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Stephen Crane's Maggie - Girl Of The Streets

The term vernacular derives from the Latin root meaning native. Its modern meaning generally refers to the native language of a place(1) or the common speech of ordinary people. While certainly a practice with ancient roots in the Old World and the East, it’s generally accepted that Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” introduced the form to U.S. fiction readers. His accurate phonetic spellings of the slave Jim and young Huck’s dialogues brought them to life and removed contrivance and unnecessary artifice. Vernacular usage later became quite prevalent in the twentieth century as evidenced in such works as “Catcher in the Rye”, “A Confederacy of Dunces” and in the UK, “The Ginger Man.” The word vernacular is closely related to “slang” and “dialect”, both of which may be best thought of as sub varieties. Slang is often associated with street talk and dialect usually refers more to geographical peculiarities of speech. Though not an absolute, the vernacular is usually associated with the lower or working classes, their speech patterns being the farthest removed from standard written English. When an author chooses to use vernacular in his fiction, a sociological interpretation is usually unavoidable.

Stephen Crane’s “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” uses vernacular in a dramatic and forceful way. With the brutal backdrop of fictional places like Rum Alley and Devil’s Row of Manhattan’s Bowery or Lower East Side, the dialogue of its denizens is phonetically drawn to recreate the authentic speech of this burgeoning late nineteenth century slum. The bizarre spelling can make reading difficult but it takes one right to the heart of the characters. Consider the following passage. "I met a chump deh odder day way up in deh city," he said. "I was goin' teh see a frien' of mine. When I was a-crossin' deh street deh chump runned plump inteh me, an' den he turns aroun' an' says, 'Yer insolen' ruffin,' he says, like dat. 'Oh, gee,' I says, 'oh, gee, go teh hell and git off deh eart',' I says, like dat. See? 'Go teh hell an' git off deh eart',' like dat. Den deh blokie he got wild. He says I was a contempt'ble scoun'el, er somet'ing like dat, an' he says I was doom' teh everlastin' pe'dition an' all like dat. 'Gee,' I says, 'gee! Deh hell I am,' I says. 'Deh hell I am,' like dat. An' den I slugged 'im. See?" (2). This is the character Pete bragging to his friend Jimmy while in the presence of possible love interest Maggie. The monologue is particular to the time, place and social class. The main characters are most likely British immigrants or possibly from a Northern European country. We can discern this by the derogatory ethnic names used for others. Fairly early on we know the main characters aren’t Italians or Irish by the frequent use of slang terms for those nationalities. The following passage illustrates this: ’"Why," he said, referring to a man with whom he had had a misunderstanding, "dat mug scrapped like a damn dago. Dat's right. He was dead easy. See? He tau't he was a scrapper. But he foun' out diff'ent! Hully gee."’(3) This brings a gritty realism to the scene that conventional spelling cannot. We can practically hear the braggart, thus the reader is brought into this world of poverty, ignorance and violence. Ethnic tensions, stereotyping and tribalism were mainstays of the slum and Standard English would only evoke an artificial or wooden feeling. The vernacular makes the reader feel part of the scene. Here Crane realistically portrays a world that may have been unknown to the reading public. The language reinforces this dark world, ironically, a world quite similar to the London East End of the same period. These are the times of Jack the Ripper and the world’s first urban slums. Here, “unfortunate’s”, often immigrants, in search of a better life, found themselves in dirty crowded tenement houses populated with foreigners. The struggle for survival was the only constant and self worth was often determined by such low brow achievements as fighting or the status of one’s few material possessions. Crane also used the vernacular to show the relative inanity and meaninglessness of many of the day’s common phrases. The same words might be used in response to many different queries, situations and circumstances. Here the vernacular reveals an overuse of tedious clichés and how they prevent meaningful communication. These phrases, more than anything, display an attitude. Crane makes this clear at the end of Chapter five with this comment by the narrator about the ruffian Pete. ‘When he said, "Ah, what deh hell," his voice was burdened with disdain for the inevitable and contempt for anything that fate might compel him to endure.’(4)

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