The Engineered Desire: Systemic Exploitation in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets’ Tragedy

This study examines Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, arguing that Maggie’s motivated behaviors are systematically engineered by capitalist culture rather than by merely natural drives. The study asserts that Maggie’s engineered desire is the product of a capitalist social environment and market values. Thus, her motivated behaviors are largely mimetic. For Maggie, Pete is the socially approved mediator of her engineered desire. With Pete, she finds herself caught in the illusion of the late nineteenth-century urban landscape, which advertises consumerism through fashion and elegance. Clothes generate consumer desire that draws Maggie into the pursuit of happiness she observes in Pete, and in the process, she loses her identity. Ultimately, she becomes a scapegoat for these engineered desires. She falls victim to the judgmental standards of capitalist culture and religious morality. In her tragedy, she passes from individual existence to anonymous subjecthood through an engineered social structure, illustrating the psychological costs of a market-driven existence.