Maggie's World: A Vision of Hell

[hellsapoppin]

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1890)


New York City during Maggie's brief lifetime:












a reported communist riot (1874):





endless poverty and deprivation:










And there are MANY more photos and proofs that Maggie's milieu was a veritable HELL on earth.

[hellsapoppin]

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets begins thusly,


A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him.

His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths.

"Run, Jimmie, run! Dey'll get yehs," screamed a retreating Rum Alley child.

"Naw," responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, "dese micks can't make me run."

Howls of renewed wrath went up from Devil's Row throats. Tattered gamins on the right made a furious assault on the gravel heap. On their small, convulsed faces there shone the grins of true assassins. As they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus.

The little champion of Rum Alley stumbled precipitately down the other side. His coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was gone. He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was dripping from a cut in his head. His wan features wore a look of a tiny, insane demon.




Crane's Maggie is filled with symbolism which portray pictures of Hell. The symbolism also includes images of people equated with animals as the milieu is an atavistic society where people are reduced to the level of animals because of the violence, the poverty, and the injustices:



howling urchins = sea creatures

roar = that's what animals do when they threaten others

in the fight there is "triumphant savagery"


When the fight stops, someone intervenes and says ""Ah, what deh hell"



Paradise it is not. There is pervasive violence. Blood flows so readily. Adults nearby are totally indifferent. Anger and vindictiveness everywhere. And, no surprise considering it's New York, cops are nowhere to be found. Hardly a pleasant introduction to Maggie's world. No surprise as to why it was always called Gotham.

[Sancho]

Street urchins, guttersnipes, slumdogs, les enfants terribles.

Good way to start a book — a battle royale, une bataille des enfants, on the gravel pile, in lower Manhattan, early 20th century (I’m thinking). I’m about halfway through it. Jimmie is going through life with his guard up. He won’t let anybody in, hence no one can hurt him. Not so, Maggie…

Good pics, Poppin, Thanks. Looks like things have strayed pretty far from Jefferson’s vision for the nation of virtuous agrarianism. For an agrarian paradise we may have to leave New York and head south, maybe to Georgia, vicinity of Tobacco Road, yuk-yuk. Have you read Erskine Caldwell?

[hellsapoppin]

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

Read it about 25 years ago. A great read. Strongly recommended.

[hellsapoppin]

"Flash" was the name of old NYC English in the 1800s. The term does not appear in Maggie. However, some words from the lingo are used in the book such as "allus" which means 'always'. The letter d is used instead of th in words such as this or that. "Woik" means 'work'. The letter h is often dropped when one speaks. And the term 'croak' or 'croaker' is used to denote a dead person.

I'm in my 70s and still speak with an old New York accent. As you may have noticed, I used the term croaked in our discussion of Crime and Punishment. Several years ago an older fellow I knew told me he had been listening to me talk for the past 15 years and that I never once used the letter h when speaking. My NY accent really stands out here in Minnesota!

Here is a primer on old New Yorkese:


https://casanders.net/new-york-city-...-in-the-1850s/



Re the photos, perhaps the greatest collection of old NYC photos ever assembled can be found in this gem of a book:


The Columbia historical portrait of New York: An essay in graphic history in honor of the tricentennial of New York City and the bicentennial of Columbia University






Historians agree that this is one of the greatest history ever written. It is outstanding.

[hellsapoppin]

Street urchins, guttersnipes, slumdogs, les enfants terribles.

The book is a very fast read (I read 50 pages last night which normally take me a week). Jimmie grows up quick and mean. Maggie cares for the baby but the latter dies. The Johnson parents turn into absolute vermin - there is squalor all over the apartment, they both drink and brawl, and get into trouble with the crushers (old NYC term for cops).

Jimmie starts to hang out in street corners much like the Bowery Boys of old:


https://historica.fandom.com/wiki/Bowery_Boys




These guys did actually exist. At the very beginning of the book Jimmie got into a fight and referred to his opponent using an anti-Irish derogation. The Bowery Boys were Protestant, old school New Yorkers of British and Scot-Irish descent. They hated and got into many fights with Catholic Irish with full scale wars going on between them over the decades. They dominated the fire fighting stations, dressed superbly well (even though they were from the lower classes), and worshiped Shakespeare. This even though most did not go to school.

Jimmie continues to fight with every other teamster he encounters in his daily life. Maggie has virtually nothing to look forward to in life and worships Pete the street tough who is in the money from his tavern operations. This would turn out to be her biggest mistake.

[Sancho]

Hah. Minna-soht’ns have a pretty distinct accent too. They pronounce their “R”s with such a harsh edge, it probably makes up for your “Ah”s.

I don’t want to paint anybody with too broad a brush, and I know I ain’t tellin’ you nuttin, but those Nordic-types up there tend to be a tad more reserved than your average New Yorker, disposition wise. I used to love to listen to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion on NPR. I remember one of the skits that perfectly got at the reserved nature of Minnesotans. They were having a church potluck dinner and all the women were silently seething about another woman who’d brought a potato salad that she’d *gasp* sprinkled paprika on. That was just a little too show-offy for the other women’s sensibilities.

When Maggie got a job sewing collars, I thought — Oh great, she’s probably working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. (Years ago I visited the site of that fire to try to get a sense for it)

[hellsapoppin]

Actually, it's Bostonians with the "ahs". In New York we often say "uhs".

As for the Lake Wobegone accent, it's more like long oooooo's and aaaaaa's. The food here is often quite bland but it is improving, thankfully, as New York style cooking is being adopted.

Re Triangle Shirtwaist Company, I recommend David von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. Very striking book.


In the 19th century many women and girls spent long hours at the sewing mills. Then they took the work home and finished their projects there:









It was abut survival at best. But as in Triangle, it was Hell. I worked not too far away from where that tragedy took place. Such a terrible thing with all the corporatists happily getting away with it.

[Sancho]

I wish I could find an article I read a few years back in The New Yorker (I think). It was all about American accents and regionalisms. There was an old man who’d been collecting samples of people’s speech and cataloguing the tapes for pretty much his whole life. His whole house was lined with bookshelves of tapes. He had tapes instead of books. His ear was so good he could listen to a recording of someone’s speech and tell you the time and the location (almost down to the city block in say Brooklyn) where the tape was made. He also did a lot of voice coaching for Hollywood actors.

My ear’s not that good. If I listen to someone from Brooklyn, or the Bronx, or New Jersey, or even Boston, my ear tells me — yup, they’re speaking Yankee.

[hellsapoppin]

Sancho,


His ear was so good he could listen to a recording of someone’s speech and tell you the time and the location (almost down to the city block in say Brooklyn) where the tape was made.

I believe it. When I first heard Bernie Sander's accent you could tell immediately that he was originally from the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Indeed, in the old days you could actually tell what neighborhood a person came from just from their accent. With gentrification and the disruption it causes, we will never see this again.

Masterful magician Harry Lorayne spoke with an old Lower East Side Manhattan accent as did pro boxer Rocky Graziano. It was always great to hear them talk both for what they said and for that terrific accent which, sad to say, has disappeared and will never return. Listen to them speak in some old video - you will see that this was very close to how Maggie and the folks in her milieu spoke.

[Sancho]

I used to love to listen to Phil Rizzuto call a game. He didn’t have a super strong accent, but just enough around the edges so that you know you’re listening to a Yankees game. And whereas Phil probably tried to suppress his native Brooklyn accent, Fran Drescher played up her Queens accent on The Nanny. Oh man, she cracked me up.

But languages and accents morph. It’s what they do. I doubt we’ll ever all sound like a TV announcer. My wife is from California. Her people tell me — We’re from California. We don’t have an accent. I tell ‘em — Sure you do. You have a California accent. My mother-in-law’s voice is a dead ringer for Grace Slick. Also they tend to flatten their Rs a bit. The wife’s Uncle Ron becomes Uncle Rahn.

Here’s one I notice Gen-Zers using: Shouldn’t has become Shuh-int. Or the mock-shock expression — Oh no you di’int!

Accents morph. Yah, sure, yew bet’cha.

[hellsapoppin]

^I always like Casey Kasem's accent ~ there was always a lot of excitement in his speech. Ditto for other Californians I've known. Must be the atmosphere.



***


Young girl with baby in the Bowery (photo by Jacob Riis):





Crane describes the atmosphere in "Devil's Row" as a 'dark region' comprised of many 'gruesome doorways' (a term used repeatedly). There are gloomy halls and Maggie's mom calls it a "a regular living hell". "The building “quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels.” It is also described as a 'panther's den'. When Maggie ("a small ragged girl)" goes out to dinner with Pete she ''ate like a tigress" because she had been so hungry.

People in the milieu are described as "pestering flies" and a preacher tells them "you are damned".

The term "what the hell" is repeatedly stated.

Maggie's Gotham is certainly no Paradise.


Like Dostoyevsky, Crane is showing that the environment is what shapes people into what they become. As with pre Revolutionary Russia, there is considerable opulence as the dominant class live in luxury while so many suffer in poverty. In Crane's Gotham, Maggie sees beer halls with flamboyant characters such as women in yellow silk costumes, fancy men in “costumes of French chefs”, and elaborate chandeliers. Maggie is struck by all this fanciness and she longs to be able to partake in it. Again, this is what led to her ultimate doom.

Such is life in Hell, or in this case, Gotham.

[Sancho]

Also she'd run out of options. "Ruined" then dumped by Pete (schmuck). Her drunken mom playing the victim and throwing her out. The girl had no where to go. But more importantly I think she felt the burn of her tarnished reputation. So, based on strictures of her faith, she was going to hell anyway, might as well hurry up the process. Religious faith gives an awful lot of comfort to people, but it also causes an awful lot of pain. The jury's still out on whether it's been an overall plus or minus for us as a species.

It's writing like this that pushes society (and sometimes legislation) forward.

[hellsapoppin]

Sancho,

It's writing like this that pushes society (and sometimes legislation) forward.

Indeed. Crane grew up in poverty and was very sympathetic towards the poor. He was looking for social reform just like Dickens who Bleak House brought about changes in chancery court. Those changes finally gave relief to those who needed inheritance funds to live and took away much of the graft enjoyed by crooked judges.

How interesting that Dostoyevsky saw the church as redeemer which brought about comfort and relief to the poor. But in Crane's Gotham, the preacher was quoted "you are damned". 'Deh HELL! Deh HELL!' "Ah, what the HELL!" Jimmie muses, "his voice was burdened with disdain for the inevitable and contempt for anything that fate might compel him to endure." All this being the very precise opposite of the Russian milieu which, at the very least, promised Heavenly reward for all one endured.


Meanwhile, Maggie dreams on:

''Maggie perceived that {Pete} here was the beau ideal of a man. Her dim thoughts were often searching for far away lands where, as God says, the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover.

Dreams. That's all she has.

[Sancho]

All in all I thought Maggie was a pretty flat character. As you said It’s a short book. So there’s not too much room to delve into her psyche, but I found myself wondering if Crane was capable of getting inside her head, or if she was just a convenient vehicle for illuminating the societal problems of that time and place. At any rate, she was certainly a victim. Moll Flanders by contrast is a survivor. But of course Defoe’s book is about Moll. Crane’s book is about the Bowery and its problems.

Have you read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell? I think in this book the writer is not so much interested in affecting societal change as he is interested in showing his readers that side of life.