| Instructor: Dr. Jeff Webb |
The Street
Read the following texts:
Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Read
ten chapters (11-53). Finish the book at your leisure.
Lee Tzu Pheng, "Bukit Timah, Singapore."
Booth, Wayne. The Craft of Research. "Making
Good Arguments" and "Claims and Evidence."
85-110.
Preparation:
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925),
the narrator, Nick Carraway, says that New York "seen from
the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first
time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty
in the world" (73).
Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders
making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the
city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar
lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money.
(73)
Earlier in the novel, describing the experience of walking
on Fifth Avenue, Nick similarly emphasizes the city's "promise."
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of
it it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker
of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.
I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women
from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going
to enter their lives, and no one would know or disapprove.
Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments
on the corner of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled
back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness.
At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting
loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young
clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it
was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks
in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night
and life.
Again, at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties
were five deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theater
district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together
in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there
was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes
outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that
I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate
excitement, I wished them well. (61-62)
James Weldon Johnson anticipates Fitzgerald's account of
New York when, in his earlier novel, The Autobiography
of an Ex-Colored Man (1911), he calls it "the most fatally
fascinating thing in America."
We steamed up into New York harbor late one afternoon in
spring. The last efforts of the sun were being put forth
in turning the waters of the bay to glistening gold; the
green islands on either side, in spite of their warlike
mountings, looked calm and peaceful; the buildings of the
town shone out in a reflected light which gave the city
an air of enchantment; and, truly, it is an enchanted spot.
New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America.
She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country,
showing her alluring white face, and hiding her crooked
hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments,--constantly
enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who
come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these
become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes
beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like
that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding
them high on the bubbles of fortune; then with a sudden
breath she blows the bubbles out and laughs mockingly as
she watches them fall.
Twice I had passed through it; but this was really my first
visit to New York; and as I walked about that evening I
began to feel the dread power of the city; the crowds, the
lights, the excitement, the gayety and all its subtler stimulating
influences began to take effect upon me. My blood ran quicker,
and I felt that I was just beginning to live. To some natures
this stimulant of life in a great city becomes a thing as
binding and necessary as opium is to one addicted to the
habit. It becomes their breath of life; they cannot exist
outside of it; rather than be deprived of it they are content
to suffer hunger, want, pain and misery; they would not
exchange even a ragged and wretched condition among the
great crowd for any degree of comfort away from it. (Chapter
6)
Both Johnson and Fitzgerald could not depart more strikingly
from Stephen Crane's representation of New York City, for
although they acknowledge an element of danger in New York's
beauty, the city nonetheless exists as a dazzling emblem of
possibility for both of them. As the literary critic, Philip
Fisher notes, the city in these two later novels (and in others
at the time) is no longer what it was in Maggie: the
"killing machine" has become a "playground" (241). The spectrum
that exists between these poles of death and delight still
informs the various ways we think about cities today. Does
the city limit and destroy us or extend and renew us? Or,
to pick up Fitzgerald's filmic metaphor, is the "constant
flicker" of the urban movie a tragedy or a comedy?
In Maggie, the city is indeed a killing machine. "Eventually
they entered a dark region where, from a careening building,
a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street
and the gutter" (Chapter 2, paragraph 1). In the urban world
depicted in this novel, babies are not only born into the
street, they are literally born from the buildings, the "gruesome
doorways." What does it mean for buildings to replace mothers?
The result is clearly lethal: "the babe, Tommy, died," the
narrator states laconically in the first sentence of Chapter
4. But what is the result of this replacement of persons by
buildings for the characters that make it past infancy? How
does Crane represent interiority, thoughts? Or does he?
A novel typically represents characters performing actions.
How does Crane resist such agency, even at the level of the
sentence? And, moreover, WHY does he resist it? Consider these
questions in the context of the following paragraph.
A stone had smashed into Jimmie's mouth. Blood was bubbling
over his chin and down upon his ragged shirt. Tears made
furrows on his dirt-stained cheeks. His thin legs had begun
to tremble and turn weak, causing his small body to reel.
His roaring curses of the first part of the fight had changed
to a blasphemous chatter. In the yells of the whirling mob
of Devil's Row children there were notes of joy like songs
of triumphant savagery. The little boys seemed to leer gloatingly
at the blood upon the other child's face. (Chapter 1, paragraphs
9-10)
Finally, how does Lee Tzu Pheng depict the urban environment
in her poem, "Bukit Timah, Singapore"? Do you see any similarities
with Crane? Why, for instance, does she refer, in the second
stanza, to the city's need to be "fed"--"men, machines,/ flushed
out of their short dreams/ and suburban holes/ to churn down
this waiting gullet"?
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Works Cited
- Fisher, Philip. Still the New World. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard UP, 1999.
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York:
Simon and Shuster, 1995.
- Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored
Man.
Writing Assignment: Formulate a question about Maggie
in a paragraph or two, paying close attention to Crane's language
Be prepared to discuss your question in class.
Further Reading (please contact
me if you find materials that should be added to this
list):
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