The action of Maggie: A. Girl of the Streets takes place entirely within the confines of New York's Bowery district.

Everything the characters think, say, and do is predicated on their surroundings and the facts of their daily existence. This existence is set up as being alien to most of the rest of the world. Alienation is one key to the problems Stephen Crane highlights.

The people of the Bowery are portrayed as both separating themselves and being forcibly separated from any world beyond the Bowery. They appear to have no understanding of the larger world.

They are shown as isolated, dissatisfied, ignorant of other possibilities, and uneducated. Yet, Crane tells us, the residents of the Bowery know that they have in some way been cheated.

Crane uses this isolation to create a background for examining the moral dealings of individual people as well as social...