MAGGİE THE GİRL OF THE STREETS
...e modern theories of deviance, capitalists look for the cheapest way for producing in order to increase their profit and capitalism pressures unemployed people to become deviants (Greenberg qtd.in Thio, 18) This situation occured in America because people who had no job because of capitalism tried to find new ways to earn money and they had to do some deviant acts since they couldn’t get money by normal ways. Especially most women had to be a prostitute in order to survive and earn money. That was also the way finally Maggie chose. So we can say that Maggie who need to earn money have to be a prostitute because of the economical conditions of the 19th century America. Bad family relations, which are related to economical conditions, is the other factor that determines the life of Maggie and makes her a deviant. Maggie grows up in a bad family environment and the members of her family have got some deviant acts. Her father and mother (Mr. and Mrs. Johnson) are both unemployed and alcoholics. Also Maggie has a brother whose name is Jimmie.. Both Maggie and Jimmie don’t love their mother and they are scared of her too much since their alcoholic mother has got uncontrollable rages when she is drunken and apply violence on them. We understand that situation from this sentence in the book: “When she drops off into a drunken stupor, the children huddle in a corner and terrified”(chapter III, p.15). Also while their mother have uncontrollable behaviors, as it is written on the 3rd chapter of the book: “ The eyes of both were drawn, by some force, for they thought she need only to awake and all fiends would come from below.” We can say that according to them their mother is a “virtual incarnation of the evil.”(http://www.sparknotes.com) Beside the deviant acts of her mother, Jimmie is a rough boy who has also got deviant acts. We meet him at the very beginning of the novella and we see him fighting in the streets with some boys, he has also fights in the streets and as it is written on the book “after a time his sneer grew so that it turned its glare upon all things. He became so sharp.”(p.17) His sneer also turns to Maggie and he treats her with a big cruelty just as Mrs. Johnson. As a result Maggie who grows up in such a bad family environment, try to find a new way for herself to have a better life. As wee see in the 12th chapter of the book, while Maggie is talking about her home life she is telling the difficulties that she had to combat in order to obtain a degree of control in her house. (P.49) So we understand that she isn’t happy in her family environment and because of that she leaves the home and goes to the way that will lead her the way of being a prostitute. As we see, bad family relations, which cause Maggie to leave the home, is the other reason for Maggie to become a deviant. In addition to these external factors that affect the life of Maggie, also the personal traits of her lead her to the wrong way and cause her becoming a deviant. By contrast to her difficult and squalor life conditions, Maggie grows up a beautiful young girl “whose romantic hopes for a better life remain untarnished”(www.sparknotes.com). The romantic and naive character of Maggie handicaps her ability to see the real world clearly. She is in love with Pete who is a bartender and bourgeois man and a friend of Jimmie and, he seduces Maggie. We see the thoughts of Maggie about Pete on the 5th chapter of the book: “Maggie perceived that here was the beau ideal of ideal of man. Her dim thought were often searching for far away lands where as Gods says, the little hills sing together in the morning-under the trees of her dream- gardens there had always walked a lover.”(p....