Gin Lane And Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets

608 Words3 Pages
“Gin Lane” and “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” William Hogarth´s engraving “Gin Lane” depicts despair, misery, and death. This engraving shows a society where the dominant factor is gin. We also observe people dead due to starvation and people committing suicide. There is also a black dog which is a symbol of depression. In Stephen Crane´s novel “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” we read through a series of events that shows us the particular case of a family that’s evolves through alcohol issues, anger, violence and despair. The most important similarity of “Gin Lane” and “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” is the overall view of a society based on alcoholic need and violence. In addition, the both reflect the falling relationship between the children and their parents. Both Crane and Hogarth focus primarily on the degeneration of parents. Crane demonstrates a family where the parents are constantly abusing their children in a catastrophic way. For instance, the father, Mr. Johnson, is continuously expressing his wrath with violence towards his children, absorbed…show more content…
The main focus of the illustration is a woman that lets her baby fall from the stairs. This depicts the way that some mothers are not concerned for their children primarily due to alcohol, in this case specifically, gin. In addition, the woman is partially dressed and has several sores on her legs. Consequently, we can deduct that this woman is on the path of prostitution. Here we find another factor that leads us to “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets”. At the end of the novel, there is “A girl of the painted cohorts of the city [which] went along the street. She threw changing glances at men who passed her, giving smiling invitations to men of rural or untaught pattern… (Crane 56)” Even though the author does not say that this girl, who is described as a prostitute, is Maggie, the reader is more likely to think
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    Stephen Crane, in his novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets clearly states the way he thinks about poverty at least in his time of living which actually relates to William Hogarth an artist that interpret his ideas of poverty very well this makes them converge in similar themes that they use across their lives. Many people such as Alice Hall argue that Crane actually used some of Hogarth’s paintings (Gin Lane in particular) to inspire his story novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets As stated previously some

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