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This essay attempts to redefine Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as a usable concept in literary studies, neither too broad nor too exclusive. Based on Foucault’s own propositions, this essay stresses two major characteristics of the notion. First, heterotopias are real space. Second, heterotopias exist in relation with other sites. When the notion is used in a literary analysis, it should focus on the relationship between heterotopic space in reality and literature as its representation. Crane’s Maggie: The Girl of the Streets showcases a use of the concept. Through Maggie: The Girl of the Streets, Crane criticizes the middle-class reformers whose architectural determinism refuses to face the real problem of the tenements: poverty. He also exposes the falsity of the middle-class morality that, as reformers believed, would save the tenement from crime, disease, and moral depravity. Maggie’s mother’s blind adoption of the middle-class sexual morality that is unfit to the reality of the tenement drives Maggie to death. Crane’s (re)creation of the tenement as a parody of the middle-class morality at stake shows how the use of heterotopia as a notion should become a starting point of discussion, not its telos.
