A Victim of Ideology - Stephen Crane's "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" and the Ideological Apparatuses

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Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1, 0, University of Marburg (Institiut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: "The Art of Fiction": American Realism and Naturalism, language: English, abstract: The main theoretical input for this paper is Althusser's landmark essay ''Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.'' In this essay, Althusser develops his theory of the Ideological State Apparatuses as crucial forces in the life of the ordinary people. I want to link the theoretical approaches to Stephen Crane's novel "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets", primarily focusing on how Althusser's Ideological Apparatuses are present within the literary action of Maggie, how Maggie and the other characters of the novel can be seen as victims of the ideological machinery. I will show in particular three of Althusser's major ISAs: the family ISA, the cultural ISA and the religious ISA and it will become clear that the propagated ideologies of the various ISAs are indeed active influences within the literary action, always affecting Maggie's fate as a literary character.