Stephen Crane's Maggie: A modern "Ophelia"?

Guido Scholl

• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2005
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783640078110
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: Progressivism, Modernity, and the 'New Woman' - US-Literature and Culture, 1880-1910", language: English, abstract: Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie – A Girl of the Streets (1893), is a characteristic specimen of Naturalist or New Realist Literature. The plot is quite different from Victorian Realist literature as well as the Symbolist literature by the likes of Kipling and T.S. Eliott. In fact, Crane purposely wanted to get away from that sort of writing as he states in one of his letters: "If I had kept to my clever Rudyard –Kipling style, the road might have been shorter but, ah, it wouldn't be the true road." While the early Realists still concentrated on people from the middle class upward, Crane's characters belonged to the lowest scale in terms of social standing. This meant that the young author had to break with some taboos installed by Victorian writers and as a result from that, he had difficulties in publishing the novel in the first place and also received a lot of hostility from critics. The most basic feature that distinguishes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets from Symbolist or Aestheticist works is its focus on the concept of 'truth'. For Symbolist authors, the highest principle of art was 'beauty' whereas Naturalists saw the need of objective descriptions of life and nature in order to portray them as close to reality as possible. Helga Quadflieg sees this as a replacement for the divine, which both Symbolists and Naturalists did not believe in: "Im Gegensatz zum Ästhetizismus stellt der New Realism aber nicht 'beauty' an die Stelle früherer Gottheiten, sondern 'truth', die [...] den höchsten Stellenwert hat." While Symbolist literature in some cases still contained supernatural apparitions, e.g. in Kipling's The Mystery of Purun Bhagath or The Bull that Thought and Hardy's For Conscience's Sake, Naturalist authors excluded this completely from their works. Surprisingly, though, the main character in Maggie, in drowning herself as a result from unlucky love, seems to be a counterpart to the figures like the sirens from Greek mythology Brentano's Lore Lay, de la Motte Fouqué's Undine and Shakespeare's Ophelia who make up a group one may call 'water women'. Such 'water women' were common literary figures especially in Romantic poetry and may be considered to have their roots in Homer's Odyssey. This certainly does not fit into Naturalist literary theory but I will try to show how Stephen Crane interweaves this theme into the novel without neglecting the Naturalist basis of it.