Fiction and Politics: The Progressive Impulse in Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets

STEPHEN C r a n e Is one of the most celebrated writers of American fiction. His reputation stems from his pioneering of the naturalist style whereby real life is reconstructed in fictional contexts. This style combined with Crane’s pervading social consciousness led to his first novelette, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893). Maggie is an expose of the harmful consequences of Social Darwinism upon the lives of the working class in a New York City tenement. It is driven by a progressive impulse that anticipates the growth of Progressive politics during the early twentieth century. It is a formidable exemplar of the use of fictional resources to advocate social justice. This brief essay elucidates the socio-political import of the naturalist style in fiction by analyzing a few key passages from Crane’s book. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “Social Darwin­ ism,” a social theory derived from ideas propounded by Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner (and founded also on a specious understanding of Charles Darwin’s accounts of biological evolution), exerted a powerful influence on American attitudes to­ wards the socio-political structure of industrial capitalism. Social Darwinism recognized four main principles: (1) that society, in addition to whatever else might be said of it, is chiefly an arena of economic competition; (2) that the terms of struggle are determined by the conditions of the marketplace; (3) that success is rewarded by