Jeremy Gagnon Period 9 GREEN 10/7/13 Maggie Tone Essay In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane skillfully

weaves the contrasting yet sensible tones of fearfulness and contentment. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is set in the rough and dirty tenements of the New York scrum, and revolves around an offspring of this environment who blossomed in a mud puddle, and desperately attempts to create a life for herself in this dark part of the world. In this specific passage of the story, Maggie, the main protagonist, is looking in vain for work in her self-degrading job as a prostitute. As others in the city seem to enjoy life a long distance away, Magie feels all alone in her misery. She comes to the end of her and disappears by the dark waters, possibly at the hand of an evil man. The diction heightens the tones of grim and glittered in this intriguing yet powerful passage. The grim tone is established as Maggie finds the river at her feet to be a deathly black hue, and when a nearby factory sent up a yellow glare. The word deathly, conveys the overall tone of grim, because it relates to the setting in which Maggie is wandering through during the last few minutes of her life, and describes how she may have been thinking about the outcome of her life. The word glare also assimilates with the overall grim tone, as it has to do with the harshness of Maggie's world. Like the situation Maggie is faced with now, the tone is very grim. The glittered tone is established as Maggie witnesses how joyous the rest of the world is, with its sounds of merriment, while she struggles and toils to live. The word joyous sounds Maggie hears relates to the glittered description of the far off joy of the rest of the world. But Maggie is alone in her pain, and not able to reach that happiness. The word merriment explains how people in the rest of the city rejoiced and were happy with their lives, while Maggie stands alone on the dock and looks out onto the water. This word greatly relates to the word glittered as it describes the brightness of the world beyond Maggies final world of loneliness. In conclusion, by reading this passage from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and through

Jeremy Gagnon Period 9 GREEN 10/7/13 Stephen Crane's diction, one can understand that Maggie had a very distant relationship with the joy of the world at the end of her life.