Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath & Crane's Maggie
The two great American classics, Stephen Crane's Maggie: Girl of the Streets (1893) and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939), emerge as pioneers works within this country's literary tradition. Maggie scandalized the late Victorian world with its frank depiction of a young woman forced into prostitution. The Grapes of Wrath with its vivid depiction of the poverty of migrant farm workers attempting to eek out a living in the midst of the dustbowl of the 1930s. Notorious within their respective eras, these two works have emerged as classics due to their author's great storytelling abilities and the universality of the stories told. Maggie and the Joad family emerge as memorable American literary figures who struggle with such dominant themes as eternal youth or naivete, the American dream, identity, conflict in values and alienation.
Written as the first novel in America to deal with slums, Maggie also emerges as the first naturalistic novel of any merit within the American literary tradition. Crane appears to have been fascinated by the task of struggling to present an average girl, considered by her contemporaries to be good and wholesome, being forced into prostitution to earn a living. Crane focuses on the Maggie's naivete and dramatically exploits how her innocence is corrupted. Yet Maggie serves as a foil for Crane's even greater ambition of unveiling the hypocrisy of her society. It is only when the mourners, ominously dressed in black, demand that Maggie's mother forgive her errant child that she is able to do so. Crane ends the novel with the mother's belated but poignant lament "Oh, yes, I'll fergive her! I'll fergive her!" (Crane 58). It is as if Crane is laying the young girl's dead body before the collective feet of society and demanding that they become less rigid and moralistic, more compassionate and realistic.
Steinbeck's the Grapes of Wrath can...