Dysfunctional Family in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Street = Dysfunctional Family in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Street

This research aims to explain the form of dysfunctional family and its impact on Maggie’s character in Stephen Crane's novel Maggie: A Girl of the Street. The novel tells about Maggie, a young girl growing up in the slums of New York, who falls into unfortunate circumstances due to poverty and family neglect. In analyzing the dysfunctional family in this novel, the writer used a structuralism approach that emphasized the intrinsic analysis of literary works. The intrinsic elements of literary works consist of plot, character, characterization, setting, and theme. The main data was taken from Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Street novel. The writer applied a qualitative descriptive method, which is a research method that uses qualitative data and describes it descriptively. The data was described in dialogue between characters or paragraphs that tell a scene. The result of this research suggests that the types of family dysfunction experienced by the Johnson family include chronic conflict family, dominant-submissive household by the wife or mother, and emotionally distant families. Living in a dysfunctional family impacts Maggie’s character in the form of uneducated, loneliness, bad behavior, feelings of envy towards other people’s lives, low self-esteem and self-confidence, poor relationships between family members due to economic problems, and mental health issues.

Keyword : Family, Dysfuntional Family, persinality