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Article Evaluation

1. Yes, everything in the article appears relevant to the articles topic about Feed. The section about stye seemed misplaced or mislabel as the content was not necessarily Clear to me. I was not sure if it was referring to the author's writing style or his main writing themes throughout the book.
2. The viewpoints seem to be consistent.
3. The links work, but the articles linked are ones which talk about the book's nominations and awards. All the rest do not have links.
4. The introduction has no references, the plot (including the context and synopsis), has no references, and after that there are only a few references. The sources mentioned seemed to come from scholarly sources. However, I could not tell if the articles were biased; the author does not mention any bias in the article.
5. Everything seems to be accurate today, but more sources could be added. Plus, the article has not been edited recently.
6. Most of the talk page consists of what people are planning on adding and editing. There does seem to be one comment about needed research.
7. This article is rated as C-Class, and it is part of WikiProject Novels.
8. I think we discussed most of this, if in a different way, in class, and I think we talked about more than this article does.

Plan of Action

What content would you want to contribute? I would want to contribute more in the lede, since right now it is only two sentences. The article also does not have much detail besides the plot summary, adding the major themes might help give a reader more information on the book. I would also want to contribute more in the influence and significance, since right now it is not long, and one of the three facts is that it's the longest written sentence according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

What research steps would you take to get that information? If I were to build the lede, I might have to read the book to understand the references. In order to add a section about themes, I would use academic journals or books.

What recommendations would you propose to the style or organization? I would recommend changing the Notes section, since it seems like it is the references or the citations which is not clear from the title. Also, one of the links is a Goodreads page which lists the best southern novels; there might be a need for two sections (references and notes). I would also propose a change to the influence and significance, since it's content refers more to the awards it won.

Light in August contains a lot more information with sections or major themes, style and structure, and characters. Absalom, Absalom! has none of these sections. Light in August also has a lot of seemingly credible book resources to back up its points, whereas Absalom, Absalom! only has a few sources, which do not appear as credible. Several people on the talk page of Absalom, Absalom! also voiced that there are a lot of incorrect facts and that it lacks some major information about the book. Overall, Light in August has more sources and contains more detailed information.

Potential Articles

All the Rivers - There was nothing on the talk page and very little on the article. We thought we could add a plot, since right now it is two sentences, and add a section on it's controversy. However, the book is fairly new, so we thought it might be hard to find scholarly sources.

The Needle's Eye -There is almost nothing on the article page and talk page. We could add a plot since there is none; we also thought we could add a major theme. It was written in 1972, hopefully giving it a lot of good sources.

The Last Battle - There is opportunity to add a section about themes in this article. It is by C.S. Lewis we thought there would be a lot of scholarly sources. However, everyone on the talk page seemed very argumentative about religion present in the book, making adding themes more difficult.

I, Robot - Although there is a ton of information, there is no plot summary. We could also possibly add a theme section.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets - We could fill in the plot, add a themes section, and a section on the dialect in the short story, since it makes the story notable.

My Antonia - The talk page was very engaged and there was lots of scholarship on the novel.

Final Two Articles

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets - We decided to use this article because we could add a themes and dialect section. Plus, there were multiple peer-reviewed articles we could use for this one.

I, Robot - We can add a plot for this article. Plus, we found good sources, and people were engaged on the talk page.

We decided not to use All the Rivers because we could not find scholarly articles. We decided not to use The Last Battle because we could not find scholarly articles and because the talk page was controversial. We did not do My Antonia because we were not sure how to add to the article already in place. We were not interested in pursing The Needle's Eye.

Final Article

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

Plan of Action:

We would like to fill in the plot section with more details and add a themes section, where we could go more in-depth into the main themes of the short story, like poverty, industrialism and family relations. We also want to add a section focused on the dialect of the characters within the story. The author's use of dialect is distinct and is part of what makes this story notable. We could add some details to the historical context section that already exists because it is very sparse now. We also could add a "Controversy" section because the story was very controversial for the time and the original manuscript was edited multiple times by editors and the author before anyone would publish it. Currently, there is a "Works of Criticism" section that only has two articles listed in it. We will look for more scholarship on this story and include it under this section, possibly using sub-headings to categorize the scholarship by topic. Finally, we could also add a "Reception" or "Influence" section to describe how this short story was received at the time of release as compared to the present day and to discuss the impact this story had on readers and the legacy it created.

Bibliography:

• Brennan, Joseph X. “Ironic and Symbolic Structure in Crane's Maggie.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 16, no. 4, 1962, pp. 303–315. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/2932407. Accessed 19 April 2018.

Summary: This article gives an in-depth look at patterns seen throughout the book, analyzing specifically irony as a motif and working through lots of specific examples. The author especially focuses on respectability, showing how through irony it is reduced to nothing as it gives way to cruelty and hypocrisy. After discussing irony, he gives some thought on symbolism seen in a fire engine and Maggie's mother; they both demonstrate the brutal forces of society. He emphasizes how this affects both Jimmie and Maggie. His final point involves a lambrequin (again connecting it with her mother's involvement in Maggie's demise), showing how it represents Maggie's tendency for romanticizing her situation, misleading her.

• Key Elements:
  • Irony
  • Respectability
  • Negative impacts of society
  • Violence as a outcome of society
  • Romanticism
  • Alcoholism

• Cottom, Daniel. "Maggie, Not a Girl of the Streets." Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 41, no. 1, 2007, pp. 73-98, https://doi.org/10.1215/ddnov.041010073. Accessed 19 April 2018

• Cunliffe, Marcus. “Stephen Crane and the American Background of Maggie.” American Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1, 1955, pp. 31–44. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/2710412. Accessed 19 April 2018.

Summary: Throughout the article, Cunliffe argues that Crane should be viewed as an American naturalist. He discusses how environment shapes lives without permission and how the author was inspired by French realists in order to back up his statement on naturalism. He also discusses how religion and the use of you and we supports naturalism as a theme in the book.

• Key Elements:
  • Use of you and we
  • Religion
  • Naturalism
  • Environment shaping individual
  • Alcoholism

• Dingledine, Don. “’It Could Have Been Any Street’: Ann Petry, Stephen Crane, and the Fate of Naturalism.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 34, no. 1, Spring 2006, pp. 87-106. ProjectMUSE. https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2006.0014. Accessed 19 April 2018.
• Summary: This article focuses on the unavoidable poverty in Maggie, depicting how Crane's use of naturalism as a theme normalizes the social class of Maggie, her family, and the urban area she lives in as a whole. The author also argues that Maggie circulates the idea that they are stuck in this class without a way out due to their own actions and heritage. He uses Maggie's mother as an example of this, expounding on her drunken and violent actions. He also furthers the idea that they are stuck in their current situation by saying they cannot see any other perspective than their own.
  • Key Elements:
    • Poverty
    • Naturalism
    • Helplessness
    • Alcoholic/abusive mother
    • Romanticism
    • Social Class
• Fitelson, David. “Stephen Crane's ‘Maggie’ and Darwinism.” American Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2, 1964, pp. 182–194, https://doi.org/10.2307/2711086. Accessed 19 April 2018.
• Gandal, Keith. “Stephen Crane's ‘Maggie’ and the Modern Soul.” ELH, vol. 60, no. 3, 1993, pp. 759–785, www.jstor.org/stable/2873412. Accessed 19 April 2018.

Summary: Gandal claims that Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is unlike the typical “slum novel” because the protagonist does not fall in love with a high-class man, but with someone else from the slum. The author argues that Maggie does not feel shame for her sexual relationship outside of marriage because in their slum world, pre-marital sex is not immoral. Maggie’s love leaves her and Gandal explains this destroys her confidence as she thinks she cannot survive in the slums now. Yet, it does not make her ashamed. On the contrary, Gandal says that the typical slum girl protagonist who has pre-marital sex with a rich man later feels remorse for losing her morality, because an effect of being with this man is that she has begun to align her morals with those of high-class citizens.

• Key Elements:
  • Class influences
  • Relationships
  • Morality

• Huntsperger, David. "Populist Crane: A Reconsideration of Melodrama in "Maggie.." Texas Studies in Literature & Language, vol. 53, no. 3, Fall2011, pp. 294-319. EBSCOhost. Accessed 19 April 2018.

Summary: In this article, Huntsperger claims that Stephen Crane uses his character Maggie’s attendance at melodramas in the theatre to hint at the performance of class society. The author compares the reaction of the audience at the theatre, who are actively cheering working class heroes and getting angry at the stealing villains, to a labor strike. The author states that Crane is making a comment through the audience's reactions on concepts of class solidarity. Crane's representation shows a hardened and impenetrable class society, where people remain in the class they were born into.

• Key Elements:
  • Discussions of class
  • Escapism from life struggles
  • Performance

• Irving, Katrina. "Gendered Space, Racialized Space: Nativism, the Immigrant Woman and Stephen Crane's Maggie." College Literature, vol. 20, no. 3, Oct. 1993, p. 30. EBSCOhost. Accessed 19 April 2018.

• Novotny, George T. "Crane's Maggie, a Girl of the Streets." Explicator, vol. 50, no. 4, 1992, pp. 225-228, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.1992.9935328. Accessed 19 April 2018.

• Slotkin, Alan R. “You as a Multileveled Dictional Device in Stephen Crane's Representation of Bowery Dialect in ‘Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.’” South Central Review, vol. 7, no. 2, 1990, pp. 40–53. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/3189332. Accessed 19 April 2018.

Summary: This article examines how speech is used to show the character's individualities and social backgrounds. He briefly discusses how social class is distinguished through language and how the majority of the dialogue is "tough dialect" specific to New York. However, he spends most of the article analyzing the use of you. It's variation throughout the book shows the reader both the emotion and ethnicity of the speaker (German, Irish, etc). He also distinguishes the masculine and feminine roles defined by language and pronoun use.

• Key Elements:
  • Use of you
  • Dialect and emotion
  • Gender differences shown through language

• Stasi, Paul. "Joycean Constellations: 'Eveline' and the Critique of Naturalist Totality." James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 1, 2008, pp. 39-53,  https://doi.org/10.1353/jjq.0.0131. Accessed 19 April 2018.

Summary: Stasi claims that Crane’s novella is built on the philosophy of determinism. Maggie tries to improve her circumstances, yet it is inevitable that she cannot accomplish this. The author argues that Crane narrates the novella from an outside to in process, never truly allowing readers to see the inner workings of Maggie as a character.

• Key Elements:
  • Modernism
  • Determinism
  • Class identity

• Stein, William Bysshe. “New Testament Inversions in Crane's Maggie.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 73, no. 4, 1958, pp. 268–272. https://doi.org/10.2307/3043423. Accessed 19 April 2018.

• Von Cannon, Jordan L. "Prostitution, Primitivism, Performativity." Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 10, no. 1, Summer2015, pp. 41-59. EBSCOhost. Accessed 19 April 2018.

Summary: This article states that in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Maggie, or the character of the prostitute, is one who is driven by her environment’s forces, rather than her sexual desire. Von Cannon claims that Maggie is ultimately stuck in a “primitive” state, although she tries to escape it. Maggie must perform in her job and her performance shows the reality of the cruel world she lives in. The author of the article argues that the character of Maggie is representative of Giorgio Agamben’s “homo sacer,” who is an outcast who is killed without society’s care.

• Key Elements:
  • Naturalism
  • Performance
  • Living a "primitive" life
  • Determinism
  • Race, class and gender
  • The character of "the prostitute"

Themes

Alcoholism

Crane uses alcohol to continue a cycle of poverty that the characters cannot break from. Through alcoholism, he demonstrates that the characters' fates are all inevitable and that their lives cannot be changed. While all the inhabitants of the Bowery drink excessively throughout the book, Crane uses Maggie's mother as a main depiction of the destructive power of alcohol. In her drunken rages, Mary Johnson is described as incredibly violent, abusing Maggie and breaking everything around her. Mary's drunken actions hinder Maggie's attempts to move up in the world and crush her hopes of doing so. In an attempt to improve her life and rise above her situation, Maggie decorates and hangs a lambrequin, hoping to attract and impress Pete. Yet, Maggie's attempts to beautify her surroundings prove futile as Mary destroys the curtain while drunk and angry. Mary's drunken actions alienate Maggie, pushing her to Pete and her life on the street. Then, she publicly condemns her daughter, while inebriated, for her immoral actions with a man, thus isolating Maggie from the community.

Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is prevalent throughout Maggie, as Maggie is faced with hypocritical judgments by her family who hold different standards for her than they do for themselves. Maggie's mother, drives Maggie away and into the arms of Pete. She then publicly condemns her daughter, further driving Maggie to her demise. Yet, after Maggie's death she displays her grief loudly. Mary's hypocrisy is further displayed with her physical aggression. During one of her violent and drunken tantrums, she threatens to beat her children with shoes. Then, after Maggie's death, Mary holds onto Maggie's baby shoes sentimentally, directly contradicting her aggression toward Maggie while alive. At the same time, Jimmie avidly voices his displeasure with Maggie's relationship with Pete and condemns Pete for seducing his sister. However, Jimmie seduces women himself and casts them off when he is done. Both Mary and Jimmie are the driving forces of Maggie's prostitution, but they condemn her when she becomes one, blind to their own faults and part in her downfall.

Naturalism

Crane is known as one of the first American naturalist authors. According to the naturalistic principles, a character is set into a world where there is no escape from one's biological heredity. Additionally, the circumstances in which a person finds oneself will dominate one's behavior, depriving the individual of personal responsibility.^[4]Although Stephen Crane denied any influence by Émile Zola,^[5] the creator of Naturalism, examples in his novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, indicate that he was inspired by French naturalism. The characters in Maggie are stuck in their class without a way out, due to their heritage and their inability to see other perspectives besides their own.^[2] Critic Don Dingledine emphasizes how the behavior and actions of the characters in Maggie are influenced by poverty. Maggie is subject to this environment, as it shapes the outcome of her life despite her best effort to improve her circumstances by marrying Pete. Critics debate whether Crane's use of naturalism was intended to create empathy for the characters living in the Bowery or to support the idea that there is a genetic reason why they are impoverished.

Determinism

In Maggie, Crane employs determinism, a theory that everything happening to individuals in the world has already been determined or predestined. Crane uses this theory through demonstrating that Maggie and those around her cannot escape the poverty of living in the Bowery. According to the theory of determinism, Maggie's poverty, downfall and death are inevitable, and her environment becomes her identity. Since Maggie receives no love from her mother or society, she seeks a better life with Pete. However, her attempts to improve her circumstances fall to pieces as she inevitably cannot succeed, pushing her farther into poverty and into prostitution. While her beauty allows her to stand out from the other inhabitants of the Bowery, she cannot move social class because she is predestined by her environment to remain the in her class. Maggie is represented as forced by her environment into prostitution rather than by sexual desires. Prostitution is not a choice, and her hope is inevitably false. Maggie depicts an environment which shapes lives without permission. This philosophy of determinism is evident in the style of Crane's writing as well. He begins every chapter in Maggie with a broad scene description, giving readers a bird’s eye perspective and this view from a distance eliminates individuality in the Bowery, showing them only as a collective whole. This style of writing reinforces the idea that Maggie is not an individual who can move from this her life in the Bowery.

Gender and Sexuality

During the nineteenth century, ideas of gender associated primitiveness with femininity. The idea of woman as savage contributed to the classification of women into binaries, such as "the prostitute and the mother". The defining difference between the women in these two groups was their ability to control their sexual desire. It was accepted that prostitutes became such due to an inability to control this sexual desire. However, Crane’s depiction of Maggie’s journey to prostitution shows that it is not her sexual desire that makes her become a prostitute. Rather, it is her environment’s influence on her which drives her to prostitution. Maggie's sexuality also reflects an alternative class-based morality that views sexuality differently from upper-class ideas of sexual morality.

Social Class

The main characters of the novella live in the Bowery, whose inhabitants are usually drunk and violent. Maggie fails to understand the impact of her social class upon her. She believes that she can move into a higher class, but she fails to realize that she lacks the social or cultural capital to do this. Maggie believes Pete to be a refined gentleman, when it is obvious to readers, by Crane's narration, that Pete is not. Maggie attempts to dress nicer and make her home appear more beautiful, but she overestimates the effects of this on Pete and on society. Despite her efforts, Maggie does not have the tastes or acquired skills of a middle-class woman, meaning that she would not be accepted into that class. The residents of the Bowery are all going to remain there. Within the novella, Crane comments on class. Critic David Hunstperger points out that the use of melodramas for the entertainment of characters within the novella emphasizes a group reaction of the lower class to class inequality. This shared reaction displays an alignment in the beliefs of the Bowery residents. In Maggie, the majority of low class residents drink, gamble and fight each other. Yet, Maggie, a low class woman herself, does not engage in this behavior. Instead, Crane writes, "The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl. None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins." Due to these differing portrayals of low-class citizens, critics debate if Crane's intentions for the novella were to critique a social caste system and its effect on those within it, or to point to the failings of a family unit, resulting in the downfall of one member.

What to put on the Maggie: A Girl of the Streets talk page about our edits: