Iowa Journal of Literary Studies

Spoto, Gilane

Gilane Spoto, “Over the Land,” pastel on paper (22^/2" x 17").
134


English

Over the Land

Front matter, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 9.1

Phelps, Greg

FICTION AND POLITICS: THE 
PROGRESSIVE IMPULSE IN STEPHEN 
CRANE’S MAGGIE, A GIRL OF THE STREETS
Greg Phelps
‘There’s room at the top, they are telling you still, 
but first you must learn how to smile as you kill.”
John Lennon, “Working Class Hero”
STEPHEN C r a n e  Is one of the most celebrated writers of American 
fiction. His reputation stems from his pioneering of the naturalist 
style whereby real life is reconstructed in fictional contexts. This style 
combined with Crane’s pervading social consciousness led to his first 
novelette, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893). Maggie is an expose of the 
harmful consequences of Social Darwinism upon the lives of the 
working class in a New York City tenement. It is driven by a 
progressive impulse that anticipates the growth of Progressive politics 
during the early twentieth century. It is a formidable exemplar of the 
use of fictional resources to advocate social justice. This brief essay 
elucidates the socio-political import of the naturalist style in fiction by 
analyzing a few key passages from Crane’s book.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “Social Darwin­
ism,” a social theory derived from ideas propounded by Herbert 
Spencer and William Graham Sumner (and founded also on a 
specious understanding of Charles Darwin’s accounts of biological 
evolution), exerted a powerful influence on American attitudes to­
wards the socio-political structure of industrial capitalism. Social 
Darwinism recognized four main principles: (1) that society, in 
addition to whatever else might be said of it, is chiefly an arena of 
economic competition; (2) that the terms of struggle are determined 
by the conditions of the marketplace; (3) that success is rewarded by
76
survival, and when spectacular, by wealth; and (4) that the process of 
competition invigorates society by perpetuating the strong and elim­
inating the weak.1
One consequence of Social Darwinism was an unfortunate bifurca­
tion of social consciousness. On the one hand, it justified acquisitive­
ness and what Thorstein Veblen would come to call “conspicuous 
consumption.”2 On the other hand, it allowed for the all-too-often 
brutal exploitation of working class labor. Moreover, it cultivated in 
the working class themselves the same acquisitive and consumptive 
motives underlying the conditions of their oppression. This tendency 
prolonged any consequential social reform until well into the twenti­
eth century.
Against this tendency arose dissident voices. The most prominent 
were the Populists who tried to subvert Social Darwinism with their 
rejection of capitalist incantations to competition, the individual and 
economic progress. Such capitalist virtues propped up the notion that 
the inadequacy of the individual rather than the inequity of society 
was the root cause of socio-economic marginalization. The Populists, 
among others, inverted this notion in order to demonstrate that 
socio-economic conditions were the consequence of inequitable socio­
economic structures.
Populism, as a political movement, concentrated mainly on rural 
economic issues and, as a result, failed to attract a great deal of 
support among urbanites. Nonetheless, it did serve as a wellspring of 
ideas for a growing congeries of urban reformers, including Stephen 
Crane.
Crane melded his concern for the neglected masses with his talent 
as a journalist to produce the evidence upon which Maggie, A Girl of the 
Streets is based. In this regard, Russell Nye observed that “Crane talked 
sympathetically and interestedly to New York street-walkers, wan­
dered through the Bowery, slept in flophouses, talked with drifters, 
pried stories out of breadlines and loiterers, and kept himself out of 
money by responding too readily to a hard luck story.”3 Consequently, 
Crane gained an acute perception of the lifestyles of New York City’s 
lower class. This, in turn, allowed him to write vividly his story about 
the sad life of an impoverished tenement girl whose efforts to escape 
the tenement resulted only in a spiral of increasing despair.
The naturalist style is well suited to Crane’s argument in Maggie. 
His candid depiction of material conditions and social relationships in 
the tenement district in which the protagonist Maggie resided vivifies 
the contradictions between the lived experience and social valuations 
of its inhabitants.
Uniquely, Maggie’s aspirations included escape from the tenement
77
and cultural refinement. With her boyfriend Pete, the bartender in 
whom Maggie saw her ideal of success and most likely path of escape, 
she attended melodramas at which “[s]he rejoiced at the way in which 
the poor and virtuous eventually overcame the wealthy and wicked 
. . . [and] wondered if the culture and refinement she had seen 
imitated . . .  by the heroine on the stage could be acquired by a girl 
who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory.”4 These 
melodramas created in Maggie an intense hatred of everything having 
to do with tenement life from her material impoverishment to her 
spiritual deprivation.
Conversely, in other characters we find demonstrated a greater 
resignation to social conditions. Unlike Maggie, none expresses an 
urge to escape the tenement. Rather, they think only of surviving or, 
perhaps succeeding, within it. Maggie’s father and mother found their 
consolations in alcoholism. Her brother Jimmie, like Pete, aspired to 
become important among his fellow tenement dwellers. He fulfilled 
his aspiration in becoming a truck driver for a brewery. The fates of 
these characters are negotiated within the perimeters set by unchal- 
langed social forces beyond their control. Their attitudes mimic the 
elite ideologies in a way that suggests children who play at being 
grown-ups without having the slightest notions of what adulthood 
means beneath its appearances.
The difference between Maggie’s attitude and the others can be 
illustrated by looking at her approach to life in contrast with the 
approach of her brother Jimmie. Jimmie’s paradigm for survival was 
emotional and physical toughness. He came to regard the “gen­
tlemen” he encountered on the streets as dandies whose fine clothes 
and manners were evidence of their inferiority to him. Meanwhile, 
Maggie “began to note with more interest the well-dressed women she 
met on the avenues. She envied elegance and soft palms. She craved 
these adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, 
conceiving them to be allies of vast importance to women[.]”5
Unfortunately for Maggie, her dreams of grandeur—untempered 
by a critical awareness of society—led her to seek situations in which 
her natural diffidence was exploited. For example, her association 
with Pete led to a string of emotional rejections beginning with Pete 
himself and ending with her own mother. Some indeterminate evil, 
probably prostitution, overcame Maggie following Pete’s jilting of her. 
Her despondency following these emotional calamities led her to 
commit suicide. Even then, her death occassioned mourning only for 
her fall; not for the end of her life.
Crane’s ironic portrayal of Maggie’s fall has allegorical significance 
to two important propositions about working class deprivation and
78
Social Darwinism. First, the individual through her or his own efforts 
cannot work out of oppressive conditions. This requires collective 
effort. Second, working-class acquiescence to the tenets of Social 
Darwinism impedes the development of class consciousness thereby 
paralyzing reform from below. As Maggie’s case teaches, the working 
class, by following Social Darwinism, pit themselves one against 
another in competing for pre-determined shares of power, status, and 
wealth. They accept uncritically the size of the shares that have been 
allotted them by the capitalist class. For the working class, the 
Sumnerian ideal of an upward spiral of progress is supplanted by a 
vicious cycle of decay and death.
Perhaps Crane understood the complicity of nineteenth century 
romantic forms in obscuring the contradiction between capitalist 
ideology and class structures. By resisting this “happy ending” mode 
of fiction-writing, he helped inaugurate a realist form with the 
capacity to shock the status quo from its Victorian complacency into 
an era of social reform. Of course, this is not to suggest that the 
potential to overcome centuries-old oppressions inheres in any one 
work of the naturalist style. However, to the extent that this style 
flourishes in fictional genres and is accompanied by a will for social 
change, a perpetual corpus of such works can contribute to social 
restructuration. In a small way, Stephen Crane shows the way.
NOTES
1 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: Mentor, 1958), p. 53.
2 Thorstein B. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: The Modern Library, 
1934), pp. 68-101.
3 Russell Nye, “Stephen Crane as Social Critic,” Modern Quarterly, 11 (1940), p. 49.
4 Stephen Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, in Three Great Novels by Stephen Crane 
(Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett, 1970), p. 62.
5 Crane, pp. 58-59.
79


Fiction and Politics: The Progressive Impulse in Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets

Notes on Contributors, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 9.1

Mason-Browne, Nicholas

THE FLUME
Nicholas Mason-Browne
Thrown in a second across the thin, tinted 
stretch of river at the end of the day. Noise­
less continents pass by, supported on a 
succession of thick, precise sleepers. Freight 
of compressed shade. Glare from the headlight 
left behind in the back room, curling up be­
hind the file cabinet like a blue stone or a 
glimpse of a child’s elbow. Moments, days 
summarized in that way. Pale twig that stirred 
in the middle of the air. Moves loosely with a 
dry, razor-like motion. A grandfather’s spec­
tral tongue. Hydraulic laboratory below the 
chutes, filling up with discolored papers, cal­
culations, and with a kind of abstract flood.
81


Not a member yet

Over the Land

Front matter, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 9.1

Fiction and Politics: The Progressive Impulse in Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets

Notes on Contributors, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 9.1

The Flume

The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Cultural Anamorphosis

Seed

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 9.1

The Kyria's Tuesday Vigil

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 9.1

241

376