Inside Mary Johnson's Mouth: Crane's Realism and Sensing the Slums in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

In the concluding scene of Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of Streets, Mary Johnson is abruptly informed of her daughter's death. Caught in the act of eating, Mary finishes her meal, "her mouth filled with bread" (77), before beginning to "weep" over Maggie's passing. In this moment, readers are given an intimate glance into Mary's life and self; she is vulnerable in the act of eating and even more so in the act of weeping over the news that her young daughter has died. In the face of Mary Johnson's monstrosity—throughout Maggie she is consistently drunk, violent, and mean—Crane presents readers with the possibility of emotional familiarity through a scene of consumption. By drawing attention to the space of Mary's mouth, its contents, and Mary's untimely appetite, Crane centralizes the experiences and bodily needs of a poor immigrant woman. At the same time, throughout Maggie, Crane invites readers into various intimate spaces—from Pete's saloon to the minds of the starving poor—through the use of food imagery and by evoking senses other than sight. In doing so, Crane disrupts long-standing, traditional sensory hierarchies that privilege sight over senses such as smell and taste, and he likewise breaks down the barrier between subject and observer established by literary realism's narrative emphasis on observation. Although Crane in some ways sensationalizes the inhabitants of the slums and uses stereotypical foods such as bread, potatoes, and alcohol to characterize the Irish immigrant population, he also centralizes their bodies, making their needs known. In doing so, Crane allows for an exchange between the sensory realities of slum life and a privileged readership accustomed to relying primarily on sight as a means of interacting with and simultaneously distancing itself from the "Other."

An ingrained philosophical hierarchy of the senses—exposing a battle between the physical body and the intellectual spirit—has long delineated some ways of "knowing" more acceptable than others. Denise Gigante writes, "Whereas sight and hearing allow for a proper representative distance from the object of contemplation … taste, like its closest cousin smell, is bound up with the chemical physiology of the body" (3). As Gigante further explains, eighteenth-century British empiricists deemed the senses unreliable, and later reconfigurations of the senses championed intellectual and "civilized" formulations of aesthetic taste while shunning appetite, which was rooted in hunger and the physiological body and was something to be suppressed at all costs, especially in high society (4–8). The difference, then, between "bodily taste" and "mental taste" was the difference between an unreliable physical instinct and a more measured cognition (Gigante 13). These powerful sensory hierarchies, though routinely challenged by diverse artistic, intellectual, and critical explorations, nonetheless maintained their hold in both British and North American cultural politics throughout the nineteenth century and permeated both elite and popular culture and society. Easily reflected in late nineteenth-century literary production, the privileging of sight and observation is especially evident in writings produced by the "high-realists," many of whom wrote about and themselves belonged to privileged racial, ethnic, and class groups.

Crane's frequent emphasis on the mouth, appetite, and non-visual sensory experiences allows for the creation of an alternative realism to that of writers such as William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, whose account of artistic process often identified observation as the primary means by which to accurately depict the world.¹ For instance, in "The Art of Fiction," James writes that "the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision" (55), the structure of the statement emphasizing the importance of the visual plane to superior artistic achievement. Howells, meanwhile, known for his championing of literary realism, uses words like "observe" and "look" in his critical treatise Criticism and Fiction (1891) to describe the act of writers approaching their subject matter, such as when he labels Jane Austen and George Eliot "worthy observers" of English middle-class life (75). This is not to say, however, that Howells shunned literary depictions...