Maggie A GIRL OF THE Streets Summary PDF

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MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS SUMMARY In A Nutshell Do you love the high life? Of course you do—everyone thinks fancy clothes, delicious meals, and time spent gallivanting about the globe are awesome. Duh. Well, you can go ahead and forget all that fun stuff now, because we have something totally different for you today, thanks to Stephen Crane's 1893 novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. This story looks into the dark underworld of poverty, examining how it grinds human beings under its cruel heel. Think: drunkards, fistfights, prostitutes, and death. It's like the original reality television—minus all the scripts and private jets—as we watch our main girl Maggie's life go from rotten to wretched to, well, non-existent. She's doomed from the beginning, thanks to the poverty she's been born into. Ugh. Don't come to this book thinking you're going to identify with any of the characters. In fact, Crane frankly doesn't care if you even like his characters—he just wants you to get a brutally clear picture of the people who came to America believing they would achieve the American Dream, only to find themselves in the gutter throwing punches to protect their meager territory and save their own necks. Readers in Crane's era were not prepared for this stuff at all—it's a far cry from the Romanticism everyone was so used to when this book came out. Unsurprisingly, then, publishers wanted nothing to do with it. But Crane was determined to get the message out there, to expose the fiction of upward mobility and the whole pull yourself up by your bootstrapstale. And so, undeterred, he published it himself. With its tough-love approach, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets offers a crash course in American Naturalism, Realism, and Impressionism. So bring your own Kleenex, read at your own risk, and above all, don't try this at home.

WHY SHOULD I CARE? Guess what? Being poor stinks. Like, big time. When you're poor, so many things are uncertain—where you'll sleep, where you'll get your next meal, where you'll do your homework… to name just a few. And the extra terrible truth is that a lot of people experience life this way. In fact, according to the 2013 U.S. census, over forty-five million Americans are living at or below the poverty line. Just think on that for a second. Now think on this: Maggie isn't a fun read in the traditional sense—it's a real downer—but it also offers an unvarnished image of American poverty at the turn of the 20th century. Sure, that was well over one hundred years ago, but in many ways, a lot of the struggles remain the same. These are folks right out of Jacob Riis's photographs of the tenements of New York.

And this is why you should read Maggie. Sure, styles have changes and tenements aren't how we roll anymore, but so long as there are masses of people struggling just to make it through the day, the sad reality is that this book will remain relevant.

How It All Goes Down The book opens with a scene of violence, and it goes downhill from there. A little scrapper of a boy named Jimmie is fighting against hoodlums from Devil's Row with the help of some other neighborhood street urchins representing Rum Alley. And we're not talking about hair-pulling; we're talking about stone-throwing, clothes-shredding, and bloody faces. Then an older boy named Pete comes along—but rather than saving Jimmie, he sort of eggs him on. But he's got his back. Home is even grimmer than the gravel heaps of Rum Alley for Jimmie because Mom is a raging alcoholic, Dad is a brute, and siblings Maggie and Tommie just seem like they have targets on their foreheads. It's complete mayhem in the house. A few years later, Tommie is dead and so is Dad. Jimmie has become a bully and a monster himself, hating everything in his path and itching for the next fight. He's a teamster with road rage long before the term is invented, and he'll make mincemeat out of anyone who crosses his path. Along comes that Pete fellow again—the one who "helped" Jimmie—and now he's a strapping, well-dressed dandy of a fellow. At least in Maggie's eyes, anyway. They begin to date, which Maggie sees as a prime opportunity to get away from the terribleness that is her life in the tenement. Pete loves him some entertainment, so he and Maggie attend all sorts of "fancy" (again, to her) vaudeville-type theatrical events where the audience is full of other hard-working immigrants. Beats being at home being beaten by Mom, that's for sure. Mom and Jimmie are not impressed by the whole Pete-Maggie love connection, though. Doesn't matter if you are poor, you still have moral standards and that Maggie—well, she's making the family look bad by spending all sorts of time with that Pete. So they kick her out of the apartment. Now she has no choice but to be with Pete. Nice call. Jimmie attempts to defend the family honor by beating Pete up—while Pete is at work, so that's not cool. The good times between Pete and Maggie come to a screeching halt. As sure as the day is long, Pete leaves Maggie for Nellie, an old flame who clearly has more sophistication than Maggie (which isn't hard, wide-eyed naïf that Maggie is). Now Maggie has nowhere to go. Mom is busy maligning her with the neighbors (sweet mom, eh?), so it's the streets for Maggie (hence the subtitle of the book). Crane does a little smoke-and-mirrors trick by showing us a prostitute wandering the streets but not telling us directly that it's Maggie. We know better, though. Unfortunately, the scene doesn't end well, as a creep of a guy with "bloodshot eyes and grimy hands" follows "the girl" (17.17) down to the river. You do the math.

We find Pete drunk as a skunk with a bunch of "ladies," including that Nellie. They all take advantage of his generosity and then leave him passed out on the floor. Jimmie comes home to Mom, flatly reporting that Maggie is dead. Mom throws a spectacular fit, as neighbors make feeble attempts to console her. The book ends with Mom promising to forgive Maggie. Um… too little, too late, Ma....