Guido Scholl

Stephen Crane's Maggie: a Modern Ophelia? Guido Scholl

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: Progressivism, Modernity, and the 'New Woman' - US-Literature and Culture, 1880-1910", 8 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie - A Girl of the Streets (1893), is a characteristic specimen of Naturalist or New Realist Literature. The plot is quite different from Victorian Realist literature as well as the Symbolist literature by the likes of Kipling and T. S. Eliott. In fact, Crane purposely wanted to get away from that sort of writing as he states in one of his letters: 'If I had kept to my clever Rudyard-Kipling style, the road might have been shorter but it wouldn't be true." , abstract: Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie - A Girl of the Streets (1893), is a characteristic specimen of Naturalist or New Realist Literature. The plot is quite different from Victorian Realist literature as well as the Symbolist literature by the likes of Kipling and T. S. Eliott. In fact, Crane purposely wanted to get away from that sort of writing as he states in one of his letters: "If I had kept to my clever Rudyard -Kipling style, the road might have been shorter but, ah, it wouldn't be the true road." While the early Realists still concentrated on people from the middle class upward, Crane's characters belonged to the lowest scale in terms of social standing. This meant that the young author had to break with some taboos installed by Victorian writers and as a result from that, he had difficulties in publishing the novel in the first place and also received a lot of hostility from critics. The most basic feature that distinguishes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets from Symbolist or Aestheticist works is its focus on the concept of 'truth'. For Symbolist authors, the highest principle of art was 'beauty' whereas Naturalists saw the need of objective descriptions of life and nature in ord