Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane uses increasing distance between the narrator and the characters to emphasize the increasing determinism in the characters’ lives.
Booth says “the narrator...may be more or less distant from the characters in the story he tells” (Booth 156). In the beginning of Maggie, the narrator is very close to the characters. The narrator even describes their feelings like an omniscient narrator. “[The boy] felt that it was degradation for one who aimed to be some vague soldier, or a man of blood with a sort of sublime license, to be taken home by a father” (Crane 6). This is describing when Jimmie is dragged home by his father. When Pete comes to visit Maggie, “her heart is warmed as she reflect[s] upon his condescension” (Crane 23). The narrator gives an up-close view of the characters to the reader. This changes though in later chapters.
“A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street. She threw changing glances at men who passed her” (Crane 52). The reader is left to assume that this mysterious girl is Maggie as a prostitute. Then later in her walking the streets, after meeting a customer, “the varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence.” This is the readers only clue that Maggie either was murdered or committed suicide. This distant and unclear reference to Maggie causes her character to fade into the background of her surroundings and for the reader to focus on them. Maggie becomes merely a part of her environment, that Crane so poignantly says is “joyous by distance”, instead of the individual that she originally was.
This use of changing distance between the characters and the narrator is parallel to the chronological order of the story. Also, the distancing reflects the slow losing of control over the characters’ lives and their succumbing to the deterministic factors at work.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Adrienne, this is a really interesting point you brought up. I feel that when looking through this lens of distance in the story, we may be able to consider "Maggie" an anti-sentimentalist novel.
ReplyDeleteI feel that instead of dwelling on death or the succumbing to prostitution, perhaps Crane writes in a way that is vague and unattached as to show Maggie's "numbness" towards her fate. Though Maggie is at first sentimental towards her relationship with Pete, she becomes less naive and grows "thicker skin" throughout the story. She tries her best to find other jobs and depend on Pete financially, but we find that her ability to escape poverty is much larger than that. Therefore, Crane's anti-sentimental descriptions of death and prostitution seem to highlight the inevitability of Maggie's fate.
Taryn, your comparison of Maggie’s relationship and infatuation with Pete to her life after Pete clarified increasing anti-sentimentalism in the novel for me. You said that Maggie’s relationship with Peter was at first sentimental. I think that this is evidenced by the focus on the dialog, particularly Pete’s stories, when Maggie first meets Pete. But, the novel does become more anti-sentimentalist when Crane describes Maggie’s prostituting herself. As she walks into the darkness, she passes men in quick succession into shadier and shadier parts of town. These men are only characterized by their class and the level of darkness that they occupy. So, I think that you are right, Maggie does become numb and her personality fades into the background. The other characters in the story also begin to lose any defining features and only play the role that they were meant to serve in society. So, not only does distance between characters and author play a role in creating the anti-sentimentalism in the novel, but the distance between characters and the emptiness of the characters also shows anti-sentimentalism.
ReplyDelete