Chap 4 - From Romance to tragedy

Question 1

What type of character is Maggie ?

Answer 1

Maggie is a romantic character : she dreams of a husband, wishes to have a boyfriend.

Even if we don’t get to read about Maggie’s feeling we understand she has some sort of expectations.

She remains stuck in her ignorance & doesn’t reach any type of salvation

Question 2

Image of purity
Critic Donald Pizer about Maggie

Answer 2

Critic Donald Pizer says about Maggie that she functions as an “almost expressionistic symbol of inner purity uncorrupted by external foulness.”

==> He suggests that Maggie is pure and remains foreign to all forms of contamination and corruption.

Question 3

Image of purity

Answer 3

⇒ We don’t see her being a bad girl. She is always very timid & modest. She remains quite constant throughout the narrative.

• she is often associated to innocence, for example, when she is pictured stealing a flower to put on her brother’s coffin
• She is also compared explicitly to a flower despite the dirt surrounding her, she is able to bloom like a flower.
  + The flower imagery reappears when she is obsessed with the “flowered cretonne she buys for the lambrequin.

She stands for purity :
“None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins.” In the Bowery, Maggie stands as a unique character who is not soiled by her environment.

• She is scared by hell: His remark leads Maggie to opt for work and provokes in her a deep-seated fear of hell.
• often she cries: he stands for the innocent victim who remains passive and suffers unjustified insults and outrage most of the time.

Question 4

Romance
A romantic encounter?

Answer 4

In spite of what Maggie believes, the reader is given clues to understand that their romance is doomed from the start.

Observe the way he is presented on his first appearance. We easily picture him walking proudly (strut=se pavaner) on the stage. ⇒Comedy + violence.

Clues about his aggressiveness

Question 5

Romance
Love at first sight?

Answer 5

Observe the scene in which Maggie sees Pete for the first time (Ch5) and note that remarks about Maggie’s feelings stand out from the narrative and are reported to the readers in small condensed sentences

Those quotes reveal a lack of romanticism as Maggie is the only one looking at him. Not once in chapter 5 does Pete look at her. This forecasts a nonreciprocal and unrequited love.
Note the irony of Crane’s staging: she looks at him with half-closed eyes, which can account for her misinterpretation of Pete. She has a partial view of the man and mistakes him for the romantic lover she is longing for.

Question 6

Maggie’s misinterpretation of Pete

Answer 6

She is mistaken, naïve and pictures the ideal man in a very pastoral and religious scene. She confuses a Garden of Eden-like setting with a romantic setting. Her sentimentalism contrasts with Pete’s cold and indifferent attitude.

There is much violence in the narrative voice as Maggie’s remarks are not witty and encourage the reader to perceive that she is a senseless and gullible who believes in tales.

Question 7

Maggie’s insecurity

Maggie has a self-deprecating tendency.

Answer 7

She feels transparent and often stands “back in the shadow” and fears being seen.

She imagines that Pete is “the knight” who can save her from her life “composed of hardships and insults”. She fancies he is some sort of divinity, or hero,

Maggie feels hurt by her own inferiority and keeps fantasizing about Pete’s activities → many conjectures and hypotheses as reveals the use of modality grammatically speaking.

The “purchase of flowered cretonne for a lambrequin” represents Maggie’s hopeful expectation, which, however, is not likely to come true as Pete vanishes “without having glanced at the lambrequin” VI, 28.

Question 8

Maggie’s fantasies

Answer 8

She “spent most of three days in making imaginary sketches of Pete and his daily environment”

In the theatre she is impressed by Pete and constantly drawing erroneous conclusions.

Question 9

Maggie’s shame:

Answer 9

She is ashamed of her building which is “dingy”, “piteous”, her “crude” furniture, even her clothes.

“She began to note, with more interest, the well-dressed women she met on the avenues. She envied elegance and soft palms. She craved those adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, conceiving them to be allies of vast importance to women”. (35)

⇒ She is tormented by jealousy, envy and feels she has not assets (atouts) for her.
=> She considers having soft hands & beautiful dresses = ally to become a woman.

Question 10

D. Maggie : Pet’s pray

Answer 10

Pete is trying to tame her, to make her his own property.

She is a hunted animal.

For Pete, Maggie is a prey : He is seducing her exaggerating the “descriptions of various happenings in his career” (26). He says he is“invincible” he is whenever in fights . He is well-aware that he stands as an example to her and acts as a smooth-talker (charmeur)
Pete is concerned with his physical appearance.

Maggie initially is his sex target. Pete is stuck on her “shape” ch6, p. 26. He is attracted to her silhouette first.

In the theatre, he does not “pay much attention to the progress of events upon the stage,” but is “drinking beer and watching Maggie” (33)
⇒ going in theatre not because he likes drama but because likes alcohol & women

Thus, when Maggie is being expelled by her mother, he gets the chance to seduce Maggie by saying “Come ahn out wid me! We’ll have a hell of a time” (31). He contrasts sharply with the ideal lover Maggie is expecting. Maggie is an opportunity for him, a short-lived entertainment.

Question 11

e) Maggie’s downfall

Answer 11

Pete refuses to acknowledge any responsibility “Pete did not consider that he had ruined Maggie. Pete assumes that it is Mrs. Johnson and the brother who have always tried to cause him trouble. He is unable to assess his actual role in this tragedy.

Women, for him, are only “temporary or indifferent ones” Pete is obsessed by his own vanity and the respectability of the bar he works in. He fears the “wrath of the owner of the saloon”. He is self-centered and never shows concern for Maggie’s lot.

→ Note that Pete does not learn anything from this episode. Characters do not evolve and remain stuck in their environment, attitudes and thoughts. Rare car au 19è on propose plutôt des choses qui présentent une évolution. Ici, plutot rare le fait qu’ils restent coincés ! Dimension pessimiste, très anti-américaine qui n’envisage jamais la possibilité de se réinventer, d’apprendre de progresser.

Ironic reversal
We observe an ironical reversal as Pete believes he is pure while Maggie is a source of contamination. → To him, she could soil the place and may ruin both his career and good name.

Question 12

g) The vicious mother

Answer 12

→ Mother stands for vices : In spite of her name Mary hinting at purity, virginity, she stands as a debased version of the Virgin Mary. Besides, she is the one who pushes her daughter to run away with Pete. The mother often yells at her and ridicules her.

It is when Maggie finds her mother drunk that her desire for leaving the house becomes more intense. As a consequence, Mrs. Johnson is responsible, to some degree, for Maggie’s downfall.
Mary is unable to handle her domestic affairs and her violence causes the family to break down.

→ The mother believes she has taught her daughter to behave according to moral standards. Great irony derives from this quote as the mother is unable to see her responsibility.

The mother wants to be seen as a responsible mother, who has been watchful of Maggie’s conduct.; Like Pete, she is much concerned with pride, vanity and respectability and accuses Maggie of contaminating the household.

Manipulative mother: She stages Maggie’s drama in order to save herself and demonstrates her acting skills.

Question 13

Onomastic : Maggie & Pete

Answer 13

Maggie peut être diminutif de Marie-Madeleine
Pete nom ++ significatif, dans la bible, c’est Saint Pierre qui est connu pour être censé avoir les clés du paradis.
⇒ Personne ressemble à ce qu’il connote !

Question 13

Onomastic : Maggie & Pete

Answer 13

Maggie peut être diminutif de Marie-Madeleine
Pete nom ++ significatif, dans la bible, c’est Saint Pierre qui est connu pour être censé avoir les clés du paradis.
⇒ Personne ressemble à ce qu’il connote !

Question 14

Conclusion on Maggie’s death, Chapter XVII

Close reading of this key chapter

Answer 14

First, we notice that she wears a “handsome cloak” and her feet are “well-shod” (76).
→ Maggie has evidently prospered in her activity.

Maggie’s name is never mentioned but referred to as “a girl of the painted cohorts” 76. → she becomes an anonymous character again and the narrative fails to have humanize her to the full.

The red color scheme surfaces again as she is pictured as“the girl of the crimson legions” 78 ⇒ impression d’avoir armée de filles des rues !

Question 15

Conclusion on Maggie’s death, Chapter XVII
Clues about her coming death

Answer 15

She meets a flower-dealer and the motif of the flowers recall the flower Maggie had stolen and put on the white coffin when her brother died:
=> Roses and chrysanthemums symbolically associate love and death, Eros and Thanatos.

She becomes an outcast, as if she stepped out of the stage. Interestingly, the narrative mentions that theatres are emptying gradually. → She is no longer part of the audience and exits the stage → it is the end of the show / play / performance.

The chapter reads like a journey to blackness : → she is marching to her fate.

Weather conditions create a gloomy setting as it is raining. → Rain could also be interpreted as a water image washing away her sins. The water element also announces the river in which she will eventually drown.

Very economical chapter in which her career as a prostitute is reviewed. Time accelerates and the action may have unfolded on several weeks, but the reader is given a panoramic view of her life in a kind of flash-forward way. Her encounter with death takes several shapes and forms

→ a tall man with a chrysanthemum, a stout gentleman, apparently
a businessman, young dandy, who addresses her as “old lady”
a labouring man, a mere boy, a drunk, a man with blotched features, finally a “great figure” “ragged being with shifting bloodshot eyes and grimy hands”. The image of the Reaper (faucheuse) is clear here.

Question 16

Was Maggie murdered ?

Answer 16

Maggie may have been murdered by the “huge fat man” she encounters at the edge of the East River. Crane modified the ending and generated more ambiguity. In the original version of it : she more clearly committed suicide in the original version of the text.

The word death is not explicit but conveyed by sounds and the repetition of words belonging to its lexical field.

→ “His whole body gently quivered and shook like that of a DEAD jelly-fish.”
→ “the river appeared as a DEATHLY black hue
→ The varied sounds of life…DIED AWAY to a silence.

Symbolism of the number three and its religious meaning. = as if sounding the end of the play.

Maggie’s euphemistic death is just like Maggie’s euphemistic description, she is a girl of the streets, which is euphemism to describe her as a prostitute. (prostitute is never defined)