Both Stephen Crane and Edith Wharton are famous and well-respected authors but the work of Stephen Crane is acknowledged perhaps as the better of the two since he seemed to have a strong sense of what made the common man or in this case, woman think. Life was hard in the late 1800’s and no one escaped the depravities of hardship. In the rhetorical question “If you had to refer someone today to either Maggie: Girl of the Streets, or The Age of Innocence to gain a view of life in the late 1800`s which novel would you recommend?” It would be Maggie, A Girl of the Streets.
The next question is “why”?
Stephen Crane took a far different point of view than most people of life in the slums. He did not treat the people who lived there in his writings as if it were their choice to live and die in that environment. He was able to see that many of these people where simply victims of a society that refused to allow them to raise themselves beyond that origin of squalor. The blacks, the Irish, or others of immigrant status who were dismissed by middle class society as “trash”. Perhaps it if viewed by the naked eye of a person unfamiliar with life in the slums, then the slums would be simply a trash pile of overcrowding and noise.
“In all unhandy places there were buckers, 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.” (Crane 15)
The Essay on Life Of Stephen Crane
Page1 The life of Stephen Crane was very confusing. In this paper I am going to discuss the novels he wrote, his life growing up, and how his novels became popular. Stephen Crane grew up in Newark, New Jersey on November 1, 1871. Stephen Crane was the fourteenth child of Jonathan Townley Crane and Mary Helen Crane. Stephen's family moved in 1874, then in 1876, then again in 1878 because Stephen's ...
A great many of the novels about the 1800’s dealt with the West and the struggles of the frontier but very little of the miserable conditions of such over populated cities as New York. It seemed a dismal prospect that the hopeful and optimistic people who came to this country seeking a better life than the one they had known in their own country that the first sight to greet them was the drab, ugly docks of New York and the hell that they found themselves in if they had no one to direct them any farther than the cut-throat and vicious cycles of New York slums.
Edith Wharton’s work, The Age of Innocence, covers similar points but it does not seem to rise to the points that Crane’s does. The intensity and knowledge with both authors comes across clearly and distinct but Stephen Crane’s story was far more eye opening and thought provoking in the way that it seemed to draw right into the gut of the characters. Men do tend to write more intensely in some ways than women but gender has no place in the truth and characterization of Maggie, A Girl of the Streets. It was a very enjoyable and memorable read.
Works Cited
Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; George’s Mother. Greenwich, CO: Fawcett, 1960.
