The Moral Space In Maggie:a Girl Of The Streets

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) is one of the American realist writers who examine the life of ordinary people. His first novel Maggie:A Girl of the Streets, published in 1893, tells a story about the struggles of a girl reared in a slum. It is considered as the first piece of fiction presenting a true delineation of urban slum life.This dissertation is a spatial and textual analysis of the Bowery district of New York City in the 1890s, where Maggie is set. Through the lens of spatial theory-in particular, the work of Lefebvre-the Bowery district of New York emerges as a critical space, a moral space embodying two opposing moralities endorsed or resisted by the characters.In order to shed light on the moral space in the novel, the thesis aims to center on three aspects of space based on Lefebvre, namely, the physical, the mental and the social. Chapter 1 analyses the slum people’s spatial practice in the urban slum, indicating the conflict of ethics in the Bowery, which leads to the heroine’s dismay. Chapter 2 delves into the complex psychological path, which is filled with two different kinds of moral values and is related to dwellers’different representations of space in the slum. Chapter 3 argues the representational spaces, as the composite of the physical space and the mental space, reveal the dominion of ethical philosophy in different settings of the Bowery and the struggling between two moralities on the whole, from which Crane’s ethical evaluation emerges.