Assignment #4: Stephen Crane and Maggie

For this week's blog assignment we were tasked with picking out one passage in the story that we find interesting and examining it in light of what we have learned about 19th century America, realism and impressionism. For me, the most disturbing scenes of the first seven chapters occur in the beginning of the story. The audience gets a snapshot of life for these young children and it is not sugar-coated one bit. After Jimmie is escorted home from the fight with the Devil's Row boy by his father, Maggie his sister, appears for the first time. She drags along her younger brother Tommie with little attention to the fact that he is just a babe. He "roars with indignation" in a way that only a small child can do. When Jimmie meets with his sister, she starts to cry because she sees that he has been fighting again and this annoys Jimmie who does the only thing he's been raised to know how to do, hit her. We then enter the tenement and the way it is described is very intriguing, almost as if they are entering the belly of the beast per se, with the hallways and stairwells being described as gruesome, cold and gloomy.

In the next few lines we meet Mrs. Mary Johnson, who, as scary as we might have thought Mr. Johnson was, is a monster taken human form. She gets roaring drunk, screams obscenities directed at the father and beats him mercilessly and he retaliates in kind. Mary isn't immune to hitting her children as we witnessed when Maggie dropped a plate after dinner. Jimmie is so terrified he runs off to a neighbor who offers to let him sleep on the floor if he ran an errand for her, when Jimmie tries fate and his drunken father prevent him from fulfilling the request. His father steals the beer out of the bucket and smacks Jimmie with the empty bucket. Jimmie runs off into the streets in a rage and returns only late at night to see the limp for of his father and the slobbery mess of his mother. He and Maggie hold each other in their arms until morning.

The first three chapters are devastating in their effectiveness of bringing to scope the lives of the tenement poor of NYC, so devastating that Stephen Crane published his novel with a pseudonym. This story is all about impressionism, as impressionism is more interested in painting a realistic picture of the world than of copying reality exactly. As authors and illustrators they were acting with a belief in civic duty to their fellow man. America was rebirthed in fire and flames after the Civil War and these people represent the iron and steel ore that is heated, pounded and shaped into the beams that support NYC.