Maggie is a lady who does not give way to anybody or does not let anyone else takeover her life not even her father or husband Willie at first. She makes Willie marry her to show her father she is not an old maid at the age of thirty and she does not care about classes, she does not care that Willie is a low class person who works in her fathers shop for eighteen shillings a week. Also to verify that point she does not mind wearing a brass ring, she knows they can’t afford much and she knows that’s all they need to get married, a ring of some sort. She is a strong woman and when her father tells her sisters to get married then changes his mind Maggie says I don’t allow people to change their minds. What kind of person can say that everyone has a right to change their minds if they have a justified reason. “I don’t allow folks to change their minds. He made his choice. He said get married, and you’re going to.”
In this play Maggie transforms Willie, more than anyone else. She transforms him from a man who worked under her, to her husband and fellow partner to someone who was above him in the end (Hobson). Willie took orders from everyone when he worked at Hobson’s but Maggie makes him believe he is more than a piece of dirt. The best example of this is when the doctor tells Hobson that he needs someone to look after him, preferably a woman. So Hobson asks Maggie and Willie to come and live with him, and help him run the business, but Hobson says to Willie if you come back here I will pay you your old wage of 18 shillings a week, but the new transformed clever Willie under the influence of Maggie says NO. Willie says I will only come here if you change that sign on the shop to Mossop and Hobson, but Maggie and Hobson both think he is going a bit to far but he says to Hobson if you don’t agree to this I am going back home. “Mossop and Hobson or it’s Oldfield Road for us, Maggie.” By living with Maggie he has learnt how to take control of a situation, he has learnt that people in life are going to push you around but you have to stand up for yourself. Maggie has also taught Willie how to read and write, as he was not able to when he was at Hobson’s before.
The point in the play in which I think she takes the most control in is when Ada Figgins comes into Hobson’s, she has come in the shop to give Willie his dinner. She is Willie’s landlord and she is also in love with Willie and Willie loves her back in return. But Maggie is in between them, Maggie wants her own way and she says to Ada that Willie is not worth it and she says to Willie, Ada is not worth it he is a scheming hussy, Maggie has to right to say this to a girl she has never seen before and who is in love with Willie. “The scheming hussy. It’s not that sandy girl who brings your dinner.” Maggie is scaring Ada off because she wants to marry Willie as he is a magnificent shoe maker and also to prove that she is still capable of getting married and that she is not an old maid at the age of thirty to her father.
To show Maggie is a smart woman she set up her father, one day after he was coming home from the Moonraker’s pub he was drunk and he falls into the cellar of a man called Freddie who eventually marries Vicky. They are going to get some money off Hobson because he has not paid them wages for the time they have worked in his shop and also because they are going to be getting married (Alice and Vicky) so Maggie helps them to raise money for their weddings even though they have rich husbands. When Hobson fell into the cellar of the corn merchant they were going to accuse him of breaking some off the corn sacks and they were also going to accuse him off spying. Maggie set all this up because she cares about her sisters, but she also cares about her father even though it may not seem like it, but eventually she does go back and lives with him and helps him run his business with Willie by her side.
So as you can see, Maggie is a pushy sales woman who always gets her way she does not care if it is men or women that she is talking to or their ages, she does not show much respect to elders like her father. She makes people buy something every time they come into the shoe shop even if they have just come to browse or chat to a member of staff. It shows when she leaves the business how much she is missed because there is no business in the shop and Vicky and Alice do not know what to do because they have never been in a situation like that before, because Maggie was always in control. Also when she made Willie marry her to show her father up and not for love, but when she made Albert Prosser carry a wheel barrow across town that showed she was a woman of steel as she made a well respected lawyer walk through the town with a wheel barrow. She also sets her father up to benefit her two sisters but on the other hand she still loves her father and goes and helps him at the end as the doctor advised her to.