Escape to a Deeper Hell:

Hell Imagery in Stephen Crane's

Toward the end of Stephen Crane's novel, Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets, the protagonist finds herself thrown out of her home by her mother and forsaken by the man she has idealized and idolized. When she asks Pete where she can go, he replies: "Oh, go teh hell" (50). Pete's answer is ironic because Maggie is already in hell. Crane's novel takes place where people are devils, the world is a living hell, and deliverance is impossible.

The characters of Maggie are often portrayed as devils or demons. Jimmie is described in the first chapter as someone whose "features wore a look of a tiny, insane demon" (3). In his confrontation with Pete, he "snarled like a wild animal" (35). In addition, he curses Maggie ("Of course Jimmie publicly damned his sister"), an act that seems appropriate for a devil (42).

Maggie's mother, Mary, is also characterized as demonic. Crane often uses the color red to describe her and creates a character who also ironically curses Maggie. At the end of Chapter VI, we read: "Maggie's red mother, stretched on the floor, blasphemed and gave her daughter a bad name" (21). In Chapter IX, Mary is portrayed as a serpent in that her body is "red, writhing" (31), alluding to the classical portrayal of Satan. As children, both Maggie and Jimmie fear their mother as one might the man possessed by Legion (see Luke 8:26ff): "for they thought she need only to be awake and all fiends would come from below" (13).

Thomas De Witt Talmage, a controversial minister, preached a sermon in 1871 entitled The Evil Beast, in which he portrays rum as a sort of demon which destroys home life and is the cause of ruin for the whole city. After describing a home which has been ravaged by the man of the house who drinks, Talmage asserts: "Rum changed that paradise into a hell!" (69). Not rum, but whisky is the demon which possesses all the characters of Maggie, especially Mary. It seems that the main reason she treats Maggie so badly, besides great selfishness, is that she is an alcoholic. She is a person out of control whose most violent tantrums occur after bouts of drinking:

In this passage, the acts of rage and chaos are even more painful than usual for Maggie in that Mary wreaks her anger upon the lambrequin, an emblem of Maggie's futile attempt to introduce beauty into the squalid home.

Maggie is considered a devil by her mother although she is actually, the narrator says, a flower "in a mud puddle" (16). Mary calls Maggie "a regular devil" when she is late getting home from work (21) and a "beast" after she has slept with Pete (41). After Pete leaves the saloon with Nell and Maggie tries to return home, her mother again calls her a beast (47). In addition, Mary states that Maggie has "gone teh deh devil" (30).

The universe of Crane's novel is also portrayed in terms of the imagery of hell. Jimmie, in Chapter IV, says "wonderingly and reverently: `Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?'" (16). In the "hot, stuffy room" of the factory where Maggie works, the air strangles her (25). In the third hall scene in Chapter XIV, "the rumble of conversation is replaced by a roar" (42). Maggie, in her descent into the Dantesque inferno, notes that people do not talk to each other, but speak with "shrill voices" (42). Chester L. Wolford, who considers Maggie an inversion of the Persephone myth (79), writes that the saloons Maggie goes to with Pete "have a liquid, misty underwater effect, creating a near parody of classical hells" (81). Also, the river, often a symbol of life and its continuance, is the scene of Maggie's suicide and is painted as having a "deathly black hue" (53). It is in this river that both Maggie and "the varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence" (53). Even nature is hostile, for in the final chapter, when the mourners come to Mary to "comfort" her, the "inevitable sunlight" enters the room to "shed a ghastly cheerfulness upon the faded hues of the room" (57).

In his book, Civilization's Inferno: Or, Studies in the Social Cellar (1893), Benjamin Orange Flower wrote of the inhabitants of the slums:

This is certainly Maggie's situation. Though she is the only character of worth in the novel, she also is damned in Crane's universe. Nell, without knowing her, tells Pete, "Oh, t'hell with her" (44). In Chapter X, Maggie's mother says, "May Gawd curse her forever" (33). God, in Crane's view, has already cursed Maggie. She has no hope of redemption even though her actions stem from noble, if not idealistic, motives. When Pete comes to take her out, Mary tells Maggie "Go teh hell an' good riddance" (31). What is certain is that she is already in hell; she can only go further into the pit. All her efforts to make the world she lives in more beautiful will not be realized, and all her longing for tenderness will go unnoticed because love is impossible in hell: "To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults" (20). The tragic fact of Crane's novel is that life in the slums is always that way. Maggie believes that Pete can take her out of the hell she lives in; in reality, he can only take her deeper into the inferno.

In Pete's world, "souls did not insist upon being able to smile" (49). Here, Pete is justifying his own actions toward Maggie, but it is quite a telling statement of the universe that Crane has painted. In this universe, all are damned, even those who try to escape the hell they live in. Wolford states, "With such creatures as Mary, Jimmie, and Pete controlling her life, Maggie is quickly caught in a straightjacket of fate that slowly but inexorably squeezes the life out of free will" (86). All attempts to escape are actually flights of terror deeper within the abyss.

"We know now that there is no way out; that the `system' that was evil the offspring of public neglect and private greed has come to stay, a storm-centre forever of our civilization" wrote Jacob Riis in How The Other Half Lives (1890) (1). "Home to them [the occupants of the slums] is an empty name" (140). Home is especially empty for Maggie. When she tells the "mere boy" who had accompanied Nell, "I'm going home" (46), she does not seem to realize how lost she is. She originally hoped that Pete would rescue her from "the broken furniture, grimy walls, and general disorder and dirt of her home" (18). When she loses Pete, she vainly hopes that her mother and brother will take her back. Like all of the damned, Maggie is doomed to an existence in which all hopes are dashed.

Turned away by her lover and her family, Maggie becomes a prostitute in order to survive. Riis indicates that for a woman alone in the slums, prostitution was the only real means of adequate support because of the severe discrepancies in pay for men and women in lawful employment (183). He goes on to relate the story of a woman who ended her life because she could not find work and refused "the wages of sin." In her suicide note, she wrote, "Sing at my coffin: `Where does the soul find a home and rest?'" (183). For Maggie, there is no home and no rest. She is in complete despair because she has nothing to hope for. As Wolford writes,

Perhaps the harshest evidence that the universe of Stephen Crane's Maggie is hell is in the fact that one cannot find comfort even in the church. Shortly before her suicide, Maggie, who "had heard of the Grace of God," reaches out in desperation to a minister whose "eyes shone good will" (51). The minister's reaction reveals that appearances are more important than salvation:

That his movement was "convulsive" suggests that even men of God are possessed. Religion, in Crane's disordered world, is godless and unlike the "pure and faultless" practice mentioned in the Book of James which commands that one "look after orphans and widows in their distress" (1:27). As Talmage writes in The Night Sides of City Life (1878),

In Crane's novel, the ruin is eternal because there is no hope of redemption. Flower faults ministers who "do not know and take no steps to find out the misery that results from the avarice of their parishioners" (89). For Crane, God has left the abyss to its own devices.

Maggie is forsaken by her family, the man she has made an idol, and even by God. But she is not the only character of Crane's novel who is left without hope. Mary, Jimmie, and Pete may try to comfort themselves with alcohol and self-pity, but will never escape hell, but only move deeper within.

Works Cited