Stephen Crane's Maggie: The Death of the Self

Stephen Crane's Maggie ostensibly follows “naturalistic” conventions. However, a complex subjective fantasy functions below this narrative surface. This fantasy reveals a vision of a chaotic reality external to the self, and the activity of this external disorder makes for disintegration of the self and absorption into chaos. Crane uses the city to create a cosmos which demands that its “survivors” become disorder. Each of the novel's major characters therefore, either are, or more importantly entirely become, the cityscape. To aspire beyond the dimension of disorder is to mislead oneself and to be misled by agents of disorder toward disintegration of the self and biological extinction. Furthermore, the textual history of Maggie, as established in Fredson Bowers's Virginia edition, corroborates that Crane gradually conceived and continuously shaped at least three patterns of annihilation of the self, represented by Maggie, Jimmie, and Pete and Mrs. Johnson.

Criticism of Maggie has focused on the novel's superficially naturalistic elements.1 In reading Crane, we would do well to follow Richard Chase's argument for the intensive role of fantasy in American Naturalism.2 In Maggie, the disorder that threatens integrity and assertion is a fusion of four