Stephen Crane, "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets"

            In exploring how realism in fiction can engender sympathy, one cannot help but discern where the reader’s sympathy lies for the characters in Maggie. Furthermore, the distance maintained between the readers and the action of the novel promotes a specific type of sympathy, one that does not involve establishing a solution, but rather a sympathy that leans toward voyeurism. Crane constructs his piece in such a way that allows the reader to glimpse, commiserate with, and understand the plight of the lower class while maintaining the distinction between “us” and “them.”

            Maggie, the title character of the novel, demands readerly sympathy. As she is introduced, as “a small ragged girl [dragging] a red, bawling infant” (7), Maggie’s character is illustrated in relief to the foreground of her brother, Jimmie; it is this quiet, obedient, submissive presence that draws the focus, and consequently, the compassion, of the reader. Her appearance, a blossoming “rare and wonderful production… a pretty girl” (18), parallels to her timid, compliant personality; Maggie becomes an anatomization of goodness. Her one flaw—a naiveté of perspective—is tragic simply because the character herself is unconscious of this one vice. As she misinterprets the mannerisms and characteristics of a young man, Pete, to be those of “a man who had a correct sense of his personal superiority” (20), the naïve girl falls in love with her misconception. Bind to reality—Pete’s evident disinterest in Maggie as a person, his crude remarks, and heavily accented speech marking a lower class—she continues to think of him as both “elegant and graceful” (20), enchanted with ideas of high class. Such fascination with upward mobility, an interest grounded in illusion, incites the conflict to propel the plot. The situation, deriving from Maggie’s ignorant pursuit of Pete and leading to the ultimate destruction of already-weak familial bonds, evokes sympathy from an audience whose investment in the suffering of immigrants seeking mere survival never leaves the pages.

            Realism, a writing style highlighting the imperfect aspects of life through representation, allows Crane to separate the subject from the reader, to use the novel as a lens through which to critique—but not change—the dark underbelly of American society. The reader’s sympathy for Maggie is dependent upon such distance; to empathize, to experience the novel through the eyes of the wandering, discomforted girl, would drastically shift the end-result, the audience’s response to this pictorial profile of low-class, tenement life. Stephen Crane’s illustration of the bleak portrait of immigrant life is driven by a fascination with the “dark world.” However, such perspective inevitably imprints itself upon the reader; Maggie then becomes an image of the misfortune of class stratification, rather than a personal account that commands closer attention.