Maggie Book

What men love is sluts. Show a man a poor innocent pretty young girl forced by circumstance or evil into prostitution and he cannot wait to start sighing and what-a-pitying and that-poor-waifing and but-what-was-she-wearinging and it's liable to get pretty maudlin in here by the time she dies. (Wait, she dies? Of course she dies, sluts always die.)

This one, though, is special: this is a landmark in the genre of young sluts, or anyway of realistic novels. It was written in 1892 by Stephen Crane, whom you know from his book Red Badge of Courage, which you read in ninth grade for some reason. Maggie was his first novel, and it's a landmark because, as opposed to, say, Moby-Dick, it's about real people who do real things, and specifically Crane is trying to show how Maggie's environment - her poverty and her alcoholic, abusive family - left her on the highway to degradation with no exits. Which, again, like, that's a noble idea but can no one think of any way to make that point that doesn't involve sluts?

Give Crane credit, he did his research: his life partner was a for-real brothel madam. He caused a scandal by appearing in court to defend a different prostitute. But you won't get any of that compassion from this book, which presents all its doomed and uneducated characters with a curious load of sarcasm and contempt. They do things like have a dim idea it perhaps "wasn't common courtesy for a friend to come to one's house and ruin one's sister." It may be a landmark, but in the pantheon of Slut Literature there's more sympathy in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders or Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess, both written almost 200 years earlier, and for that matter in Fanny Hill which is actual porn.

Stephen Crane is a great writer, in his way. He's a great describer of things. The opening to Red Badge of Courage is incredibly powerful. His short story Open Water, based on his own experience of getting shipwrecked and stranded in a rowboat for 30 hours, is basically perfect. But Crane more or less sucks at people: he can't do character arcs and he has no feel for psychology. That makes Maggie, where the whole goal is to describe how a nice person could end up a prostitute, basically a lost cause. The theory here is called naturalism - that idea that one's environment determines one's character - and this is the first American example of it. It's sortof a subgenre of realism, and it was defined by the mighty French author Emile Zola, and once you start comparing Crane to Zola...Crane looks like a shabby slut indeed. Of course - growing up amongst metaphor warriors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, what chance did he have?