Stephen Cranes Maggie: A modern "Ophelia"?

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: Progressivism, Modernity, and the New Woman - US-Literature and Culture, 1880-1910", language: English, abstract: Stephen Cranes first novel, Maggie - A Girl of the Streets (1893), is a characteristic specimen of Naturalist or New Realist Literature. The plot is quite different from Victorian Realist literature as well as the Symbolist literature by the likes of Kipling and T.S. Eliott. In fact, Crane purposely wanted to get away from that sort of writing as he states in one of his letters: "If I had kept to my clever Rudyard -Kipling style, the road might have been shorter but, ah, it wouldnt be the true road." While the early Realists still concentrated on people from the middle class upward, Cranes characters belonged to the lowest scale in terms of social standing. This meant that the young author had to break with some taboos installed by Victorian writers and as a result from that, he had difficulties in publishing the novel in the first place and also received a lot of hostility from critics. The most basic feature that distinguishes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets from Symbolist or Aestheticist works is its focus on the concept of truth. For Symbolist authors, the highest principle of art was beauty whereas Naturalists saw the need of objective descriptions of life and nature in order to portray them as close to reality as possible. Helga Quadflieg sees this as a replacement for the divine, which both Symbolists and Naturalists did not believe in: "Im Gegensatz zum ؤsthetizismus stellt der New Realism aber nicht beauty an die Stelle früherer Gottheiten, sondern truth, die [...] den hِchsten Stellenwert hat." While Symbolist literature in some cases still contained supernatural apparitions, e.g. in Kiplings The Mystery of Purun Bhagath or The Bull that Thought and Hardys For Conscience