streets,” one always has the consolation that, despite his ragged clothes and bed in a box or hay-barge, he often has a rather good time of it, and enjoys many of the delicious pleasures of a child’s roving life, and that a fortunate turn of events may at any time make an honest, industrious fellow of him. At heart we cannot say that he is much corrupted; his sins belong to his ignorance and his condition, and are often easily corrected by a radical change of circumstances. The oaths, tobacco-spitting, and slang, and even the fighting and stealing of a street-boy, are not so bad as they look. Refined influences, the checks of religion, and a fairer chance for an existence without incessant struggle, will often utterly eradicate these evil habits, and the rough, thieving New York vagrant make an honest, hard-working Western pioneer. It is true that sometimes the habit of vagrancy and idling may be too deeply worked in him for his character to speedily reform; but, if of tender years, a change in circumstances will nearly always bring a change of character.
With a girl-vagrant it is different. She feels homelessness and friendlessness more; she has more of the feminine dependence on affection; the street-trades, too, are harder for her, and the return at night to some lonely cellar or tenement-room, crowded with dirty people of all ages and sexes, is more dreary. She develops body and mind earlier than the boy, and the habits of vagabondism stamped on her in childhood are more difficult to wear off.
The the strange and mysterious subject of sexual vice comes in. It has often seemed to me one of the most dark arrangements of this singular world that a female child of the poor should be permitted to start on its immortal career with almost every influence about it degrading, its inherited tendencies overwhelming toward indulgence of passion, its examples all of crime or lust, its lower nature awake long before its higher, and then that it should be allowed to soil and degrade its soul before the maturity of reason, and beyond all human possibility of cleansing!
On and on it goes like this, layering the cultural zeitgeist of the times over the differential manifestations of sin between young men and young women. Girls are to remain pure, and even one sexual encounter outside the sanctioned socio-religious boundaries will tarnish her forever. It is thought that the longer work may have served as a source or inspiration for Crane’s Maggie. If so, I can only believe that it was Crane’s intention to subvert, not support, this view of the world.
Social Insanity Creating a Moral Madhouse
Here, I think, is the point. Crane’s naturalism and sentimental inversion combine in Maggie to show not just the reality of people in New York’s tenement district, but also the social insanity that traps them there. And it is that combination, not just the naturalism nor just the sentimental inversion, that truly makes Maggie a remarkable novel.
Here’s another critic, Charles Child Walcutt, making the point better than I can.
A dominant idea that grows from this landscape of hysteria is that these people are victimized by their ideas of moral propriety which are so utterly inapplicable to their lives that they constitute a social insanity. Maggie is pounced upon by the first wolf in this jungle and seduced. When she is abandoned and returns home, her mother’s outraged virtue is boundless:
“Ha, ha, ha!” bellowed the mother. “Dere she stands! Ain’t she purty? Look ut her. Ain’t she sweet, deh beast? Look ut her! Ha, ha! Look ut her!” she lurched forward and put her red and seamed hands upon her daughter’s face. She bent down and peered keenly up into the eyes of the girl. “Oh, she’s jes’ dessame as she ever was, ain’t she? She’s her mudder’s putty darlin’ yit, ain’ she? Look ut her, Jimmie. Come her and look ut her.”
Maggie is driven forth with jeers and blows and presently commits suicide. Crane tells how her mother responds to the lugubrious consolations of her neighbors in this classic paragraph:
The mourner essayed to speak, but her voice gave way. She shook her great shoulders frantically, in an agony of grief. The tears seemed to scald her face. Finally, her voice came and arose in a scream of pain. “Oh, yes, I’ll fergive her! I’ll fergive her!”
The impressions that these people are not free agents, and that their freedom is limited as much by the conventional beliefs as by their poverty, are naturalistic concepts completely absorbed into the form of the story. One might object upon sociological grounds that Crane’s ideas of the family are unsound, but his literary technique here is a triumph. It creates a coherent if terrible world, and there are no serious loose ends -- no effect of tension or contradiction between abstract theory and human event. Crane’s hallucinatory inferno is a gift of his style. What he says and what he renders are one. Indeed, he does not comment because the whole work is one grand roar of mockery and outrage. The hysterical distortions symbolize, image, and even dramatize the confusion of values which puts these social waifs in a moral madhouse.
OK. First. In my book, there is no higher praise for a fiction writer than what Walcutt just offered Crane. Essentially, Crane has dramatized abstract truth, and done it without preaching. “Preaching,” as Crane is quoted elsewhere in this volume, “is fatal to art and literature.” The goal, in this case, is not to describe moral outrage, but to depict it -- depict it only in the speech and interactions of dramatic characters. And in this regard, Crane’s Maggie truly is a triumph.
But the more direct point of Walcutt’s essay is that the characters of Maggie, and the real world tenement dwellers that they represent, hold themselves to moral absolutes that no longer serve the grim isolation and harrowness of their existence. Maggie’s mother is cajoled into forgiving her daughter in a naturalistic but still maudlin scene, oblivious to the reality that if she hadn’t shunned Maggie after her “fall from grace,” she very well might still be alive.
And in this sense, Crane’s early and still flawed novel manages to transcend its form. For it is not just Maggie’s mother that is bound to a moralistic farce. The reader, especially the contemporary reader who may be more prone to take sides, is revealed as being equally bound. As critic Frank Bergon helpfully explains:
By the end of the novel, then, the reader is caught in the position of realizing that it is as absurd to forgive Maggie as it is to damn her. Her only transgression is against moral and social codes that are in themselves transgressions or moral and social reality. Yet Maggie shares these codes with other characters whom the reader would never forgive. Like them, she is a victim of self-deception; and, like them, she adopts moral poses so as to appear on a higher social plane. Her errors are so perfectly those of her society that forgiveness of Maggie should be extended to others. The forgiving reader is caught in a moral contradiction, or like Maggie’s mother, becomes bound to noble sentiments that are in themselves self-serving deceptions.
Allegory Lost in Editing
Maggie’s suicide is the last thing I want to comment on. It, like many other gruesome aspects of the novel, happens off-stage. And this, as I came to learn through reading the commentary that accompanies the text, is only partly a result of Crane’s intent. A big part of it is the frustrating influences of Crane’s more traditional publishers.
There are, in a way, two versions of Maggie included in this volume. The presented text follows the author’s original intention, the way the novel was cast and published in its first printing in 1893. But a second version of Maggie was published in 1896, and in that version many mollifying changes were made, each and every one footnoted and explained in this volume.
It’s fascinating to see the changes. The 1893 version was self-published by Crane. The 1896 version was done by a respectable publishing house, who insisted on the changes, believing the original version was too honest. References to “micks” were changed to “mugs,” “hell” was changed to “h--l” or deleted entirely, “Gawd!” was changed to “Gee!” These are all relatively minor, although in the aggregate, they do create a different kind of novel than the one Crane intended.
But the biggest problem comes in Chapter XVII, the one in which Maggie commits suicide. It’s fairly short, so here it is in its 1893 glory.
Upon a wet evening, several months after the last chapter, two interminable rows of cars, pulled by slipping horses, jangled along a prominent side-street. A dozen cabs, with coat-enshrouded drivers, clattered to and fro. Electric lights, whirring softly, shed a blurred radiance. A flower dealer, his feet tapping impatiently, his nose and his wares glistening with rain-drops, stood behind an array of roses and chrysanthemums. Two or three theatres emptied a crowd upon the storm-swept pavements. Men pulled their hats over their eyebrows and raised their collars to their ears. Women shrugged impatient shoulders in their warm cloaks and stopped to arrange their skirts for a walk through the storm. People having been comparatively silent for two hours burst into a roar of conversation, their hearts still kindling from the glowings of the stage.
The pavements became tossing seas of umbrellas. Men stepped forth to hail cabs or cars, raising their fingers in varied forms of polite request or imperative demand. An endless procession wended toward elevated stations. An atmosphere of pleasure and prosperity seemed to hang over the throng, born, perhaps, of good clothes and of having just emerged from a place of forgetfulness.
Crane describes this scene to show the contrast with what is to come next.
In the mingled light and gloom of an adjacent park, a handful of wet wanderers, in attitudes of chronic dejection, was scattered among the benches.
A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street. She threw changing glances at men who passed her, giving smiling invitations to men of rural or untaught pattern and usually seeming sedately unconscious of the men with a metropolitan seal upon their faces.
This girl is Maggie, although Crane will never name her as such. She is both the Maggie of the novel’s title, and an archetype of her class.
Crossing glittering avenues, she went into the throng emerging from the places of forgetfulness. She hurried forward through the crowd as if intent upon reaching a distant home, bending forward in her handsome cloak, daintily lifting her skirts and picking for her well-shod feet the dryer spots upon the pavements.
She is well clothed. She must have found some success in her new line of work.
The restless doors of saloons, clashing to and fro, disclosed animated rows of men before bars and hurrying barkeepers.
A concert hall gave to the street faint sounds of swift, machine-like music, as if a group of phantom musicians were hastening.
A tall young man, smoking a cigarette with sublime air, strolled near the girl. He had on evening dress, a mustache, a chrysanthemum, and a look of ennui, all of which he kept carefully under his eye. Seeing the girl walk on as if such a young man as he was not in existence, he looked back transfixed with interest. He stared glassily for a moment, but gave a slight convulsive start when he discerned that she was neither new, Parisian, nor theatrical. He wheeled about hastily and turned his stare into the air, like a sailor with a searchlight.
Maggie’s first potential customer of the night; a well dressed gentleman; rejecting her.
A stout gentleman, with pompous and philanthropic whiskers, went solidly by, the broad of his back sneering at the girl.
A belated man in business clothes, and in haste to catch a car, bounced against her shoulder. “Hi, there, Mary, I beg your pardon! Brace up, old girl.” He grasped her arm to steady her, and then was away running down the middle of the street.
Two more potential customers in the crowd; both with no time or consideration for her. It seems clear that Maggie no longer belongs in respectable society.
The girl walked on out of the realm of restaurants and saloons. She passed more glittering avenues and went into darker blocks than those where the crowd travelled.
A young man in light overcoat and derby hat received a glance shot keenly from the eyes of the girl. He stopped and looked at her, thrusting his hands in his pockets and making a mocking smile curl his lips. “Come, now, old lady,” he said, “you don’t mean to tell me that you sized me up for a farmer?”
A laboring man marched along with bundles under his arms. To her remarks, he replied: “It’s a fine evenin’, ain’t it?”
She smiled squarely into the face of a boy who was hurrying by with his hands buried in his overcoat, his blonde locks bobbing on his youthful temples, and a cheery smile of unconcern upon his lips. He turned his head and smiled back at her, waving his hands.
“Not this eve -- some other eve!”
A drunken man, reeling in her pathway, began to roar at her. “I ain’ ga no money, dammit,” he shouted, in a dismal voice. He lurched on up the street, wailing to himself, “Dammit, I ain’ ga no money. Damn ba’ luck. Ain’ ga no more money.”
A lower class neighborhood; four more opportunities; four more rejections. Where will she go next?
The girl went into gloomy districts near the river, where the tall black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of light fell across the pavements from saloons. In front of one of these places, from whence came the sound of a violin vigorously scraped, the patter of feet on boards and the ring of loud laughter, there stood a man with blotched features.
“Ah, there,” said the girl.
“I’ve got a date,” said the man.
Further on in the darkness she met a ragged being with shifting blood-shot eyes and grimy hands. “Ah, what deh hell? T’ink I’m a millionaire?”
Are you getting the picture? She is moving through the ranks of society, and each one is rejecting her in turn. The entertainment district, the working classes, the riverfront slums. None will have her. Where will she go next?
She went into the blackness of the final block. The shutters of the tall buildings were closed like grim lips. The structures seemed to have eyes that looked over her, beyond her, at other things. Afar off the lights of the avenue glittered as if from an impossible distance. Street car bells jingled with a sound of merriment.
And now, at this crucial moment, the texts of the 1893 and 1896 versions diverge, the original containing the following amazing paragraph, the subsequent deleting it entirely.
When almost to the river the girl saw a great figure. On going forward she perceived it to be a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments. His grey hair straggled down over his forehead. His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl’s upturned face. He laughed, his brown, disordered teeth gleaming under a grey, grizzled moustache from which beer-drops dripped. His whole body gently quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish. Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions.
At their feet the river appeared a deathly black hue. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against the timbers. The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to silence.
Who is this figure, the one Maggie “perceives” to be a huge fat man, the one who escorts her to her death in the black and oily river? Just a dark denizen of the city’s underbelly? Or something more, something allegorical like the journey Maggie makes through the layers of her society? And why, whoever or whatever he is, was he cut from the 1896 version?
The novel is so much richer with him.
+ + +
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment