Magie a girl of the streets, Stephen Crane, weep over, feel emotion, feelings, influence of ancestors, family, heredity, surroundings, social category, naturalism, Zola, laboratory rats, novel, Maggie's fate, tragedy, scientific experiment, dead inside, narrator's irony, objectivity, metaphor, characters's analysis, poverty, mise en abyme, theatre, social laws
Individuals are determined by heredity and their social category (which covers the place they live in and their standard of living).
Maggie, the protagonist of Stephen Crane's novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets published in 1896, is modelled, shaped, and ultimately determined by her surroundings. And this, despite how exceptionally pure she seemed at first, and this, despite all her efforts to rise away from the milieu in which she was born -especially her family. That's the definition of naturalism. But that whole thesis seems highly paradoxical: how can the novelist pretend to be a strict observer of reality when he is the one who makes all the decisions; when he decides what odds are inflicted upon his characters and their reactions to it? How can he pretend that his novel is a laboratory when he is the one who ultimately gets to decide everything that not only happens to the rats but also whatever goes through their heads?
[...] The crowd cheers their hero but doesn't cheer Maggie. Theatre is an illusion, not only because it tells a fictional story, but also because it transforms into a fairy tale a grim reality : Pete, whom Maggie idolizes, is actually a sham, and Maggie will never be able to step out of her environment the way the play's hero does. The Johnson's neighbours comment the action as the audience does, but instead of cheering Maggie, they loathe her and support Mary, who is nothing like a heroin. [...]
[...] We don't weep over physics or get angry at some toxic gas so we shouldn't be sorry for Maggie, who is shaped by her environment and, as such, is just a girl of the streets, not an individual, because individuality doesn't really exist since we are all shaped by the same social laws. Maggie isn't like a tragic character because she is like us: determined. [...]
[...] But would Maggie be Maggie if she was born in a more supportive surrounding? She wouldn't even be named Maggie, which is a typical name of the disadvantaged neighbourhoods of the XIX century. Maggie is impossible to weep over because she is determined by the laws of her surrounding, because she is a laboratory rat, and we don't weep over laboratory rats and facts. Crane doesn't get to decide whatever goes through her head because it's all determined by the laws of the real society, which he studied because he is a journalist like Zola. [...]
[...] But after all, we could also consider being far more emotional precisely because of the tragedy encompassed by Maggie's inevitable fate. The characters are determined by their surroundings and their heredity, and we should not feel sorry for them because the novel is a scientific experiment . The characters are determined by their surroundings and their heredity . Maggie's family are brutal hypocritical alcoholics: both the parents are violent and apparently unable to care about any of the kids. Their quarrels are known in the neighbourhood: "Is your father beating your mother or is your mother beating your father?", and both of them frequently smash objects over the flat, or over their children or over each other. [...]
[...] "The other women began to groan in different keys". Here again, the irony is based on the contrast between the groan, which isn't gracious at all, and the different keys, which suggests some sophisticated polyphonic chorus. "Women nodded their heads with airs of profound philosophy", while they are just expulsing Maggie from her home by their contempt -plus, being uneducated, they don't have any notion of philosophy. So even if Maggie's woes seem particularly unfair and cruel, Crane's tone prevents the reader from feeling pity: no pathos, no emotion. [...]
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