Psychological Moralities of the Slum

Abstract At this point one is perhaps tempted to conclude that Riis and Crane reject harsh moralism and bring moral conceptions about the poor in line with psychological facts. This is how we often view these writers, and this is how we normally imagine psychology: as an amoral knowledge that allows us to lower our ethical demands to a realistic level. But in fact, psychology ceases to be amoral the moment it becomes either normative or prescriptive, and Riis and Crane do not simply lower or discard traditional moral expectations in light of psychology. Crane’s psychology is normative, and Riis’s is both normative and prescriptive: they both assert new ethical objectives. Riis finds in the tough the “hopeful symptom” of pride and imagines social programs built around its cultivation. Crane faults the Bowery for its “cowardice” and praises “inward confidence.” And one does not have to have read Crane’s letters to conclude that the characters in Maggie are too willing to “be knocked flat and accept the licking”: the novel strongly implies that something is wrong with Maggie’s extreme self-doubt, just as it indicates that Jimmie’s and Pete’s relentless self-promotion has something unseemly about it.