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American Literary History 16.4 (2004) 596-618



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Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane's City

William Dean Howells's novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) presents a haunting sense of New York as a divided city. The novel's protagonist, Basil March, an aesthetically minded journalist, delights in the Bowery's "gay ugliness," its "shapeless, graceless, reckless picturesqueness" (183). March relishes every "interesting shape of shabby adversity" he encounters, from the "bare, cue-filleted skulls" of "Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese," to "[t]he colossal effigies of the fat women and the tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums" (183). In the Bowery's "frantic panorama" March perceives "the fierce struggle for survival," a struggle waged against "deformity," "mutilation," "destruction," and "decay" (184). He watches as a "Christian mother" is wheeled down Mott Street in a cart by two policemen, followed by a crowd of "swarming and shrieking children" (186). A later walk down Madison Avenue on a Sunday afternoon presents March with a radically different spectacle, one of "fashion," "richness," and "indigeneity" (301). "Their silk hats shone," he observes of the promenaders, "and their boots; their frocks had the right distension behind, and their bonnets perfect poise and distinction" (302). But March decides he prefers Mott Street. In a characteristically glib effort to convert socioeconomic facts into aesthetic qualities, he tells his wife, "'I understand now why the poor people don't come up here and live in this clean, handsome, respectable quarter of the town; they would be bored to death'" (302).

Howells's narrative works to reiterate what had already become, by the late nineteenth century, a well-established topography of New York as a city polarized between the "opulent rich" and the "degraded poor," its citizens occupying self-contained, noncommunicating worlds (Blumin 18). Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) initially adopts this point of view. Crane's characters inhabit the brutal, lower-class realm of the Bowery tenement, recently opened up to a middle-class readership by Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890): a world of "dark stairways" and "tattered gamins," of "howls and curses, groans and shrieks" (Crane, Maggie 7, 3, 11). [End Page 596] Maggie Johnson's brother, Jimmie, maintains "a belligerent attitude toward all well-dressed men," particularly "obvious Christians and ciphers with the chrysanthemums of aristocracy in their button-holes" (14). This sharp demarcation between social worlds begins to break down, however, with the arrival of Maggie's bartender suitor, Pete. With his "checked legs," "oiled bang," "blue double-breasted coat," and "patent-leather shoes" (which resemble "murder-fitted weapons"), Pete seems to be the lineal descendent of the Bowery b'hoy as working-class dandy, bringing uptown sophistication and self-esteem into the Johnson household (17). On a subsequent visit, Pete appears with "fascinating innovations in his apparel" (20), leading Maggie to suppose that his wardrobe is "prodigiously extensive" (21). She worries that Pete's "aristocratic person" might "soil" (19), given the "disorder and dirt" of her home (18).1

The Bowery of the 1890s provided plentiful resources for Pete's cross-class dressing. According to Shepp's New York City Illustrated (1894), the "better class" of the Bowery's secondhand stores sold the "cast-off and often only slightly-worn garments" of "young men . . . of aristocratic families, addicted to many changes of raiment" (3). This meant that "Patsy McClosky, the Bowery 'tough,'_" could arrive "resplendent, at the Bartenders' Ball, in the identical clothes which Mr. Livingston Schuyler Van Der Knickerbocker wore on Fifth [A]venue a month before" (3). The sentimental distinction between the Bowery and Madison Avenue that Howells's March wishes to hold onto appears to have been eroded. In Maggie, Pete displays what anthropologist Michael Taussig calls the "mimetic faculty," the urge not just to "copy" and "imitate," but to "yield into and become [the] Other" (xiii). For Taussig, as for Pete, the "wonder of mimesis" appears to lie in the copy "drawing on the character and power of the original" (xiii). The Bowery bartender can "break boundaries" by...

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