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MonkeyNotes-Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane
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Notes
This scene of domestic violence is written with all the glare of
melodrama. The language is so loaded with pathos that it depicts
the scene as surreal (nightmarish). The building "quivers and
creaks from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels."
The urban landscape of New YorkÂ’s tenement slums is not
rendered realistically, but surrealistically. It is worse than any
reality any of CraneÂ’s readers would ever have envisioned.
Therefore, he renders it like one of their nightmares. Every inch of
space is loaded with horror. Even the kitchen sink is an "unholy
sink." The doorways are "gruesome doorways." The halls are
"cold, gloomy halls."
In this physical space loaded with horror, the people are even
worse. Crane establishes the childÂ’s point of view with the first
scene of the novel. As readers, we keep our focus on the children,
and are horrified by the neglect and abuse that is heaped on them
by their parents. Mary, the mother, is drawn in the most lurid lines.
She is red-faced from alcoholism, she is huge and violent in every
movement. In Mary, Crane draws a horrified caricature of the
nineteenth centuryÂ’s sanctified image of the wife and mother. In
her fight with her husband, "the woman was victor." Almost more
horrifying than her vicious violence is her maudlin moaning after
her husband has gone as she complains to her children of her
husband and her sad life.
The chapter ends with some relief. Jimmie finds a haven in an old
womanÂ’s apartment down the hall.
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