I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of 'identity' and 'culture' in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane's short story 'Manacled' from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people.'4 Crane intended Maggie to convince his audience that the lives of the working poor in New York's Bowery district were greatly influenced by the world they inhabited, and that middle-class readers should reconsider some of the value judgments they impose on the working poor. In 1893 when Stephen Crane wrote to his friend and fellow author Hamlin Garland about Maggie,2 he enclosed the now famous description of his intent 'to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless,'3 and his hope was that Maggie would persuade his audience to make 'room in heaven for all sorts of souls. Alcohol and its impact is an inescapable part of the characters' environment, and this environment and its influence on a person's life was one of Crane's more pressing concerns when he penned Maggie. Alcohol is symbolically represented in the street names around her house both her parents are constantly inebriated, her lover is a bartender, and even her final sexual partner is apparently drunk.

Alcoholism and intemperance permeate every aspect of the titular Maggie's world.

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