CHAPTER V CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION
5.1. Conclusion
After analyzing the American social condition that found in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, I have the conclusion of this thesis.
1. As a whole, Stephen Crane is successful in expressing his idea through this
novel. In the late of 19
th
century, the impact of immigration widened the discussion of race as ethnic and cultural differences became more pronounced
in a country where agricultural, industrialization, and mass production of goods all vied for labor. Capturing urban poverty of Irish neighborhoods,
Stephen Crane penned Maggie: A Girl of the Streets to chronicle the challenge of chiseling out an identity and livelihood in New York City.
2. It is certainly proved that the real subject of this novel is the city of New York
and more specifically the Bowery neighborhood. Maggie is just the title character of this novel because Crane really focuses on the social forces on the
lives of individuals. He is interested to depict the social ills of his time. He makes the city and the social problems, a subject for serious literary study. It
is inevitably that Maggie: A Girl of the Streets presented the American social condition in the late of 19
th
century. 3.
With Maggie, Crane also seems to challenge his readers to see a side of life that many did not want to see. It is because the other popular novels at the
time only describe the goodness of human nature and about the prosperity of American society. They overlook the grim poverty. It is also the affect of
popular entertainment on the morality of poor people. For Crane, the morality
Utami Anggiarini : American Social Condition In The Late Of 19
th
Century found In Stephen Crane’s Maggie…, 2007 USU e-Repository © 2009
of melodrama dominates the morality of his age. People prefer to attribute the suffering of people to moral failings instead of looking at the social
institutions which makes suffering. As a witness to the life of the Bowery neighborhood, Crane reacts by showing the real condition of New York that
inhabited by the poor, the drunken, and the desperate people blinded by hypocrisy or driven by need, profane and corrupted.
5.2. Suggestion