SOURCE: Krause, Sydney J. “The Surrealism of Crane's Naturalism in Maggie.” American Literary Realism 1870-1910 16, no. 2 (autumn 1983): 253-61.

In the following essay, Krause investigates the surrealism found in Stephen Crane's Maggie.

The source of Maggie's plight is that her lack of toughness unfits her to withstand the animal callousness of real-life experience. Traumatized by betrayal in love and rejection at home, she sinks into psychic paralysis. In Crane's day, it was his subject that troubled readers; in ours, it is his method. Thus, while the modernist may find passing amusement in those early critics who were put off by Crane's obsession with the “depraved” and “disgusting”¹—vindication, as it were, for Richard Watson Gilder²—he can also be less than convinced by Richard Chase, R. W. Stallman, and others who have found effectiveness in Crane's tendency to conventionalize and simplify, a technique augmented in the 1896 revision, and from...