Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets

Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is set in the 1890’s where there were ideologies about how women should live; however, Maggie did not live up to these expectations. The idea of a perfect woman means they would have all four of the pillars intact: purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity. However, Maggie was not representative of any of the pillars and this was blamed on her domicile residing in the slum area of New York. The slums during this time were depicted as dirty and were thought to further contaminate the city if left to their own. However, Brace, Talmage, and Flower utilize language of cleanliness, religion, and purity to convey the prevalent issues in the slums to the middle and upper class to solicit their help without implying their own guilt. Specifically, this was directed at the upper and middle class as these people had money and jobs to offer those in the slums.
The people who live in the slums have a dirty lifestyle and focused on their feelings to evoke sympathy in the eyes of his followers which was exemplified by “The words of sympathy and religion always touch their hearts, though the effect passes like the April clouds. On a broad scale, probably no remedy that man could apply would ever cure this fatal disease of society”. He means religion is the only way break the cycle of unclean lifestyles so he is soliciting help from his followers to be able to build churches within these areas. 1 Maggie so to speak fits the mold of the corruption that Brace discusses because she is from a poor family living in the slums without religion. The way society sees them is not good and it is clear by the way people talked down to her and her mother which starts to deteriorate her self-value spiraling her down an even more unclean lifestyle of