Characteristics of Naturalism in Stephen Crane's "Maggie. A Girls of the Streets"

frantic quarrels”. Children have an awkward behavior, as well, “sitting stupidly in the way of vehicles”, having presumably entailed their mother’s madness. However, the author calls the women “formidable”, in an obviously ironic manner.

Insanity threatened the economic system of that time, made up of big fortuneowners and large monopolies, and it was not convenient that such people should walk freely among the others. They were considered dangerous and incurable, and therefore, they should be dislocated, isolated, and locked up in confinement places. The houses of Rum Alley look more like animal cages, for people are “withered”, stay in “obscure corners” and have “curious postures of submission to something”. Perhaps it is the poverty that overwhelmed them, the feeling of inferiority and the oppressive ignorance. The whole neighborhood could easily be reduced to a “mud puddle” (chapter 5).

All the characters in the novel (except for Maggie) are prone to violence, stirred either by alcoholism or by a loose education, or by their exaggerate pride and vanity, in order to gain respect in that jungle where only the best survive. The most eloquent example is Mary, Jimmie and Maggie’s mother, a “large, rampant woman”, with immense hands and yellow face, acting in a “chieftain-like” style. She has a dipsomaniacal behavior, oscillating from a violent and hysteric mood to a melodramatic one, weeping, moaning and crooning about her miserable condition. She is a vicious person, drinking her minds almost all the time, especially after the death of her husband, and exploiting her children, Maggie in particular. For instance, when the girl breaks a plate by mistake, her mother is so furious, that she scares little Jimmie out of the home: her eyes “glittered with sudden hatred. The fervent red of her face turned almost to purple”. Mary also has an impressive police record, being such a constant presence in the court rooms that the officials called her by the first name, “Hello, Mary, you here again?”. Moreover, “she measured time by means of sprees, and was eternally swollen and dishevelled”.

But despite all these shameful facts, she has the hypocritical desire to keep the appearances, to adopt moral poses in front of her neighbors and to obey the regular middle-class ethic. That’s why she feels embarrassed by Maggie’s “fall”, “she could not conceive how it was possible for her daughter to fall so low as to bring disgrace upon her family”. It is not the miserable position of her daughter that upsets her, but “the fact that neighbors talked of it, maddened her”. She needs the approval of the others, of the “audience” made up by the women in the neighborhood in order to

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receive the social approbation rightful to a respectable family such as hers, “When a girl is bringed up deh way I bringed up Maggie, how kin she go the deh devil?”. Even she believes the theatrical role she plays in order to deceive the others, and consequently, the fact that bothers her most is that Maggie dared to destroy the moral code of her family. This snobbish reaction is shared by Jimmie, too, who “could not

conceive how under the circumstances his mother’s daughter and his sister could have been so wicked”, and he “publicly damned his sister that he might appear on a higher social plane”.

However, when Tommie, the youngest child, dies, the news comes briefly, just like regular news, and has no extraordinary consequences, “The babe, Tommie, died”. The fact that the rest of the family continue their lives as usually is suggested by the “insignificant coffin” in which the boy leaves this world, without any sign of grief from his relatives, except for a flower stolen by Maggie from an Italian and put in his hands. Moreover, the author finds it important to state that “she and Jimmie lived”, that is they are tough enough to face this world in which only the strong survive. This conception has its source in Charles Darwin’s Evolution of Species theory that prevailed in that time, promoting the idea that life is a battlefield in which it is natural that the strong ones should oppress the weak, and in order to survive, one should be strong, even ruthless, if necessary.

The same reaction of indifference occurs in the last chapter, when the news of Maggie’s death is brought by a “soiled, unshaven man”, “Mag’s dead”. The mother prefers to continue her meal, pretending that she does not believe, “Deh hell she is”. It is only after she finishes her coffee when she begins to weep, but presumably because the “ethic” says so, not necessarily because of authentic grief. She does not cry because she has lost her child for good, but she has a dumb fixation for a pair of “worsted boots” Maggie used to wear when she was a little child. The fake lamentation of the dozen of women gathered there, and the supporting words of the woman in black, with “good, motherly face wet with tears” cannot deter Mary from repeating the same stupid phrase about the boots, “I kin remember when she weared worsted boots”; the other women talk about salvation in a ritualistic way, “like a choir at a funeral”: “She’s gone where her sins will be judged”,”Deh Lord gives and deh Lord takes away”, but the mother continues to think about the boots, urging Jimmie to go to Maggie and “put deh boots on her feet”. When the woman in black asks Mary in a persuasive way to forgive her child, whose life and days were “cursed and black”,

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