Maggie

Determinism in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

Stephen Crane's novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets paints a very vivid and dismaying picture of what life for the lower classes in New York City was like. The rough, largely angry, and ultimately hopeless individuals that fill the streets of the Bowery and the pages of this novel can be described in a variety of ways, and their actions are easy to judge as rash, unthinking, an even animalistic by a reader not given to more careful and full consideration. When this type of consideration and long-term perspective is applied to the novel, however, it becomes clear that Crane saw these characters as victims of circumstance, inexorably and inevitably drawn to their ultimate conclusion and left without real recourse for bettering their situations. The determinism that is so evident throughout Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is expressed through...
[ View Full Essay]