Crane Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Journal

By Jessica Granse
January 12, 2009

"Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the brain-clutching heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her guardian, who is cruelly after her bond, by the hero with the beautiful sentiments," (975).

During the week, Pete would take Maggie to see plays. All of them had the basic story line of this girl being saved from her guardian by this elegant hero character. This is much like them going to see plays. Pete comes and takes her from her drunken mother out to see a play, where she can forget her troubles and dream of it all being resolved.

Since the plays are much like her current situation, she enjoys them, because they always end with the heroine being saved. This helps her to imagine herself being saved. While Pete was taking her out to the theatre and the museum, she was mentally saved from the life she is stuck in, until her mother and Jimmie start saying she’s "gone the deh devil". She believes that by going with Pete, he will protect her from this life, but he ends up leaving her for a "woman of brilliance and audacity" named Nellie. Maggie believed in the story of the play, where she is saved by the "hero with the beautiful sentiments", but after all, it’s just a play. Pete seems to be this wonderful charming man to her because he is disinterested in things she thinks are absolutely unbelievable, such as plays and museums. She thinks this makes him really sophisticated because he isn’t easily amazed and he says nice things to her thus why he’s the "hero with the beautiful sentiments", because he asks her to come away and have a "hell of a time". Maggie’s main objective in this story is to escape her current situation. She is unlike her brother and mother in the way that they all drink heavily and curse at each other whenever they come home, but you’ll notice that Maggie doesn’t take part in this. She, instead, stands on the sidelines or is the one being yelled at. Because she doesn’t believe it has to be that way, she wants to escape. In the end, her escape doesn’t work out because Pete leaves her for Nellie, so she is left poor again, and ends up on the street as a prostitute until she is murdered. This is why this novella is considered an example of naturalism, as stated on Wikipedia. She tries to escape her current way of life, but is controlled by her heredity and environment, so she is stuck in the situation she tries to escape. Fate has sealed her to be in a certain situation because that is the situation she was born into. When she tries to escape, she just ends up worse than before. Her heredity and the fact that she was a kid growing up on these streets doomed her to be at the mercy of Pete for an escape, but as soon as he found someone better, she was worse than in the beginning.