lifes struggles
Enthusiasm for Life’s Struggles?
In Stephen Crane’s novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, he displays a relentlessly brutal, violent and oppressive existence trapped in the bottom class standing of the New York Bowery of the 1890’s. “My Adventures as a Social Poet” by Langston Hughes’ is an answer to an ongoing question, “Why do you write ‘social’ poems?” and his battles with being a colored scholar in the early 1900’s. Stephen Crane’s novella is fictitious while Langston Hughes’ piece is somewhat of an autobiography but the poems included are about people he comes across in his life. But because Hughes’ struggles and oppression stem from real life experiences and he has found positive outcomes or more uplifting results, the reader responds in a more optimistic and enthusiastic way. In regards to the novella by Stephen Crane, the characters failure to achieve social reform through their oppression deflates the reader’s response because in the fictitious scenario we assume that the victim should triumph over. Because they fail to do this, Hughes and the speaker of his poetry are held in much higher regard with a more encouraging outcome. In this paper, I want to discuss how these two authors have different expectations and feelings toward oppression and the struggle of being poor or being colored.
Despite the title, the novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is not necessarily just about Maggie, but rather deals more directly with the environment, Bowery, and how it shapes the lives of its inhabitants. The tenement where Maggie and family resides is described as, “a dark region where...a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter”(5). All of the inhabitants of Bowery are all in the same situation and there isn’t a way out. They are oppressed to such living conditions. Outside readers might criticize that it is an over exaggeration but in lieu of things by exaggerating the ‘dark region’, it portrays that life isn’t so easy. The
In Stephen Crane’s novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, he displays a relentlessly brutal, violent and oppressive existence trapped in the bottom class standing of the New York Bowery of the 1890’s. “My Adventures as a Social Poet” by Langston Hughes’ is an answer to an ongoing question, “Why do you write ‘social’ poems?” and his battles with being a colored scholar in the early 1900’s. Stephen Crane’s novella is fictitious while Langston Hughes’ piece is somewhat of an autobiography but the poems included are about people he comes across in his life. But because Hughes’ struggles and oppression stem from real life experiences and he has found positive outcomes or more uplifting results, the reader responds in a more optimistic and enthusiastic way. In regards to the novella by Stephen Crane, the characters failure to achieve social reform through their oppression deflates the reader’s response because in the fictitious scenario we assume that the victim should triumph over. Because they fail to do this, Hughes and the speaker of his poetry are held in much higher regard with a more encouraging outcome. In this paper, I want to discuss how these two authors have different expectations and feelings toward oppression and the struggle of being poor or being colored.
Despite the title, the novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is not necessarily just about Maggie, but rather deals more directly with the environment, Bowery, and how it shapes the lives of its inhabitants. The tenement where Maggie and family resides is described as, “a dark region where...a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter”(5). All of the inhabitants of Bowery are all in the same situation and there isn’t a way out. They are oppressed to such living conditions. Outside readers might criticize that it is an over exaggeration but in lieu of things by exaggerating the ‘dark region’, it portrays that life isn’t so easy. The