In "Maggie: a Girl of the Streets" by Stephen Crane, disheartening images of Riis's photographs are depicted through the story of a young family struggling through life. There, life is a picture of deterioration, passivity, and despair. "From a window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid squat, ignorant stables, there leaned a curious woman. Some laborers, unloading a scow at a dock at the river, paused for a moment and regarded the fight. The engineer of a passive tugboat hung lazily to a railing and watched. Over on the Island, a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of an ominous grey building and crawled slowly along the river's bank" (Crane, 3). In this panoramic view of the setting, the darkness of life is evident; each object described is portrayed as passive, lazy, and ignorant, conveying the overall despair of the atmosphere. The characters in this passage observe; they take no actions in stopping the fight in the foreground, a sentiment mirrored in their feelings towards life in Rum Alley. Dejected, surrounded by this grayness embodying despair, the people of this society do not attempt to move on and up. They are stagnant in this life, accustomed to the ways of their world.
             Among this dreary backdrop, Crane explores the growth of a young girl, Maggie, who represents an ounce of hope as she is still young enough to dream and have faith in these desires. However, as she has never known anything but the violent and grotesque landscape and life around her, her dreams do not carry her far from home, as seen in her relationship with Pete. Though a drunken, haughty, and miscreant character, Maggie labels Pete as "the beau ideal of a man" (Crane, 19). He is Maggie's means of escaping her life: "Her dim thoughts were often searching for far away lands where, as God says, the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the trees of her dream gardens there had always walked a lover" (Crane, 19). As the ...