The arrival of Jake's wife and son some three years after him, rather than being a happy occasion, represents to Jake the diminishing of the exciting, new life he has tried to build for himself in New York. After the arrival of his wife, Jake "thought himself a martyr, an innocent exile from a world to which he belonged by right and he frequently felt the sobs of self-pity mounting to his throat" (Cahan 93-94). Like Maggie, Jake works in a sweatshop making clothes, and like Maggie, he uses his time working to day dream about other things. However, where Maggie thinks of Pete while he is working as a means of escape from the drudgery of her factory job, Jake actually enjoys his job, because it represents such a stark contrast to his life on a farm in Russia.
Thus, Jake's thoughts while working are not of escape from his job, but rather from his wife, because "for several minutes at a time, while kicking his treadle, he would see, reddening before him, Gitl's bandana kerchief and her prominent gums, or hear an un-American piece of Yiddish pronounced with Gitl's peculiar lisp" (Cahan 94). Jake seemingly loathes his wife because she is a "greenhorn," and serves to keep him attached to everything he has attempted to escape by moving to America and changing his name (Cahan 94). Jake's anger at his wife stems from the fundamental differences between his former rural life in Russia and his experience in the United States, and the difficulties which arise from these almost catastrophically different experiences may actually be traced back to Jake's poverty and his work in the sweatshop.
While Jake's shame and anger regarding his wife may at first glance appear to constitute a separate issue from the poverty faced by immigrants and other poor people in New York during the 1890s, in actuality it serves to demonstrate the difficulties immigrants faced when attempting to make it financially, because oftentimes the industrialized economy of their new homes was fundamentally different from their lives in their former homes. In Russia, Jake married young and lived with his wife and son on the same farm as his parents, likely not interacting with that many different people. When he comes to New York, though, Jake is thrown into an entirely different economic and social structure, and in order to make enough money he is forced to work in a factory, which means close interaction with a wide variety of people. In his previous life Jake's labor and familial experience blended seamlessly, but in his new life, where he has become "a vehicle of labor," working in a sweatshop that serves to rupture his connection to his family and suture his attentions onto new relationships (Haenni 514).
Both Jake and Maggie's problems ultimately stem from their socioeconomic class, but their problems take on a different flavor due to the fact that Jake is an immigrant and Maggie is a woman. Jake's desire is not so much to escape poverty...
Maggie Determinism in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Stephen Crane's novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets paints a very vivid and dismaying picture of what life for the lower classes in New York City was like. The rough, largely angry, and ultimately hopeless individuals that fill the streets of the Bowery and the pages of this novel can be described in a variety of ways, and their actions are easy
Stephen Crane's novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, was written during America's "Gilded Age" which was the era from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the Century. The name was given to the period by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, who poked fun at the period for its rampant corruption. During this essential time of American development, New Yorker's were categorized into two different
When Pete betrayed her by leaving her for Nellie, that was when Maggie could no longer continue to tell herself (and believe herself) that things were going to get better. Her judgmental, hypocritical family would not take her back in after she left Pete's home and she basically had no choice but to feel completely abandoned and alone. Crane uses a great deal of imagery to portray the mood he
Her means of survival becomes how she responds to the violence and abuse she encounters on a daily basis. Maggie's choices are made as the result of something that happens to her. She never makes a decision without being forced to make it either by some act of violence or other negative experience. While she attempts to turn her life around with Pete, we see that she can only get
Long streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. In all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, rags and bottles. In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels. Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure corners.
Stephen Crane: A Great Writer of American Naturalist Fiction and Non-Fiction, and of Local Color Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American author of the late 19th century, whose work, in terms of style and sub-genre, was somewhere between American Romanticism and American Naturalism (with some American Realism added). Crane wrote at the end of a century (the 19th), a time when several literary styles and genres are typically blended together until
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