PLOT

Crane plots Maggie: A Girl of the Streets on a series of locations. It begins in the streets with JimmieÂ’s first street fight. The family walks home to their tenement building where Crane describes the first in a series of wretched family scenes. Crane continues in the rest of the novel to alternate between street scenes and interior scenes. The two primary interior spaces used are the Johnson apartment and the music halls. In alternating between these two spaces, Crane demonstrates the connection between the private and the public value systems.

In the music halls, the popular form of entertainment is the melodrama. The heroine is a simpering and passive beauty who would wilt away and die if it were not for a dashing hero to come and rescue her. The setting begins in the poverty stricken slums of the city and ends in the placid fields of a country estate. The bad guy is always vanquished fully and irredeemably. The good guys always get much more that they had ever wished for.

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