"Making room in Heaven for all sorts of souls": Temperance Rhetoric and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets"

In Stephen Crane'S Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, alcohol, violence, and the promise of violence is in every part of Maggie's home and neighborhood. Immediately after her older brother Jimmie fights with other wayward youth in the ominous Rum Alley, the boy's father finds him in the street, kicks him, and drags him home to his mother, who is an equally violent drunk. The following domestic disturbance in the Johnson home is filled with violent imagery as husband and wife fight with one another; Jimmie threatens his sister, and the mother severely beats Jimmie for his street fighting. Even the infant Tommie goes to sleep "with his fists doubled,"¹ implying the stress he is under and foreshadowing the violence that awaits him when he is older. This is far from a happy home, and, throughout the entire scene, alcohol fuels the violence and dysfunction.

Alcoholism and intemperance permeate every aspect of the titular Maggie's world. Alcohol is symbolically represented in the street names around her house; both her parents are constantly inebriated, her lover is a bartender, and even her final sexual partner is apparently drunk. Alcohol and its impact is an inescapable part of the characters' environment, and this environment and its influence on a person's life was one of Crane's more pressing concerns when he penned Maggie. In 1893 when Stephen Crane wrote to his friend and fellow author Hamlin Garland about Maggie,² he enclosed the now famous description of his intent "to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless,"³ and his hope was that Maggie would persuade his audience to make "room in heaven for all sorts of souls . . . who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people."⁴ Crane intended Maggie to convince his audience that the lives of the working poor in New York's Bowery district were greatly influenced by the world they inhabited, and that middle-class readers should reconsider some of the value judgments they impose on the working poor.

For many readers the most obvious environmental factors contributing to Maggie's tragedy are the sexual double standards between men and women and the decay of middle-class morality in the slums. My study of Maggie does not disagree with those arguments that focus on the novel's discussion of gender roles, the moral failings of New York's Bowery district, or those works that place the novel in the slum literature tradition. Instead my intent is to expand on the critical understanding of the novel's structure by examining a second narrative structure that lies beneath the already well-established slum narrative. While Maggie contorts the established slum narrative and the story of a fallen women, it also builds on the other well-known temperance narrative to reflect the lives of women living in New York's slums and ultimately challenge middle-class conceptions of the working poor by subverting a rhetorical strategy largely developed by middle-class temperance workers. These narratives, adopted by the Women's Christian Temperance Union and other temperance workers, were a combination of fictional and nonfictional accounts of alcoholism and its impact on families. Although ostensibly these were works of fiction, these narratives employed a common set of rhetorical practices designed to influence their audience's behavior, practices which Crane manipulated in order to challenge his middle-class audience's understanding of the working poor and in doing so, reworked the temperance narrative into naturalist novel. In effect, Maggie upturns middle-class expectations of the temperance narrative by repositioning alcohol and its abuse as an environmental factor contributing to Maggie's destruction, thus removing the sentimentalism so closely associated with traditional temperance narratives while still maintaining a strong sense of sympathy for Maggie that could encourage middle-class audiences to reconsider their opinion of women living in poverty.

The temperance narrative was a well-known part of the American temperance movement by the end of the nineteenth...