Maggie: Girl of the Sims (Short Version)

Literary Realism and Naturalism

About the article-Maggie : A Girl of the Streets

 In this article, Maggie and her brother Jimmie, live in a  world full of degradation and violence. 
Their father is an alcoholic and their mother, Mary always scolds them when she is unhappy. 
Since their parents don't take any responsibility and duty for them, Jimmie become violent and vicious while he grows up.
Their living environment influence them deeply and lead them to totally   different future.


Maggie, wants to escape from their home and then decides to live with her boyfriend, Pete, together. 

Since Maggie's poor family background, Pete is convinced to leave Maggie. 

Finally, Maggie has no place to go. She is rejected by her mom and abandoned by Pete. Therefore, she becomes a prostitute and die soon in the end. 

This story reveals that Maggie's any  decision may lead her to different consequences. If she didn't leave home, or if she didn't fall in love Pete, maybe her life will totally be different. 

However, since it's a story  about the Realism. Human's decision and living environment determine their fate. 

In this story, Maggie's whole life is a misery but it really show that how the environment affect her and sway her fate. 

Literary Naturalism

Literary Naturalism

According to this video, the key themes in Naturalism are SURVIVAL and DETERMINATION. Often, the conflict is the "fight for survival". The conflicts may be "man vs nature" or "man vs man(himself)".

Also, Naturalism believed that life is determined by "ENVIRONMENT", "HEREDITY" and "CHANCE". In other words---Only the fittest survive.

It's the New Era of JRE with AL

Hooray~ Finally the blog of our group has born!!
Why are we the 'JRE'? Easy. It stands for 'January', 'Rita', and 'Emily'.
Since we don't have a group number, so we just decided to name the group name by ourselves.

We wanted to have the topic of Asian Immigrants at first, but there's too many groups doing the same topic, so we decided to change and focus on Naturalism.
We will try to relate naturalism and American Literature in our group project.

So, keep an eye on us as we will update the blog once in awhile to report our project progress.

- January -