Interview Questions

1)  If you were to teach this book using only one literary element, which one would it be and why? What made this element stand out about the rest?

If I was to teach this book using only one literary element I would use point of view because from the very beginning of the book Crane allows the reader to see different points of view from different people in the community. I believe the beginning and ends of books tells you everything you need to know to understand the book as a whole.

        

         

2)  At what point do you think Maggie lost her innocence, and how did that change her from beginning to end?

Maggie lost her innocence when she started prostituting. That changed her from beginning to end because in the beginning she was almost like the chosen one she was very different from her loud fighting brother she was more quit and laid back; however when she started prostituting her entire mind set changed.

3) If you had never read the book before, what mood would the first chapter give off? What about the last? How do you think Crane successfully gives off each of these moods (basically, what did he do differently from the first to the last chapter?)

The first chapter would give me a weird feel of the book, I wouldn’t be sure if I want to continue reading the book or not its gives me little rascals with a mixture of Oliver twist in sense where fighting is exciting but the way Crane describes the fighting isn’t intriguing enough. In the last chapter I felt the same way I feel like Crane doesn’t use enough descriptive words in order for me to truly engage with the text. 

If these questions did not produce the elaboration I was hoping for, or the support from the text, how do I incorporate them into my paper?

A Unit on Maggie

     When we first started reading this novel, I was fooled into thinking it was a story of hope and the magic of perseverance. It would be an understatement to say that I was completely wrong. Once I finished the book and realized that it wasn't a story of conquering a classist society, the entire book shifted from hopeful to forlorn. So instead of teaching Maggie in a unit focusing on poverty or global issues as the essential questions, it would do more for students to read the book thinking about smaller topics or tools that lend to the essential questions about survival of the fittest. Why wasn't Maggie one of the strong? What made her weak? Why was Maggie considered a "flower blooming in a puddle of mud?" Does morality make us weak?
      As we read Maggie for this class, I don't feel like we had any specific essential questions to keep in mind as we discussed, read, and lead activities. Conversely, I also feel that covered a broad range of them, because it was up to each of us to pick what we thought the text was applicable to. What we focused on, for the most part, was how we would build on this for our own classroom (which could be an essential question, but not in an ELA classroom). From this unit intro, I would define "essential question" as a frame work question(s) that is the main focus students should keep in mind and pull details the pertain to it. These questions should also inspire a certain degree of reflection, and encourage students to make as many self to text/world connections as possible.
       By using Darwinism as the main focus of the text, using subjects other than English becomes possible. Science and history can be used to relate different types of "artifacts" that are brought into lessons. Also, by asking what makes Maggie weak, we can explore issues like morality and hope. Since both of those issues are subjective and will illicit different definitions from each student, a great deal of reflection is required for students to fully fathom what they mean. Like in our discussions about nobodies and somebodies, there is no one true definition. By using the broad theme of survival of the fittest, a few different subcategories can be explored while still supplementing the former. Morality, by definition, is different for each person, so I hope that these essential questions would help students to critique their own morals. I would also like for them to think about how Maggie would have felt today, in a society that holds little value in morals, and survival of the fittest seems to be the motto of even the politicians.

Sensory Details in Maggie

           "In a hilarious hall there were twenty-eight tables and twenty-eight women and a crowd of smoking men. Valiant noise was made on a stage at the end of the hall by an orchestra composed of men who looked as if they had just happened in. Soiled waiters ran to and fro, swooping down like hawks on the unwary in the throng; clattering along the aisles with trays covered with glasses; stumbling over women's skirts and charging two prices for everything but beer, all with a swiftness that blurred the view of the cocoanut palms and dusty monstrosities painted upon the walls of the room. A bouncer, with an immense load of business upon his hands, plunged about in the crowd, dragging bashful strangers to prominent chairs, ordering waiters here and there and quarreling furiously with men who wanted to sing with the orchestra.
           The usual smoke cloud was present, but so dense that heads and arms seemed entangled in it. The rumble of conversation was replaced by a roar. Plenteous oaths heaved through the air. The room rang with the shrill voices of women bubbling o'er with drink-laughter. The chief element in the music of the orchestra was speed. The musicians played in intent fury. A woman was singing and smiling upon the stage, but no one took notice of her. The rate at which the piano, cornet and violins were going, seemed to impart wildness to the half-drunken crowd. Beer glasses were emptied at a gulp and conversation became a rapid chatter. The smoke eddied and swirled like a shadowy river hurrying toward some unseen falls. Pete and Maggie entered the hall and took chairs at a table near the door. The woman who was seated there made an attempt to occupy Pete's attention and, failing, went away."

          Sensory details fall under the literary element of "imagery," and authors must appeal to all five senses if they wish to produce a vivid image in readers' minds. In the first part of chapter fourteen of Maggie: Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane uses two condensed paragraphs (that don't quite fit in with the choppy and curt nature of the rest of the novel) to get readers believing that they are at this orchestra performance. By overloading this passage, Crane assails each of our senses - sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell - with tiny, yet significant details that convey the discourse that Maggie is feeling in this scene. As we read the long, windy sentences that fill this passage, our head starts to spin with all the details we are getting. We begin to smell the smoke cloud, and taste its density on our tongues as Crane goes into more details about it. The waiters dashing around the seas of flailing limbs make it so our minds' eyes can't fathom what they are seeing through this cloud, and we hear the wailing woman singing along with the music that's increase in pace increases the heartbeat.
       From this passage, we understand that Maggie is feeling a little frazzled at her boisterous and overbearing surroundings. By using our own senses to his advantage, Crane was able convey a sense of wariness by giving us solid, corporeal details to experience with Maggie. It is my opinion that this passage was meant to also give us a sense that Maggie does not feel safe in this setting. Crane uses words like "swooping down like hawks," "monstrosites," and "impart wildness" to issue a sense of danger, like she is surrounded by vicious creatures ready to attack. This ties into the theme of the book about survival of the fittest. In my interpretation of this passage, I would assume that Maggie no longer feels like she is one of the "fittest" in this social circle. If city living in the 1890's was like living in a jungle, then this was the watering hole where everyone strutted their stuff for power and prominence. I think that this is where Maggie starts to realize that there is no beauty in trying for the life she wants to live, and the remainder of the book has a more feral, animalistic feel than the hopeful beginning we read.

#hashtag

 Point of View
"She vaguely tried to calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have looked down upon her."
 
#whatevenisfeminism #mancrushmonday

Foreshadow

"Say, Mag," said Pete, "give us a kiss for takin' yeh teh deh show, will yer?"

Maggie laughed, as if startled, and drew away from him.

"Naw, Pete," she said, "dat wasn't in it."

"Ah, what deh hell?" urged Pete.

The girl retreated nervously.

"Ah, what deh hell?" repeated he.

Maggie darted into the hall, and up the stairs. She turned and smiled at him, then disappeared."

#allnetflix #nochill #ourfirstdate

"As she passed them the girl, with a shrinking movement, drew back her skirts."

#dirty #lowestofthelow

Symbolism
"She envied elegance and soft palms. She craved those adornments of person which she saw every day on the street, conceiving them to be allies of vast importance to women."

#goals #startedfromthebottom


Irony of Situation
"Shady persons in the audience revolted from the pictured villainy of the drama. With untiring zeal they hissed vice and applauded virtue. Unmistakably bad men evinced an apparently sincere admiration for virtue.
The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the oppressed. They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers. When anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned. They sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin."

#lookinthemirror #hypocrites

Motif

"The mother and the son began to sway and struggle like gladiators.

"Whoop!" said the Rum Alley tenement house. The hall filled with interested spectators."

#likemotherlikeson #Spartacus

Oxymoron

"The rage of fear shone in all their eyes and their blood-colored fists swirled."

#youmadbro?

Ekphrasis

"A ballad singer, in a dress of flaming scarlet, sang in the inevitable voice of brass. When she vanished, men seated at the tables near the front applauded loudly, pounding the polished wood with their beer glasses. She returned attired in less gown, and sang again. She received another enthusiastic encore. She reappeared in still less gown and danced. The deafening rumble of glasses and clapping of hands that followed her exit indicated an overwhelming desire to have her come on for the fourth time"

#storyofmylife

The Streets of the late 19th Century

       19th century culture is something we can only gain insight to through art. Since the oldest living person on the planet was born in 1900, we are officially out of people that were able to experience any part of that century. However, because George Bellows was born in 1882 and painted Both Members of This Club in 1909, we can count this piece as a primary source of the time period. Maggie, Girl of the Streets can also be grouped in this category because it was published in 1892. Unlike Bellows, Stephen Crane did not live a tough life in the harsh streets of NYC, and could only

Both Members of This Club - George Bellows (1909)

 pretend to know the inner struggle of city life.   So one obvious connection that students will be able to draw is that both of these works can be considered primary sources, and come from the same time period. They would have to dig a little deeper than surface value, however, to find more than just time period in common.
      After doing a little bit of research on Bellows, and the painting itself, I found that this painting was inspired by the time in New York when a corrupt power had made public boxing illegal, closing it to any fighter that couldn't gain access. Over 15 years before this was painted, the very opening scene of Maggie is a fight between children in an alley. I would like for my students   to be able to draw the connections between what class these boxers probably come out of, and the class of the "urchins" we see brawling in the book. The violent tendencies portrayed by the lower class in the novel, and how far they escalated, were probably what caused boxing to be banned in the first place. So unless fighters were sanctioned by the same, or two different, athletic facilities they would not be allowed to fight. This is where the phrase "both members of this club" comes from. When two fighters from the same athletic facility participated in a bout, the announcer would say this phrase to indicate the sanction of the fight. I would also like for my students to draw this similarity from the context research. Children would fight in the streets of New York, but it was mostly overlooked by the public because they appeared to be "members of the same club." But only the parents would know the difference between the urchins (the orphans) and their own children, thus breaking up the fight. It is also important to realize that the parental fighting was viewed as sanctioned because they were also members of the same team.
          I think it would also be important for students to think about whats going on with the crowd around the boxers in the painting. The expressions on the faces of the fight watchers are almost sadistic in their enjoyment. Aside from the fighters, what I notice most about the painting is the one cluster of bright fans beneath the black fighter. The faces, and the posture, of anticipation is reminiscent of the blood-lust experienced in the days of the gladiators. I would want my students to understand these fighting incidents as a way to claim territory and exercise dominance. But as it was for the gladiators and the boxers, fights are only sanctioned for the benefits of others. When the children fight for themselves, it is broken up, but the parents are allowed to keep going because they are "members of the same club."

Classic vs. Contemporary Literature

      To say that my tastes have changed would be an understatement. In high school, I refused to even open Great Expectations because I was so opposed to being forced to read classic literature. I was the just like every other teen girl at the time, caught up in the craze of the Twilight saga, searching hungrily for the next addition to my collection of supernatural romance books. Prior to my senior year and my introduction to John Steinbeck, I couldn't be bothered to open a classic. As I reflect on it now, I think that maybe it was because the language was so intimidating and the metaphorical weight was so formidable that I couldn't comprehend them. On top of that, teachers before senior year made it so tedious for us to make it through a novel that they ruined to impact a great novel can have. When it took is three months to make it through Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade, none of us ever wanted to pick up another Shakespeare play (which I actually love now, thanks to Levitan). I believe taking too much time to focus on the insignificant details, or trying to interpret themes before we know the whole book, takes away from the overall power and point a novel can have.
     Since coming to college, however, I feel that I have grown into a more mature reader. Not that I have as much time to read for leisure, but I find that I enjoy assigned books more because I can better understand them. As I began to read Maggie: Girl of the Streets, I found it was a little difficult to understand the dialect in which the characters speak. Having only read the first three chapters, I could see this posing a problem in the classroom because it is far different from how we speak today and students might interpret this to mean that the problems in the novel aren't still relevant today. As a teacher, it would be my job to break the wall that this dialogue creates and bring the students into Maggie's world. Just because I don't find it a particularly hard read doesn't mean that others won't, and just because I cannot relate to Maggie's situation personally, doesn't mean that there won't be students who can. To address these challenges in a modern day classroom, I would think it would be beneficial to approach the novel by discussing current poverty and child abuse rates, and helping them to understand that a lot of these problems still exist today. I also think it could be a good idea to talk about how the laws have changed from Maggie's time to our time, and how these laws are enforced and rights are protected.
    By approaching the novel in those ways provides a great opportunity for the students to find interesting ways to connect to classic literature. Instead of them just finding superficial connections with a character, this approach enables them to make connections between their world and the world portrayed in the book. These approaches provide the chance for students to start researching the time period in which a novel takes place, helping them enhance their connection building skills. Maggie itself provides the unique opportunity for students to begin exploring their own class consciousness and their awareness to the world around them. When thought about in the context of the modern world, there is a place for some classic literature in a classroom. It depends on the teachers ability to get students interested and how well they can bring it back to the students' lives. But there is also a place for good contemporary novels, too. Like we discussed, I also hope to one day include YA literature in my classroom, but I feel that Jago treated the subject as if there were no novels published more recently that are worth replacing the classics. Even some post-modern classics can have their time to shine. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next by Ken Keasy found its way into my senior English class and evoked such a strong reaction in my class that no one failed a single assignment. Like I said before, it just depends on the teachers ability to get the students excited about reading.