One approach you could take in answering this question might be to think about the characters' names. When, in Chapter 17, the prostitute whom the reader may take to be Maggie accidentally bumps into a man on the street, he says, "Hi, there, Mary. I beg your pardon! Brace up, old girl." It is possible that we are intended to imagine that Maggie, in her degraded condition, has come to resemble her mother, physically and perhaps morally. But another option should be presented. If Mary can be seen in this novel as a devilish antithesis to the "blameless" Virgin Mary--although, of course, if you embrace the theory that this novel blames all sins on social circumstance, Mary might be as innocent as the Virgin Mary herself, her misdeeds the result of inevitable circumstance-- then Maggie can perhaps be seen as an incarnation of Mary Magdalene, the Christian Bible prostitute who repents and becomes a devout disciple of Jesus. In this approach, Crane is not tying her to her mother but rather distinguishing her: she is another, more worthy, Mary. Of course, Crane does not resolve the ambiguity surrounding the many possible meanings of this chapter--this is part of the novel's supple intelligence.
This novel seeks to portray the streets honestly, and this means adopting the rhythms of street talk and its slang. But there is more here. Readers may notice, as they progress through the novel, that when characters speak there is usually a great deal of sound, but very little actual meaning. The characters tend to speak in what the writer Jayne Anne Phillips characterizes as "code phrases," and in bluster that is largely nonsense and slang. Their inability to break out of the slang conventions of speech is striking; when Jimmie means to express wonder at the moon, he ends up using the same expression he uses to damn his sister and others: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?" What they have to say is as much governed by language as expressed through language. They do not have complete control even over what they say, which comes back to haunt them in unexpected ways, as when Mary's "Go teh hell" is met by the narrator's smug double entendre: "She went."
Like many of the realist writers for whom he laid the groundwork, and like the great French realists and naturalists whom he followed (Balzac, Flaubert, Zola), Crane was fascinated by the urban landscape. He was simultaneously repulsed and attracted. Lower New York was the scene of so much degradation and filth, but it was also vibrantly alive, shaking constantly with violent motion. This is the Bowery given to us in