As the novel opens, Jimmie, a young boy, is leading a street fight against a troop of youngsters from another part of New York City's impoverished Bowery neighborhood. Jimmie is rescued by Pete, a teenager who seems to be a casual acquaintance of his. They encounter Jimmie's offhandedly brutal father, who brings Jimmie home, where we are introduced to his timid older sister Maggie and little brother Tommie, and to Mary, the family's drunken, vicious matriarch. The evening that follows seems typical: the father goes to bars to drink himself into oblivion while the mother stays home and rages until she, too, drops off into a drunken stupor. The children huddle in a corner, terrified.
As time passes, both the father and Tommie die. Jimmie hardens into a sneering, aggressive, cynical youth. He gets a job as a teamster. Maggie, by contrast, seems somehow immune to the corrupting influence of abject poverty; underneath the grime, she is physically beautiful and, even more surprising, both hopeful and na?ve. When Pete--now a bartender--makes his return to the scene, he entrances Maggie with his bravado and show of bourgeois trappings. Pete senses easy prey, and they begin dating; she is taken--and taken in--by his relative worldliness and his ostentatious displays of confidence. She sees in him the promise of wealth and culture, an escape from the misery of her childhood.
There comes a night when the drunk and combative Mary accuses Maggie of going "to deh devil" and disgracing the family; Maggie runs into Pete's arms, and we are given to understand that the two are, ind
eed, sleeping together. Jimmie is furious that Pete has "ruined" his sister, and he gets very drunk with a friend and gets into a brawl with Pete. After this, Maggie leaves home and goes to live with Pete. Jimmie and Mary affect sorrow and bewilderment at Maggie's fall from grace, and her behavior becomes a neighborhood scandal. A scant few weeks after Maggie leaves home, she is in a bar with Pete when they meet Nellie, a scheming woman with a veneer of sophistication who has no trouble convincing Pete to leave Maggie. Abandoned, Maggie tries to return home, but her family rejects her.
The linear narrative now ceases, and we are given a series of scenes, arranged in chronological order but separated by passages of time. There is an interlude in which we see that Jimmie, who acts horrified at Maggie's actions, has in fact himself seduced and then abandoned at least one girl. In another brief scene, Maggie visits Pete at work, and he, too, refuses to acknowledge her legitimate claims on him. Months later, we are shown a prostitute--presumably Maggie, but unnamed--walking the streets of New York, pathetic and rejected, bound for trouble. There is a scene with Pete in a bar, badly drunk and surrounded by women; he collapses on the floor and, in his turn, is abandoned by the scornful and manipulative Nellie. Finally, the novel ends with Jimmie giving Mary the news that Maggie's dead
body has been found. Mary stages a scene of melodramatic mourning for her ruined child, which ends
with her deeply hypocritical and bitterly ironic concession: "I'll fergive her!"
CharactersMaggie  -  The novel's title character, Maggie Johnson grows up amid abuse and poverty in the Bowery neighborhood of New York's Lower East Side. Her mother, Mary, is a vicious alcoholic; her brother, Jimmie, is mean-spirited and brutish. But Maggie grows up a beautiful young lady whose romantic hopes for a better life remain untarnished. Her seemingly inevitable path towards destruction begins when she becomes enamored of Pete, whose show of confidence and worldliness seems to promise wealth and culture. Seduced and abandoned by Pete, Maggie becomes a neighborhood scandal when she turns to prostitution. Crane leaves her demise vague--she either commits suicide or is murdered. She seems a natural and hereditary victim, succumbing finally to the forces of poverty and social injustice that built up against her even before her birth. Like all the people in this short novel, she seems chiefly a type rather than an individuated character, serving to illustrate principles about modern urban life.
Jimmie -  Maggie's brother and Mary's son, Jimmie Johnson is the first character we meet in the novel, and from the start he is fighting a street battle. He grows up violent and combative, hardened against sympathy and introspection. Although he himself has seduced and abandoned women, he fails to see himself in Pete, whom he hates for seducing Maggie, and he cannot muster any sympathy for Maggie,
whom he blames, hypocritically, for bringing disgrace on the household. Unlike his na?ve sister, Jimmie has the toughness necessary to survive in the rough world of urban poverty, but this toughness seems inseparable from the casual cruelty that seems endemic to the novel's world. He survives his sister, but one senses that he will only engender the same kind of cruelty and misery that his parents engendered in him.
Mary -  Maggie's and Jimmie's mother, the alcoholic and vicious Mary Johnson is a virtual incarnation of the devil. She spends the novel shattering furniture and flying into uncontrollable rages; even in the rough-and-tumble Bowery, where we sense that drunkenness is hardly foreign, Mary is a neighborhood joke. After terrifying Maggie into fleeing from home, Mary is hypocritical enough to condemn her daughter for immorality, and crassly sentimental enough to stage an elaborate scene of mourning for the daughter she never really loved.
Pete -  A friend of Jimmie's, Pete seduces and then abandons Maggie. A bartender with bourgeois pretensions, Pete affects bravado and wealth; to the downtrodden Maggie, he seems to promise a better life. But Pete is easily drawn away from Maggie by the manipulative and relatively sophisticated Nellie. He certainly seems the villain in Maggie's story, but it is important to remember that he is only the proximate cause of her traged
y; in Maggie, tragedy is inevitable, and it waits only for human agents, of whom there are many readily available. And it is also true that Pete seems, as we first meet him, to be the product of the brutalizing atmosphere of the Bowery, shaped as much as Maggie by his surroundings. Indeed, he, too, can be considered a victim of his environment, and we see at the end, when he is abandoned by Nellie, that he, too, is an innocent despoiled by circumstance.
Nellie -  Nellie is the "woman of brilliance and audacity" who, nearly effortlessly, lures Pete away from Maggie. She promises the sophistication and worldliness that Pete craves, just as Pete represents the same things to Maggie. In the novel's penultimate scene, it becomes clear that Nellie has nothing but contempt for Pete, whom she is using for money. It seems from Maggie that only tough women like Nellie can survive male predation in the world of the Bowery.
Tommie -  Maggie's youngest brother and Mary's son. Brought up amid the curses and flying cutlery of his parents' battles, Tommie dies early in the novel.
Father  -  The father of Maggie, Jimmie, and Tommie, and Mary's husband, Mr. Johnson is known only by his last name, and dies early in the novel. In what little we see of him, he seems casually brutal to his children, even to the extent of stealing beer from his son Jimmie. Like his wife, he is an alcoholic, going to bars to escape the "livin' hell" of his home.
only girl (in the world)The old woman  -  A nameless old woman who lives in the same tenement house as Maggie's family. She befriends the children to a degree, offering Maggie shelter in her apartment after Maggie has been rejected by Mary.
Miss Smith -  Miss Smith appears abruptly in the novel during the closing scene. She helps to whip Mary up into a sentimental fit of mourning for her lost daughter, Maggie.
Billie -  A Rum Alley urchin who fights with Jimmie in the novel's first scene and who, like Jimmie, grows up to be a violent brawler. He is Jimmie's ally in the fight against Pete late in the novel.