Language Use Variance in Stephen Crane's 'Maggie'

Despite the similarities in the time periods of the pieces, the use of language in them is very different. In Stephen Crane's “Maggie,” the audience is given the story of a poor family whose children grow up and experience difficulties due to their social position. As already noted, the dialog is treated in the story in a much different manner than the paragraphs which are written in a more eloquent manner. An example of this is:

A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appealing thing that he loves with a distant dog-like devotion. They had been known to overturn street-cars. Those leaping horses, striking sparks from the cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures to be ineffably admired. The clang of the going pierced his

best like a noise of remembered war. (Crane 23)
The dialog on the other hand is written not only in a way to force the reader to hear it as it would be said, but often with poor grammar. An example of this is when the character Pete is talking to Jimmie after being reunited:
“Billy gee! Dey makes me tired,’ he [Pete] said. ‘Mos’ e'ry day some farmer comes in an' tries the run deh shop. See? But dey gits t'rowed right out! I jolt dem right out in deh street before dey knows where dey is! See?” (Crane 26)
In more proper written words, one of the two problematic sentences here is, “But they gets throwed right out!”. From this, it is clear that Crane purposefully showed a disconnect between the description of the world of “Maggie,” and the spoken words of the characters. In it, the world is described elegantly amongst the more harsh dialog.
Not only does the way the dialog is used help establish the voice of the characters, but it also reveals the position Maggie and her family have in life. The description of the story by Crane shows that during the time period, there are individuals who are well spoken and may actually have the ability to change their social positions. Someone who comes from a lower social sphere may be able to fit in with a higher one if they can perhaps play the part, or offer something of value that earns them such a move. Maggie and the other characters in Crane's “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” however, do not have such ability. They are born into lives from which there is no escape. Not only are they part of the poorer social sphere, but they are also poor in both speech and education. Because of this, they do not have the competency to participate in any social sphere but the one they were born into.
In Clockwork Angel, the reader is introduced into a fantastical world of demons, and the warriors with angel blood who fight them, when she is kidnapped by two evil warlocks. Upon her rescue, Tessa is brought into the institute, where the nephilim live, to keep her safe. It is here that she and the reader are shown that despite their angelic attributes, some of the nephilim still try to maintain a life as one would expect of individuals within their culture. This is never more apparent than with the character Jessamine, who wishes only to be a proper European lady in the 1870’s.
While Clare’s use of language is at times quite modern, it has already been noted that she does attempt to make her characters feel like they come from a time of high expectations when it comes to behavior and speech. Even when paragraphs involved what one might consider everyday life during the 1870’s, Clare seems to make an attempt at sounding more eloquent than she did within the Mortal Instruments series, set in 2007, which Clockwork Angel is the prequel to. An example of such attempts is:
Thomas waited with the carriage while the girls made their promenade. As Tessa walked beside Jessamine, the other girl kept up a constant stream of chatter. They are making their way down a broad thoroughfare that, Jessamine informed her, was inexplicably called Rotten Row. Desire the inauspicious name, it was apparently the place to see and be seen. Down the center of it paraded men and women on horseback, exquisitely attired, the women with their veils flying, their laughter echoing on the summer air. (Clare 132)
Here, Clare uses words like “promenade”, “thoroughfare”, and “inauspicious” which are far more refined than Clare’s typical use of language. From this, it is clear that Clare uses the more refined language within her prose in Clockwork Angel to give the reader the sense that they are in a world with higher expectations than that of modern culture.
Unlike the way Crane uses language, Clare’s Clockwork Angel doesn’t show any disconnect between the dialog and the description of the world.

This can partiality be seen as a result of the book being set in London rather than America, like in “Maggie.” However, the character Tessa had a background similar to Maggie in a couple of ways. Tessa is also from America, and was rather poor. The reason she moves to London to be with her brother is that she sold all of her possessions to pay for her aunt’s funeral. This shows that her and her aunt had very little money to get by on. The thing that sets the two characters apart is that Tessa is educated. This fact is shown in the dialog of Tessa, as she says things like, “I'm awfully obliged to you for everything, Jessamine. Shall we return to the institute now?” (Clare 120). She is well spoken and doesn't get called out by other characters for her speech other than when using what is mentioned in the book as American phrases. This feature of the character seems to be attributed by Clare to the fact that Tessa has a love for books, which would have imparted on her the sort of eloquence that is seen in Crane's world descriptions. While Tessa is poor and begins in a similar position as Maggie, Cassandra Clare uses the character’s ability to converse on the same level with a proper lady like Jessamine to establish that she has the potential to escape from her dire social

status.
In “Maggie,” it was important for Stephen Crane to use the language of the dialog to further emphasize that the character of Maggie Johnson is doomed to a life of prostitution and subsequent death no matter what she tries to do.

She could try and marry someone who is better off, as she does with her brother’s friend Pete, but she will never succeed given the way Crane uses language within the story. Unlike Clare’s Tessa, she is not only poor, but uneducated and not well spoken. She can never pretend to be anything more than what she is, and Crane shows this fact plainly to the reader through his use of a disconnect between the dialog and the description of the

world.