Populist Crane: A Reconsideration of Melodrama in Maggie

Stephen Crane’s first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), is replete with images of popular entertainment. Some of these might justifiably be said to depict working-class New Yorkers of the fin de siècle as in pursuit of escapism. Early in the novel, for example, Maggie—a young woman growing up in the working-class Bowery neighborhood of Lower Manhattan—goes to “a great green-hued hall” with her boyfriend, Pete, where they watch “[a]n orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men” perform “a popular waltz” (Crane 30). Next “a girl” wearing “a pink dress with short skirts” (31) entertains the audience with a song-and-dance routine that ends with “grotesque attitudes which were at the time popular among the dancers in the theatres up-town” (31). As a result, “the Bowery public” enjoys “the phantasies of the aristocratic theatre-going public, at reduced rates” (32). The show also features a ventriloquist; a minstrel performance; “some verses which described a vision of Britain being annihilated by America, and Ireland bursting her bonds” (32); and “a small fat man” who “began to roar a song and stamp back and forth before the foot-lights, wildly waving a glossy silk hat and throwing leers, or smiles, broadcast” (32). In response to the evening’s entertainment, Maggie, who works in a sweatshop making collars, “drew deep breaths of pleasure” (33), and “[n]o thoughts of the atmosphere of the collar and cuff factory came to her” (33). Clearly, this is escapism. Maggie works at a job that is exploitive and unfulfilling, and a night of Bowery entertainment allows her to forget her troubles.

Pete and Maggie also regularly attend melodramas, one of which Crane describes in some detail. In general, Crane critics have tended to regard melodrama as a similar form of escapist entertainment, and Crane’s portrayal of it as merely parodic. But I would argue that Crane’s representation of melodrama is more complex than critics have recognized, and that melodrama as a cultural formation in the second half of the nineteenth century resists reduction to mere escapism. While it does contain a measure of irony, Crane’s portrayal of Bowery theater suggests that melodrama has subversive and perhaps even revolutionary undercurrents that exceed mere false consciousness or ideological obfuscation. Members of the working-class audience depicted by Crane are not naïvely drawn in by melodrama. Rather, they become participants in a show of class solidarity that is analogous to a labor strike. The audience gets angry precisely because melodrama stages and clarifies socioeconomic inequities and injustices. In response, the audience actively engages in the performance by cheering working-class heroes and jeering villainous industrial robber barons. Such performativity constitutes an authentic and spontaneous labor protest, a form of protest that has a basis in historical fact and that is depicted in Maggie.

Heroes and Villains

To a limited degree, it is true that Crane’s depiction of melodramatic theater is parodic. But it is important to recognize that Crane’s fictional portrayal scarcely exaggerates the maudlin sentimentality, stark moral polarities, and action-packed plots that characterized the popular theater productions of the day. In order to contextualize Crane’s treatment of Bowery theater, it will be useful for a moment to examine two melodramas performed in New York in the last third of the nineteenth century. Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1867) engages many of the same themes as Crane’s fictional melodrama: wealth, poverty, abjection, and class conflict, to name a few.¹ Although Under the Gaslight is perhaps too often used by scholars to represent melodrama in general (a genre that is far too varied to be adequately represented by any single play), its thematic consonance with Crane’s Maggie makes it worth reexamining here. The play begins at the end of the holiday season in the fashionable New York home of the Courtland family, where a group of socialites and Wall Street investors are taking their leave. Daly’s play functions as a critique of the fatuousness and cruelty of the beau monde, a...