Peer Interview w/ Steven

1.What were the main themes that you would want students to explore in Maggie?
1. I think the two main themes I would want students to explore are somebody or/vs nobody and sense of meaning. I feel that while the two are similar, they are different enough where if one was teaching it a compare and contrast paper could be done. Throughout the book Maggie considers her self a nobody and is striving to become a somebody. When she is taken to the play with Pete she wants to become the people she is surrounded by, but at the same time she is discussed by the way these "high class" people see "lower class" people. She then thinks about here sense  meaning and where she stand in the world. Meanwhile, she is also wondering if she really wants to be a somebody. 

2.What class activity helped you the most in understanding Maggie? 

2. The activity that helped me the most was comparing the book to the Emily Dickson poem. This was also the poem that I had to teach to the class. I feel like the activity opened up or showed me the theme of nobody vs somebody and how the characters in the novel view themselves as such. It made me go back and re-read some of the passages that I did not quite understand the first time around and helped me better understand certain themes in the novel. I then took those themes with me throughout the rest of the novel which help me better understand it as a whole. 

3. What is one activity you would do with film/pop culture in Maggie?/ How would you relate the characters to people today?

3.I could see myself using an old Frankenstein film because the book at least was published around the same time. I am not one-hundred percent sure on all the character, but I would have the students relate Maggie to the Monster himself. I would bring in the theme of nobody vs somebody and ask my students how the Monster and Maggie view themselves and how the students view them. Then I would most likely turn it into a compare and contrast paper. 

Wrapping up Maggie

I originally thought Maggie would have never been taught in a public school because it was so short and difficult to read (not to mention its content of prostitution and abuse): why would teachers even try to teach it? Between the "immigrant vernacular" and the obscure narration, the plot of the story was likely to get lost while a child was reading. But after exploring the main themes, I found some redeemable traits in the text. Point of view, symbolism, imagery, setting and characterization led us to see the value in a text that may have otherwise been boring, unrelatable, or difficult for students. But by focusing on the specifics in the text, we got at a bigger picture.
Through engaging students in both top-down methods and student-led discussions we can hope to teach the lessons that Maggie has to offer today's younger generation. When taught properly, the book can teach students that just because people are from a different time period does not mean that they are somehow different from us. Theatrics, appearances, and gossip are prized above anything else in the world of Maggie. Maggie teaches us what it means to start from nothing and fight in an environment where onlookers are all talk and no action.
That being said, a few essential questions for Maggie might be:
1. What does it mean to be a member of a community in this book?
2. Who is responsible for ensuring that children are raised well?/ What makes a successful parent?
4. How effective is irony and satire in stimulating change?
5. How does Darwinism fit into a social structure like Maggie's?

Symbolism at Maggie's end

If I were teaching Maggie in a classroom, I would definitely want students to delve deeper into the symbolism associated with Maggie's shoes at the end of the book; it's important not only in understanding the final scene but also the effect of Maggie's actions on her family (particularly her mother). It also says something about childhood in a society that has all these strange points of view being expressed. 

Maggie's mother immediately recalls Maggie's shoes from when she was a child upon hearing that her daughter is dead. She tells Jimmy to put them back on Maggie, and Jimmy responds like a cold-hearted observer and points out that they obviously won't fit anymore. I want students to see, first off, these two differing points of view and then hopefully have them realize that these shoes could possibly stand as symbols of childhood and innocence. They act as a vehicle for forgiveness because the mother wants to show Maggie's true nature, who she was as a child and how innocence and pure her daughter is on the inside. The condition of the shoes speaks to what childhood was like in those times, similar to Jacob Riis's photographs of poverty-stricken children in the street. But at the end of the book, the beat up pair of shoes representing Maggie's true character as perhaps a victim of uncontrollable circumstances like so many children were at the time. Maggie's mother feels guilty and sorry for the way Maggie was brought up and how she ended up; her mother takes responsibility for the life that Maggie was condemned to, which is what Steven Crane most likely wanted: for people to start caring about whats going on around them, not just observing. 

Hashtags for Maggie

Metaphor
"She vaguely tried to calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have looked down upon her" #HighandMighty #boysrule #jktheydrool

Metaphor
"Very infrequent tipsy men, swollen with the value of their opinions, engaged their companions in earnest and confidential conversation" #TheyThinkTheyreBetter #Narratorknowswhatsup

POV/Simile
"She began to see the bloom upon her cheeks as valuable"  #useitorloseit #werkit #blossomedinapuddle

Simile"The mother and son began to sway and struggle like alligators" #urbanjungle #TroubleAtTheWateringHole #MaggieandJimmiegotohell

Setting/Personification
"A chair or two and the table, stood uncertainly upon legs" #CleanTheCrimeScene #PeteTheHouseGuest #MakesMaggieWeak

Points of View in Maggie

Crane includes multiple points of view to show us the power of an outsider's perception. We get at least nine different spectators in the first chapter  , each with their own view of their environment. The book's third person narration even gives us a point of view to view the other points of view through. It acts as an objective outsider looking at the world, narrating it for us. It describes people by their physical attributes first; for example, Pete's character arrives on the scene, being introduced to us as "a lad of sixteen years" who boastfully saunters down the avenue. Jimmie's father is similarly introduced as "a man with sullen eyes." Interestingly enough, we are not given people's titles like "Jimmie's friend Pete" or "Jimmie's father." Rather, we get to know characters through their physical characteristics and actions; who they are is directly linked to what they do and how they interact in their environment (a very naturalistic phenomenon).  


Jimmie challenges this in chapter four while being a truck driver. After his father and brother died, "he menaced mankind at the intersection of streets" (19). He is becomes a truck driver and disregards any conventions in society that demand him to respect others. He purposefully picks fights, drives on sidewalks with no care whether he will hurt anyone; in summary, he thinks the world revolves around him, rather than being one working part in a functioning community. He doesn't care what people think of him, and picking fights and getting arrested don't seem to bother him either. Maggie, in contrast, is the quiet observer who lets the world act around her. Her chapter is interjected by one-word paragraphs that describe the two men's interactions in a clinical, matter-of-fact tone; for example, "He was telling tales to Jimmie" or "The two held a technical conversation." The outsider's point of view that Crane returns to in chapter five is meant to be ironic. We are observers of the "technical" conversation between the two men, which is really just a rant session of one man's stupidly selfish story about proving his strength to men that walk into his bar.

Entering History through Visual Culture

This painting, along with the text of Maggie, seems to depict the late 19cenury as a time that prized violence, or at least the spectacle of violence. In the baroque style of the painting, we are shown the true brutality of the act. The focal point of the piece is the white man wearing green shorts with a red, bloodied face. The black man is heaving all his force into taking down the other fighter, showing a superior athleticism that has the crowd on their feet craning their necks to see the show. But there are also two men about to enter the ring to seemingly break up the fight that has been escalating.

Students will most likely pick up on the shared physicality of the text and painting. They may also not that in a time when poverty is rampant, the sport of boxing brings people of all backgrounds and classes together. Taking both of these themes and putting them together in relation to Maggie might help students understand why Maggie’s family does not talk about the abuse but allows it to continue. I would have students consider the role of the onlooker; maybe they could form a text-to-self connection between who they might be in the painting: a member of the crowd, the man jumping into the ring to break up the fight, or one of the two fighters. They could even do the same thing with characters in Maggie; who would the father be in this painting? Or where would the old woman fit into this painting? Shock seems to be another theme that could be explored. Are audience members shocked by who is winning the fight?  We could also tie in race and see how this violent culture that is at times filled with bystanders deals with racial tensions, if it does at all.

Maggie and Jago: Teaching Classics

Jago notes in his few pages that the classics are worth teaching because they help readers wrestle with some of the most complex of human conditions. She also says that we need to stop kidding our students; we need to be real with them and tell them that not all reading is going to be easy. Struggling is part of education. It is also what makes the classics worth reading. Its all about finding connections between people from the past and relating to people in the present. What makes these people who they are, and why should we care about them?


The language of Maggie is not particularly difficult to comprehend, but the time jumps and setting changes may pose the most difficulty for readers. There are a lot of characters introduced in the first few chapters that may be hard to keep straight. From the very beginning we have to sort characters into "good" and "bad" during the street-fighting scene. We have to know who is punching who and what happens to them. Having students outline characters and their key characteristics may help students get their footing in preparation for the rest of the text. It would  be interesting to have them focus on the family dynamics in particular; the old woman's comment at the end of chapter II of "who's beating who now" tells a lot about the home environment and who's living there.A family tree could serve this purpose. Have students outline who is in the immediate family, who is an outsider of the family, and then examine each character's role in the functioning of the dysfunctional family unit.


In relation to the family dynamics, we should also ask students what they know about Maggie right now. How is she portrayed in the beginning? What does her  role in the family shenanigans say about her character? After all, the book shares her name; why might that be? All these questions could help students understand the characters' actions so far and reflect on their own family dynamics and what it means to be a family.