Populist Crane: A Reconsideration of Melodrama in <i>Maggie</i>

Abstract

Stephen Crane’s first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), is replete with images of popular entertainment. Some of these might justifiably be said to depict working-class New Yorkers of the fin de siecle as in pursuit of escapism. Early in the novel, for example, Maggie—a young woman growing up in the working-class Bowery neighborhood of Lower Manhattan—goes to “a gr eat green-hued hall” with her boyfriend, Pete, where they watch “[a]n orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men” perform “a popular waltz” (Crane 30). Next “a girl” wearing “a pink dress with short skirts” (31) entertains the audience with a song-anddance routine that ends with “grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the dancers in the theatres up-town” (31). As a result, “the Bowery public” enjoys “the phantasies of the aristocratic theatre-going public, at reduced rates” (32). The show also features a ventriloquist; a minstrel performance; “some verses which described a vision of Britain being annihilated by America, and Ireland bursting her bonds” (32); and “a small fat man” who “began to roar a song and stamp back and forth before the foot-lights, wildly waving a glossy silk hat and throwing leers, or smiles, broadcast” (32). In response to the evening’s entertainment, Maggie, who works in a sweatshop making collars, “drew deep breaths of pleasure” (33), and “[n]o thoughts of the atmosphere of the collar and cuff factory came to her” (33). Clearly, this is escapism. Maggie works at a job that is exploitive and unfulfilling, and a night of Bowery entertainment allows her to forget her troubles. Pete and Maggie also r egularly attend melodramas, one of which Crane describes in some detail. In general, Crane critics have tended to regard melodrama as a similar form of escapist entertainment, and Crane’s portrayal of it as merely parodic. But I would argue that Crane’s representation of melodrama is more complex than critics have recognized, and that melodrama as a cultural formation in the second half of the nineteenth century resists reduction to mere escapism. While it does contain a measure of irony, Crane’s portrayal of Bowery theater suggests that