INTRODUCTION

1

BOTH as a man and as a writer, Stephen Crane was an elusive figure. For Willa Cather he was ‘the first writer of his time in the picturing of episodic, fragmentary life’,1 and for Ford Madox Ford he was a shapeshifter ‘full of fantasies and fantasticisms’ who adopted contradictory identities:

He was an American, pure-blooded, and of ostentatious manners when he wanted to be. He used to declare at one time that he was the son of an uptown New York Bishop; at another, that he had been born in the Bowery and there dragged up. At one moment his voice would be harsh, like a raven’s, uttering phrases like ‘I’m a fly-guy that’s wise to the all-night push,’ if he wanted to be taken for a Bowery tough; or ‘He was a mangy, sheep-stealing coyote,’ if he desired to be thought of cowboy ancestry. At other times, he would talk rather low in very selected English. That was all boyishness.2

Crane’s ventriloquisms are an essential part of his fiction. Throughout his brief, eclectic, uneven, but brilliantly innovative writing life, his stories focused on individuals in extreme situations and on moments in which selfhood is at once intensely felt and troublingly unstable. In the exemplary case of Crane’s second novel and most famous work, The Red Badge of Courage, an untried soldier finds his heroic idealizations replaced by confusing experiences which threaten his subjective fantasies. In a genre traditionally dominated by decisive action rather than by reflection, Crane’s Civil War story portrays a character whose erratic responses to battle are mediated by mistaken notions of self-identity.

In October 1895, when The Red Badge of Courage was first published as a single volume, Crane was 23 and something of a literary maverick, having published at his own expense a novel of New York slum life {Maggie: A Girl of the Streets) in 1893, a collection of poetry (The Black Riders) earlier in 1895, and a number of stories, newspaper reports, and sketches drawn from the various communities in which he had lived—Port Jervis, Asbury Park, the Bowery district of New York. In December 1895, with The Red Badge of Courage the focus of enthusiastic reviews in the United States and Britain and with, suddenly, a reputation and an audience, he was embarking on a new kind of adventure, sailing to Cuba on the steamer Commodore to report on the uprising against Spanish rule. The disaster which followed is depicted in ‘The Open Boat’, an intensely evoked account of endurance in the face of a natural world that is presented as uncanny, relentless, and random. Crane’s sense of the non-human as strange, indifferent, enticing, yet potentially malicious is central to his writings, and continued to haunt him even in delirium. As his common-law wife Cora reveals in a letter written on 3 June 1900 from the sanitorium in Bavaria where he died two days later: ‘My husbands brain is never at rest. He lives over everything in dreams & talks aloud constantly. It is too awful to hear him try to change places in the “open boat”.’3

Crane’s fiction deals with panic and the terror of insignificance in the face of an unyielding natural world, feelings which are channelled and diffused through rituals of belonging and group identity. In late stories such as ‘The Blue Hotel’ and the novella The Monster, the ritualistic nature of human interaction produces a volatile condition in which juvenile bravado can turn to violent prejudice and ferocious combat. And it is no accident that The Red Badge of Courage makes so many analogies between war and contact sport (‘He ducked his head low, like a football player’ (p. 95); ‘The two bodies of troops exchanged blows in the manner of a pair of boxers’ (p. 99)). Comradeship is never far away from the mass psychology of fear and mis-recognition. By drawing parallels between his characters’ righteous self-images and the repetitious structure of games, Crane exposes the contradictions between individuals’ beliefs in their own agency and the social forces which both determine and undermine those beliefs.

The Red Badge of Courage is full of such contradictions. It appears to be a straightforward account of the trials of war in the tradition of popular realism, but, like many classic American novels, its guise as an adventure story gives way to enigma. It is the most famous novel dealing with the Civil War, its depiction of battle and the psychology of the raw recruit so convincing that one veteran was moved to declare that he had been ‘with Crane at Antietam’, 4yet it was written by a man who was not born until 1871, six years after the war ended. Its subtitle, ‘An Episode of the American Civil War’, marks it out as a form of historical fiction, yet it is almost entirely without explicit reference to actual events, places, and figures. For many readers it is an outstanding tale of heroism, but it subjects heroism to an intensely ironic scrutiny. And what is now thought of as a fundamentally American book initially found its most appreciative audience in Britain. Crane spent much of the last three years of his life in the south of England, inhabiting a suburban villa in Surrey and then Brede Place, a damp Elizabethan manor house near Hastings in Sussex. Always something of a mythmaker where his own life was concerned, he toyed with trying to prove a link between his American ancestors and royal English blood and played the country squire at Brede, a role which may have been designed to confer greater legitimacy on Cora and himself in a foreign land.5 This lifestyle was far removed from his Methodist upbringing in New-Jersey and contrasted sharply with his hand-to-mouth existence in the Bowery and Tenderloin districts of New York.

At first Crane’s reputation as a novelist was greater in Britain than in the United States, both with the public and with writers and critics, by whom he was regarded less as a second-generation urban realist than as a modern. James, Conrad, Wells, and Ford all saw in The Red Badge of Courage a prototype of the modern novel, a work cutting out all superfluous rhetoric in order to concentrate every detail of relevant thought and action, a founding text of literary impressionism. According to Conrad and Edward Garnett, he was ‘the chief impressionist of the age’. Crane’s success was also commercial: sales of The Red Badge of Courage far exceeded those of anything written by James or Conrad.6 The literary context of Crane’s fiction is complex, involving as it does the distinct but interlinking modes of naturalism and impressionism. Broadly speaking, from the 1850s onwards, American naturalist writers placed a new emphasis on recording the material facts of life in the country, towns, and cities, the burgeoning pressures of industrialization, expansion, immigration, and class-conflict. Moral and political commentary was secondary to the desire for empirical fidelity, hiding social criticism behind a scientific objectivity which reduced history to a set of ‘natural’ determinations. Believing that the historical fiction of writers such as Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville relied too heavily on the structures of myth and romance, the naturalists (including Dreiser, Howells, Garland, and Norris) set out to demystify the American novel. But they were left with the consuming myth of the ‘real’ itself. The aesthetic of photographic and documentary precision went hand in hand with the tenets of Social Darwinism, bolstering the ‘brute facts’ of biological determinism, the laws of the market, and industrial mechanism. The Darwinist mantra of the ‘survival of the fittest’ pandered to the taste of a bourgeois reading public, which could justify the inequalities resulting from competition as the product of natural forces. However, the laissez-faire policies of successive governments devoted to big business created a highly unstable division between the rising middle class and an increasingly impoverished population of both urban and rural labourers. As Malcolm Bradbury writes, ‘[t]he characteristic fables of late nineteenth-century realism are tragedies of hope—fables of confinement and freedom, the confinement of a world that seems to work by logics and processes beyond the control of any individual destiny, the freedom of a world that seems open-ended to the future.’7 By the end of the century the growing pessimism of this condition registered in literary terms through a turn to irony; the tensions between the belief in progress and a growing sense of degeneration began to crack open the ideology of the realist novel, taking it to the verge of an early modernist aesthetic. Naturalistic traits can be found in their most self-consciously stylized form throughout Crane’s fiction, culminating in a stark passage in ‘The Blue Hotel’: ‘One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life’ (p. 224).

When Crane published his first novel, Maggie, William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland lauded him as a ‘pure naturalist’. Crane however felt too alienated from what he called the ‘detestable superficial culture’ of the eastern seaboard to have much in common with Howells’s consolatory ethics of provincial domesticity. What he calls his ‘chiefest desire … to write plainly and unmistakably’ and to ‘express myself in the simplest and most concise way’ has links with Garland’snotion of Veritism, ‘a form based on the moment of experience, acutely felt and immediately expressed’.8 But although Crane considered his friendship with Howells and Garland to be a profound influence on his life and work, his allegiance lay ultimately with Joseph Conrad, whose impressionist aesthetic is closer to Crane’s method than anything written by the American naturalists. In impressionist painting, the fusion of particulated images with chromatic intensity challenged the monochromatic hardness of the photograph. In a similar way, Conrad’s impressionism departs from naturalism:

To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life … to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood … to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth.9

Both naturalism and impressionism derive from a belief in the revolutionary impact of science on art, but the adoption of a luminous technique in impressionism accompanied its tendency towards abstraction, resulting in an emphasis on the transformative power of the artist rather than the naturalistic stress on recording ‘life’ as it is. Sergio Perosa has shown that, as early as Maggie, Crane’s writing fuses naturalist and impressionist modes. On the one hand, ‘the naturalistic principle of physiological heredity plays an important part in [Maggie’s] degeneration (her mother is an alcoholic); social determinism is clearly indicated (the oppressive presence of the factory); only at a later stage were the characters given names, the main purpose being at first strictly documentary. The insistence on squalid details is typical of social denunciations; the use of slang itself answers a documentary and photographic need, rather than an expressive purpose.’ On the other hand, the novel’sevocative, episodic treatment of events applies ‘the basic canons of impressionistic writing: the apprehension of life through the play of perceptions, the significant montage of sense impressions, the reproduction of chromatic touches by colourful and precise notations, the reduction of elaborate syntax to the correlation of sentences’.10 The Red Badge of Courage is an even more complex fusion of naturalist and impressionist styles than Maggie. Its descriptions of landscapes and events disconcertingly combine detailed observations with fragmented, symbolic image-complexes derived explicitly from the language of painting.11 When the lieutenant of Henry Fleming’s company is shot in the hand, his response is recorded as a poignant detail of life on the battlefield, and displays the psychological tensions in an individual displaced from his buttoned—down domestic manners. The lieutenant’s initial outburst of swearing ‘sounded conventional’, and ‘[i]t was as if he had hit his fingers with a tack-hammer at home’. Afterwards, ‘[h]e held the wounded member carefully away from his side so that the blood would not drip upon his trousers’ (p. 28). This snapshot gives way to a montage of connected but inconsistent images of battle which shift uneasily from one figurative level to another. Similes are used with the abandon of the purely evocative, as for example when the officers curse ‘like highwaymen’, display ‘the furious anger of a spoiled child’, and resemble ‘a man who has come from bed to go to a fire’ (p. 28). The governing trope, however, is of an apocalyptic deluge: the regiment cowers ‘as if compelled to await a flood’, where already officers are ‘carried along on the stream like exasperated chips’. The image of ‘exasperated chips’ is hasty and indeterminate, suddenly distancing the action. Typically, Crane can draw together in a single sentence naturalistic analogy and impressionistic metaphor: ‘A sketch in gray and red dissolved into a moblike body of men who galloped like wild horses’ (p. 28). ‘Gray’ and ‘red’ here suggest gunsmoke (or Confederate uniforms) and blood, but it hardly amounts to a depiction, and the general diffuseness is emphasized by the noun ‘sketch’. Strangely, it is not the clear image which becomes sketchy, but the haze which is said to ‘dissolve’ into a clear image. The term ‘moblike’ is pure naturalism, its moralistic connotations extended into the ‘wild horses’ simile. Eric Solomon points out that the combination ‘of a vivid, swift montage of combat impressions with a harsh, overwhelming naturalistic view of the individuals trapped in the war machine is Crane’s method of fitting the combat world into fiction’.12 But Crane goes further than that, transferring the question of what can be ‘viewed’ into a problem of the written image, of what is legible and illegible.

The novel is at its most enigmatic in its use of detached, epiphanic symbols which work as overdetermined metaphors. The most celebrated example here is ‘The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer’ (p. 52), which has been interpreted variously as a reference to the Christian Communion, as an Aztec symbol, as a type of artillery primer used in the Civil War, and as the sealing wax used on legal documents. Each of these readings allegorizes a general approach to the novel, whether religious, archetypal, or historical, and it is a mark of the complexity of Crane’s treatment of his subject that each has credence. But from a structural point of view, the crucial aspect of this image is its ambiguity, its capacity to act as a symbol bringing together a number of possible interpretations without resolving them. Like the red badge of the novel’s title (the ambiguous wound sustained by Henry Fleming), the red sun transformed into a wafer presents itself as a bogus epiphany in an instant that is both transcendent and ironic, a heightening and a lowering of emotional pressure, shifting the terms of the narrative from self-knowledge to that which cannot be known. The unknown here is perhaps death ‘itself’, the absence of self-knowing; ‘pasted’ in the sky, the sun reverberates with Jim Conklin’s uncanny collapse, as Fleming ‘gazed upon the pastelike face’ (p. 52), and anticipates the moment when the youth receives his ‘red badge’ from the rifle-butt of a fleeing Union soldier, causing his fingers to turn ‘to paste upon the other’s arm’ (p. 62).

The Red Badge of Courage strips away much of the traditional paraphernalia of nineteenth-century fiction; it is the first novel about war to dispense with a clearly recognizable plot and to do away altogether with subplots. There are no domestic interludes other than the flashback to the scene of Fleming’s parting from his mother, and this scene is directly relevant to the main action. The moral freedom of characters traditional in realist fiction is severely restricted; Crane reduces characters to nameless figures (the ‘tall soldier’, the ‘loud soldier’, the ‘tattered man’, etc.) who are entirely the products of their environment, and even the psychological impressionism invested in Fleming works as a parody of the development of consciousness found in the romantic Bildungsroman, for his ‘identity’ is shown not as a gradual movement towards self-realization but as a set of identifications with illusory concepts. The youth’s self-justification proceeds from fantasies based on literary accounts of heroism in war (‘He had imagined peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess’ (p. 5)), to attempts to sublimate cowardice (‘A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree. This would demonstrate that he was indeed a seer’ (p. 59)), to an uneasy affirmation of manhood (‘He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man’ (p. 116)). Delusion does not prevent the youth from becoming heroic in the last chapters of the novel, but Crane refuses to allow the act of heroism to be a transcendent event. When Fleming carries the regimental flag forward he is in the grip of its idealized image: ‘It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture to him’ (p. 95). Holding the flag, he leads the regiment but is excused from having to fight. And he is motivated not by patriotic rage against the enemy but by a frustrated reaction to the division general’s remark that he and his fellow soldiers are merely ‘mule drivers’: ‘the most startling thing was to learn suddenly that he was very insignificant. The officer spoke of the regiment as if he referred to a broom’ (p. 89). The narrator invokes ‘savage’ instincts at the moment the soldiers are likened to black servants (‘mule driver’ is another name for a ‘negro teamster’ such as the one who dances on a crackerbox at the opening of the novel); in the ensuing battle the men behave ‘as if they had been driven. It was the dominant animal failing to remember in the supreme moments the forceful causes of various superficial qualities’, and Fleming and his friends ‘danced and gyrated like tortured savages’ (p. 95). The act of ‘heroism’ is shown to be devoid of nobility, and is not inspired by a sense of common endeavour. In a ‘grim encounter’, Fleming and a fellow soldier rescue the Union flag from the corpse of their colour sergeant, whose ‘hand fell with heavy protest on the friend’s unheeding shoulder’ (p. 96). In the wake of this uncanny exchange, a scuffle ensues, during which Fleming snatches the prize from his friend. (The tables are turned later when, in a dash to wrest the Confederate flag from the hands of another dying colour bearer, it is the friend who wins out ‘with a mad cry of exultation’ (p. 112). Fleming is confronted by repetition and contingency as facts of the battlefield.) He wins the emblem, but the narrator makes clear the irony of the situation: ‘A dagger-pointed gaze from without his blackened face was held toward the enemy, but his greater hatred was riveted upon the man, who, not knowing him, had called him a mule driver’ (p 97)

Fleming’s courage is born of personal ire and not of the ‘great movements’ he had imagined before enlisting. Moreover, his ‘blackened’ face links him symbolically with what he rails against as a supposed lower order. As we will see in The Monster, Crane’s use of racial stereotyping is rooted in an atavistic belief in dark, instinctual forces underlying rational behaviour. Fleming’sheroic ideals are constantly subverted by a repressed and socially ‘insignificant’ otherness, black, servile, and feminine, against which his superficial identity is constructed. By divesting his account of war of romantic and sentimental fictions, Crane disrupts the classical distinction between a foreground of noble actors and deeds and a background of marginal figures with lower functions. Like the return of the repressed, the teamster, the mother with her ‘scarred cheeks’ and ‘brown face’, and the dark girl who stares ‘up through the high tree branches at the sky’, all haunt Fleming with their fragility, their uncanny presence behind his manly postures. As Amy Kaplan notes, the teamster and the dark girl mourn their own passing from the novel as figures of the domestic subplot: ‘Throughout the novel, domestic images resurface only to deflate the martial ethos rather than to validate it, as troops are compared to women trying on bonnets or to brooms sweeping up the battlefield.’13 Crane’s Manichean language (for example, the sadness of the ‘dark girl’ is contrasted with the vivacity of a ‘certain light-haired girl’ (p. 8)) threatens to shore up a primitivist typology for which these radical others are merely the shadowy projections of ‘uncivilized man’. Nevertheless, the novel’s parodie, theatrical gestures break up any simple reading favourable to a theory of archetypes, for if the youth is an example of the white, masculine self assimilating racial otherness, his accession to manhood is heavy with ironies.

The recurring appeal to ‘manhood’ shows how far Crane has taken his martial novel away from stock assumptions of self-reliance and heroic virility. After Fleming believes he has confronted death and reconciled himself to the world that ‘was a world for him’, ridding himself of ‘the red sickness of battle’, the way is open to pastoral bliss: ‘He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and eternal peace’ (p. 117). Nothing, it seems, could be simpler than this final assurance that ‘He was a man’. Yet these fresh woods and pastures new come before him only as ‘images’, projected as a future that may never come. The narrative has still not freed itself from the contingent perspective of Fleming’s own imagination, which, as has been shown time and again throughout the preceding events, is not a reliable gauge of actuality. And by this stage in the novel, ‘man’ has become a curiously neutral term, the very antithesis of virility. It is, for example, used in Chapter XIX to denote the lack of aggression and martial spirit: having been in battle ‘moblike and barbaric’ and possessed by a ‘mad enthusiasm’, the members of the regiment ‘returned to caution. They were become men again’ (p. 93). Earlier, in a scene which anticipates his own apparent accession to a new state of maturity and tranquillity, Fleming observes the changed demeanour of the ‘loud soldier’ whose swaggering bravado prior to battle has given way to humbling expressions of fear. Having come through this stage, Fleming believes that the man ‘had now climbed a peak of wisdom from which he could perceive himself as a very wee thing’ (p. 73):

The youth took note of a remarkable change in his comrade since those days of camp life upon the river bank. He seemed no more to be continually regarding the proportions of his personal prowess. He was not furious at small words that pricked his conceits. He was no more a loud young soldier. There was about him now a fine reliance. He showed a quiet belief in his purposes and his abilities. And this inward confidence inevitably enabled him to be indifferent to little words of other men aimed at him. (p.73)

However, Fleming’s altruism is merely a way of assuaging his guilt over the ignominious circumstances in which he has won his ‘red badge of courage’. He indulges in sentimental praise of the loud soldier, but goes on to exploit the soldier’s earlier moment of weakness. Rejoicing ‘in the possession of a small weapon with which he could prostrate his comrade at the first signs of a cross-examination’, and, with his ‘self-pride … entirely restored’, he feels gratified that he has ‘allowed no thoughts of his own to keep him from an attitude of manfulness. He had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man’ (p. 76). Manliness here becomes the sign of self-delusion, and the episode must be recalled when considering the youth’s final ‘enlightenment’. Fleming can be seen either as a flawed but genuine hero or as a mistaken idealist, but Crane suspends any verdict on the validity of his manliness.

The ambiguity evident here extends to Crane’s treatment of war in general. The Red Badge of Courage is neither ‘pro’war nor ‘antiwar’ the novel cannot be resolved into a testament to the character-building properties of conflict, nor can it be regarded as an ironic precursor to All Quiet on the Western Front. Just as Crane’s fusion of naturalist and impressionist modes creates an interplay of narrative clarity and obscurity in its representation of war, his overall ‘message’ is subject to contrary impulses, sometimes treading a thin line between the legible and the illegible. Even ‘The Veteran’, a story published in McClure’s Magazine in 1896 depicting Fleming in old age, is more ambiguous than it looks at first sight. The tale begins with Fleming recalling his war exploits ‘at Chancellorsville’ and ends with his heroic (or suicidal) death attempting to rescue two colts trapped in a burning barn. Once again Crane suggests the differences between the lived experience of warfare and boyish idealizations of it (this time represented in the figure of Fleming’s )young grandson) and once again the ending registers ambivalence through mannered overstatement, in a welter of purple prose: ‘The smoke was tinted rose—hue from the flames, and perhaps the unutterable midnights of the universe will have no power to daunt the color of this soul’ (p. 122).

Crane’s ambivalent presentation of war is also a feature of his journalism. His experience reporting the Graeco–Turkish War in 1897 began with a gung-ho flourish—he found the noise of musketry ‘a beautiful sound—beautiful as I had never dreamed … it had the wonder of human tragedy in it. It was the most beautiful sound of my experience, barring no symphony. The crash of it was ideal‘—and only later did he become disillusioned, emphasizing the horror of war rather than ‘glory and heroic death’.14 His coverage of the Spanish–American War of 1898 is more circumspect, and in his fictionalized account of that conflict he has a reporter declare that ‘war is neither magnificent nor squalid; it is simply life, and an expression of life can simply evade us’.15 Crane’s love for the heroic ideal was constantly undermined by his sensitivity to the squalid reality that lies behind it. This is the story told by the discontinuous narrative of The Red Badge of Courage, the negative knowledge that, if war ought not to be represented as the expression of spiritual endeavour, neither can it be represented as a journey from idealism to enlightenment in the real. Crane does not berate the condition of war as such, but instead dismantles its status as a subject for romance at a time when even uncompromising documentary evidence of the Civil War was being marketed as a grand story of chivalry. The introduction to Century Magazine’s Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1884 –7), on which Crane drew for historical detail in The Red Badge of Courage, waxes lyrical about the ‘heroic deeds’ by which ‘the nation is restored in spirit as in fact’.16 As Amy Kaplan argues, the rediscovery of the Civil War as a subject for fiction in the last decades of the nineteenth century is inseparable from the exploitation of chivalric images to arouse jingoistic fervour in the cause of territorial expansionism. In this schema, war frees men from the rational world of social restraints so that their natural barbarism may be mobilized for subduing ‘uncivilized’ nations. But by presenting Fleming as powerless in the face of the war ‘machine’, Crane exposes the falsity of the chivalric ideal.17

The Red Badge of Courage not only takes the Civil War as the basis for a symbolic treatment of war in general, however, but also bears the imprint of a particular battle: Chancellorsville. While George Dekker declares in his study of American historical fiction that ‘Stephen Crane’s powerful tale of combat initiation has virtually nothing to do with the American Civil War or any war in particular’, one recent historian of the Civil War, Ernest B. Furgurson, takes it for granted that ‘the best-known book about Chancellorsville is one in which the battle is never named: Stephen Crane’s great novel The Red Badge of Courage’.18 In many ways the battle of Craneians over Chancellorsville has never really been fought; or rather, it has been fought on oversimplified ground. It is easy enough to demonstrate that Crane had a sharp sense of historical nuance and an interest in the aesthetic potential of particular battles. He had had a military education and was accustomed to analysing battles tactically. His letters also give glimpses of his awareness of their different aesthetic possibilities (Fredericksburg is declared to be ‘the most dramatic battle of the war’).19 Near the end of his life he planned a novel to be set in New Jersey in 1775, during the Revolutionary War, and dictated notes to Cora about a range of historical material which he hoped to consult in preparation for it.20 (This planned novel is linked, like ‘The Veteran’, to The Red Badge of Courage because Crane’s scheme was to introduce the grandfather of Henry Fleming as a character amid various Crane ancestors conjured up from the family history.) His decision to ‘make my battle a type and name no names’ in The Red Badge of Courage was taken for artistic reasons, therefore, and does not necessarily mean that history has no place in the text, either for Crane or for his readers.21

Crane’s demonstrable sensitivity to historical accuracy makes it more, not less, difficult to assess the role played by the shadowy presence of history when one actually reads the novel. Questions about historical reference should not be artificially separated from other types of interpretation, but they need to be formulated more carefully than has sometimes been the case. Critics are uneasy with The Red Badge of Courage as a historical novel, as if admitting the complications introduced by history meant straitjacketing it as a novel ‘about’ Chancellorsville. Yet all paperback editions feature a Civil War scene on their covers, and some direct their readers for information to Harold Hungerford’s 1963 essay’ “That Was at Chancellorsville”: The Factual Framework of The Red Badge of Courage’. Clearly the Civil War is a factor in the way readers approach the work; and if this is so in our own time, it was even more so in Crane’s, when there was a market in Civil War tales for veterans. Crane’s letters suggest that it was exactly this highly informed readership which made him uncomfortable with names and dates. It is impossible to account for The Red Badge of Courage by pinpointing historical parallels, but it is odd that discussions of the possible historical referents of Crane’s tale should have made so little of the role of the reader. The search to identify and order information is a relevant part of a reader’s progress through the novel. The panicking soldier in retreat who hits out at Fleming and endows him with his ‘red badge’ is part of a throng bellowing ‘Where de plank road? Where de plank road?’ The language immediately registers difference. Why is this soldier marked out as ‘different’? Harold Hungerford says that it is because he is a German–American soldier of the routed Eleventh Corps at Chancellorsville. The language might also be thought stereotypically indicative of an African–American soldier, bringing in one of the moral and political issues of the war which are so routinely found absent in Crane’s novel. Already two quite distinct positions are possible, each allowable in that Crane excludes precise historical indications. What matters artistically is that the reader should wonder. Specialists in Civil War history, then and now, immediately strive to place the retreating soldier’s language, taking it in conjunction with many other circumstances to pinpoint Fleming’s position. To accept this as part of the work is not to restrict the text to a single meaning—in this respect Chancellorsville has the same status as the other imaginative, emotional, and spiritual reference-points in the novel—but to widen its suggestiveness. Many readers think of historical fiction as by definition a large enterprise, a painstaking re-creation of entire modes of language, dress, manners, ‘background’. But it can also be a small-scale enterprise. ‘Where de plank road?’ is a moment of strange recognition, a point at which an identifiable historical event suddenly becomes half-visible beyond the narrative. Readers are accustomed to seeing a web of symbolic reference in Crane’s text, and to disputing it. The historical web should be regarded and disputed in just the same way. So, when Fleming encounters a division general who has specific and individual as well as generic qualities, it may be futile, but it is not interpretatively irrelevant, to wonder who he is. The desire to place, to identify, to order experience in a way which is not Henry Fleming’s, is an intrinsic and carefully maintained quality of The Red Badge of Courage. The notes to this edition carry forward the question of historical reference, but it is vital that possible parallels with Chancellorsville should open up, not close down, the novel, and that they should be seen as one of the several schemes of reference which Crane mingles so provocatively.

2

Like Hemingway after him, Crane portrays a world of ‘men without women’. But although the women who appear from time to time in his novels and stories are positioned at the margins of a chaotic masculine society, their presence is significant and subversive. In Crane’s writing ‘being a man’ is a lonely, fragile condition, prey to mis-recognition and nostalgia, and threatened with reversion to childhood and/or savagery. Indeed, manhood is so contingent that it cannot be successfully separated from these ‘others’. Women rarely exist as characters, but stand as an abstract feminine principle which subverts masculine identity at moments of crisis. In The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming’s pastoralism is founded on maternal longing, nowhere more poignantly than in the ‘green chapel’ episode (Chapter VII). Even though Nature is figured as red in tooth and claw, a place where the insects ‘seemed to be grinding their teeth in unison’, this does not prevent the youth from imagining it to be ‘a woman with a deep aversion to tragedy’, ‘feeling that Nature was of his mind. She re-enforced his argument with proofs that lived where the sun shone’ (p. 42). As he enters the grove, the pathetic fallacy is reinforced by religious metaphor; but the expected revelation is destroyed by the discovery of a corpse ‘dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green.’ His vision of a nurturing, womb-like retreat destroyed by what the narrator calls ‘the little guarding edifice’, the youth flees from the spot ‘pursued by a sight of the black ants swarming greedily upon the gray face and venturing horribly near to the eyes’ (p. 43). The mythic ‘vision’ has been exchanged for mere ‘sight’.

The intrusion of the ‘feminine’ unsettles several of Crane’s stories. In the pastiche western ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky’ (1897), the homeostatic relationship between the lawman Jack Potter and the gunslinger Scratchy Wilson is shattered by the announcement that Potter has got married during a trip east. The two men are engaged, as it were, to fight, but in a camply parodie moment Wilson decides ‘it’s all off now’: ’“Married!” He was not a student of chivalry; it was merely that in the presence of this foreign condition he was a simple child of the earlier plains.’ Maturity would mean giving up both an exclusively masculine compact and the conventions of the dime-store genre on which the tale is based. In ‘The Blue Hotel’, the all-male gathering around the card-table proceeds against ‘Scully’s officious clamor at his daughters, who were preparing the mid-day meal’ (p. 203). Later, ‘The daughters of the house, when they were obliged to replenish the biscuits, approached as warily as Indians, and, having succeeded in their purpose, fled with ill-concealed trepidation’ (p. 214). The women are as ‘foreign’, yet as indigenous, as the Native Americans whose lands have been usurped (the blue hotel is in Fort Romper, a trace of Nebraska’s violent past). They are liminal figures, offering succour and sustenance, but they are also threatening, as if poised to retake the territory colonized by the men. After Johnnie gets whipped by the Swede, the women rush from the kitchen to console him with ‘a chorus of lamentation’. They carry off their ‘prey’ to the kitchen, where he will be ‘bathed and harangued with that mixture of sympathy and abuse which is a feat of their sex’ (p. 221). At the culmination of the story, when the hotelier and the gamblers are revealed to have been complicit in the death of the Swede, an Easterner called Mr Blanc declares in a ’fog of mysterious theory’ that ‘[u]sually there are from a dozen to forty women really involved in every murder, but in this case it seems to be only five men’ (p. 229). Within the context of the narrative, the Easterner has no reason to make such a claim against women, other than as a forced joke at a difficult moment, and his statistics are meaningless. Readers can only surmise that the outburst testifies to some hysterical male fantasy which sees the women exercising a dark agency from the confines of their traditionally passive, domestic space. Nothing is made explicit, and Crane characteristically complicates matters by allowing the narrator to be complicit in a prejudiced point of view which the story otherwise confounds (‘that mixture of sympathy and abuse which is a feat of their sex’). Unsettling, too, is the moment when the hotelier Scully tries to pacify the fatalistic Swede by showing him a portrait of his dead daughter, an image that is unredeemably kitsch and all the more disturbing for being so: ‘There was revealed a ridiculous photograph of a little girl. She was leaning against a balustrade of gorgeous decoration, and the formidable bang to her hair was prominent. The figure was as graceful as an upright sled-stake, and, withal, it was of the hue of lead’ (p. 210).

This deathly image of life preserved in Scully‘s ‘own chamber’ discloses the sentimental yet occulted place of women in the domestic realm of the hotel. Further than that, it haunts the remainder of the story as a sign of the arrested development of the men, idly hanging around in a town whose military days are past. Scully’s romantic idea of the feminine is invested entirely in a little girl who has been prevented from becoming a woman. His emotional grasp is so weak that he attempts to reassure the Swede by drawing his attention to an image of early death. Moreover, he cannot tell the difference between the leaden photograph and the individual it memorializes. Like all the men who feature in the story, Scully is utterly inept in his judgement of others and behaves like an awkward child. He is fixed with ‘an eye of stern reproach’ by ‘the mother’ of his son (she is not called his wife) and can only respond ‘weakly’ to her admonishments over his carelessness. The tragi-comic events of the story take place in a town with the absurd name of Fort Romper, where the only male activity is the playing of card games. The characters cannot distinguish between the game played ‘for fun’ and the seriousness of their motives. They are enmeshed in dangerous misunderstandings about the rules of play, and at moments of crisis their response is marked by a regressive need for repetition: ‘What do I keep? What do I keep? What do I keep?’ demands Scully when faced with a challenge to his authority: ‘I keep a hotel’ (p. 213). Repetitions continue throughout the story, building to a crescendo like the escalation of aggression in a child’s game that is bound to end in tears. During Johnnie’s fight with the Swede over his alleged cheating at cards, the cowboy shouts in ‘a holocaust of warlike desire’, ‘Kill him, Johnnie! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!’ (p. 219). Johnnie gets thrashed, and cries in shame ‘He was too—too—too heavy for me’ (p. 220). After the Swede has left the hotel, puffed up with a new and fatal self-assurance, the remaining players indulge in gestures of impotent bravado like witless schoolboys:

And then together they raised a yearning, fanatic cry—‘Oh-o-oh! if only we could—’

‘Yes!’

‘Yes!’

‘And then I’d—’

‘Oh-o-oh!’ (p. 223)

The Swede’s own behaviour is never more than infantile: ‘His laughter rang somehow childish’, ‘full of a kind of false courage and defiance’ (p. 205), and at one point he comes to resemble a doll: ‘Upon the Swede’s deathly pale cheeks were two spots brightly crimson and sharply edged, as if they had been carefully painted’ (p. 209). After the fight with Johnnie, he goes straight to a bar where he gets tough with another card-player, this time a professional gambler. In the ensuing tussle ‘was seen a long blade in the hand of the gambler. It shot forward, and a human body, this citadel of virtue, wisdom, power, was pierced as easily as if it had been a melon’ (p. 227). Crane’s irony is at its most blatant; the Swede’s compulsion to repeat has yielded bitter fruit—his romping days are over. His dead eyes stare up at the ‘dreadful legend’ on top of the cash register, but it is he who has become the object of the gaze, sentenced by his own belief in the myth (or legend) of the Wild West. Subject to his own fictions of toughness, he must pay: ‘This registers the amount of your purchase’ (p. 227).

The inability to escape the reassuring but dependent state of childhood also structures the narrative of The Red Badge of Courage, turning Henry Fleming’s journey to manhood into a cycle of progression and regression, and the spectre of the infantile is never completely exorcised. Like many of Crane’scharacters, Fleming and his fellow soldiers continually revert to their childhood selves, striking out against the maternal yet longing for motherly shelter. The appearance of nursery rhymes and songs recalled from childhood is an important feature here, as in much of Crane’s work. ‘Sing a song ’a Vic’try’ gives token comfort to the procession of wounded men who limp and stagger along to the tune, and, as R. W. Stallman writes, ‘is at once a travesty of their [the retreating soldiers’] own plight and a mockery of Henry’s mythical innocence’.22 A still more complex incident occurs later, when the ‘grim rejoicing’ of the survivors of battle finds expression in the proverbial rhyme ‘A dog, a woman, an’ a walnut tree | Th’ more yeh beat ’em, th’ better they be’. The soldier who chants this sees in it a parallel to the regiment’s experience of battle (‘That’s like us’), but the smug valorization of domestic violence gives way in the next sentence to a different image of men’s interaction with women: ‘Lost a piler men, they did. If an ol’ woman swep’ up th’ woods she’d git a dustpanful’ (p. 87). Reduced to fallen leaves, the men are of no interest to the woman sweeping them away, and their recourse to songs and catchphrases underlines their helplessness and insignificance.

Remembered fragments of a verse familiar from childhood are unexpectedly made central to Crane’s impressionist masterpiece ‘The Open Boat’, a work in which repetition is as bizarrely expressive as in ‘The Blue Hotel’. Based on Crane’s own experience of shipwreck en route to Cuba in January 1897, ‘The Open Boat’ explores the physical and mental duress of four survivors—a correspondent, a cook, an oiler, and an injured captain—struggling back to the Florida coast in a rowing boat. The story is full of bizarre parallels which call to the reader’s mind ballads, folk tales, and snippets of classical legend. At one point, the correspondent observes the cook and the oiler asleep in the bottom of the boat: ‘with their fragmentary clothing and haggard faces, they were the babes of the sea, a grotesque rendering of the old babes in the wood’ (p. 137). The allusion is highly self-conscious, as the correspondent’s emphasis on it as a ‘grotesque rendering’ makes clear, and it strangely mingles humour and horror (the babes in the wood were left to die on their uncle’s orders and were covered with leaves by a sorrowing Robin Red–Breast: they were also, in the moralistic reversal of fortunes depicted in this ballad, avenged, which is more than the men abandoned at sea can expect). Throughout ‘The Open Boat’, the correspondent is fascinated not only by the ‘subtle brotherhood of men’ which is established in adversity but also by the physical reassurance it offers. Like the cruelly abandoned babes, the men snuggle and slumber, and the plump cook with his cork lifebelt seems ‘almost stove-like’ (p. 137). The sea is imagined as ‘a great soft mattress’ (p. 133), and the injured captain is described as ‘soothing his children’ (p. 126). In this intriguing reworking of a boys’ adventure story, traditional testings of masculine courage and endurance are interwoven with elements of play. So, when the correspondent finds four undamaged cigars in his coat pocket and someone else finds three dry matches, a joyous boyishness sets in, as ‘the four waifs rode in their little boat, and with an assurance of an impending rescue shining in their eyes, puffed at the big cigars’ (p. 130).

In this web of childhood tales and unconscious re-enactments, one tale is given special prominence. The fear of drowning brings to the correspondent’s mind the memory of a verse he had heard in childhood: ‘A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, | There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was dearth of woman’s tears’. Here again the maternal presence is invoked, preceded by the narrator’s meditation on human insignificance: ‘When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples’ (p. 139). The passage is reminiscent of Henry Fleming’s intimations that ‘he was very insignificant’ (p. 89), and is related to the startling, nihilistic reflections on the ‘conceit of man’ in ‘The Blue Hotel’. Once again, Crane rejects the romantic vision of ‘mother nature’ even as he shows his male characters to be lost without it. Pathological distrust of the feminine becomes inseparable from the desire for a good mother who is all that stands against the descent into savagery.

Teasing out the allusions to childishness and to neglectful, malignant, or imbecilic versions of protective womanhood (Fate in ‘The Open Boat’ is ‘this old ninny-woman …an old hen who knows not her intention’, p. 131) is only one of several ways in which Crane’s superficially univocal and tightly controlled narrative may be seen to question and fictionalize the ‘true experience’ it conveys. As in ‘The Blue Hotel’, an all-male narrative turns out to pivot itself on images of domesticity. The correspondent likens the boat to a bathtub as well as to a bucking bronco, and offers the homely observation that ‘it is easier to steal eggs from under a hen than it was to change seats’ in it (p. 127). His close encounter with the indifference of nature prompts a desire for personal reformation, but, as if in anticipation of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, the reformation he envisages consists of being ‘better and brighter during an introduction or at a tea’ (p. 142). Throughout ‘The Open Boat’, the narrative tone disconcertingly juxtaposes threat (most menacingly, the shark) and comedy (at its most irresistible in the episode of the hotel omnibus). Much of the concentration which so many critics and readers have valued in ‘The Open Boat’ may be traced to one feature of narrative which marks it out as different from the other stories in this collection, and which draws together its swift changes of register and mood: its narratorial perspective. Although told in the third person, ‘The Open Boat’ describes the experiences of the correspondent, whose feelings and reflections constitute its only rendering of an individual consciousness. Questions of perspective are central. The correspondent is viewing himself in retrospect; the holidaymakers at the seaside hotel may be watching the spectacle from afar; the men wonder constantly who is going to see them. Their plight, meanwhile, is performative: they are ‘circus men’ (p. 130), gymnasts (p. 145), actors in a reconstruction mediated by that subtly evocative figure, ‘the correspondent’. Crane signals the correspondent’s odd position in the tale by having him wonder in the reader’s first access to him ‘why he was there’ (p. 123). He is there to correspond: to tell, and to represent. He is a translator of a unique situation into terms comprehensible by what he calls ‘the average experience which is never at sea in a dinghy’ (p. 124): hence his search for correspondences (to bathtubs, mattresses, a covey of prairie-chickens). But the situation remains in many ways mysterious and untranslatable, and although the story ends with the survivors’ conviction that they are now qualified to be ‘interpreters’, what lies at its imaginative centre is the impossibility of the quest for meaning and the illegibility of the natural world: ‘There was the shore of the populous land, and it was bitter and bitter to them that from it came no sign’ (p. 131).

3

Prior to his experience of war, Henry Fleming ‘had been taught that a man became another thing in battle. He saw his salvation in such a change’ (p. 24). At the outset, the youth wants to be more than a man. But war opens the way to becoming less than a man. By the end of the novel, he is merely a man. The indeterminacy of the word ‘thing’ is important here; the youth expects it to mean something heroic, the opportunity to transcend himself. But he is more likely to become an inert ‘thing’, like the dead soldier whose ‘foot projected piteously’, his beard uncannily raised in the wind, moving ‘as if a hand were stroking it’ (p. 22), or like the automatized regiment, which becomes ‘a machine run down’ (p. 97). Fleming’s own responses are described as ‘mechanical’ both when he is performing mindless actions and when he stops to reflect. The metaphor of war as an ‘immense and terrible machine’ producing corpses is preceded by vague descriptions of both armies as monsters (p. 45). And in a narrative based on spectatorship, the observers are themselves observed by ‘white bubble-eyes’ in a stream, just as, in ‘The Open Boat’, the survivors are subject to the ‘black bead-like eyes’ of gulls ‘uncanny and sinister in their unblinking scrutiny’ (p. 126). Under this monstrous gaze, ‘man’ becomes another thing to be looked at.

Crane returns to the theme of what it is for a man to become a ‘thing’ in his terrifying and enigmatic novella The Monster. This story of a black hostler whose heroic rescue of his employer’s son from a fire leaves him disfigured physically and mentally has always been regarded as one of Crane’s finest pieces of writing, but until recently it has received little critical attention. The first half of the tale concerns itself with the character of Henry Johnson, who is able to transform himself from an undistinguished servant by day into an effulgent dandy, strolling in the evenings in lavender trousers and straw hat like a ‘quiet, well-bred gentlemen of position’ (p. 151). The narrative makes clear a doubleness of perspective: from the hostler’s ‘interior’ view there is ‘no cake-walk hyperbole’ to his strut, but to the townsmen who watch him pass by he is the very image of the ‘Zip Coon’ beloved of black-face minstrel shows: ‘“Hello, Henry! Going to walk for a cake to-night?”’ (p. 152). The narrator is complicit in the second perspective; the novella is rife with comical depictions of stereotyped blacks derived from minstrelsy, which in the 1890s was the dominant form of entertainment in the northern states, superseded only by the new film industry. Significantly, Henry Johnson is unrecognizable as Henry Johnson to those who don’t know his dandified persona. Reifsnyder the barber will ’bait you any money that vas not Henry Johnson’, whereas one of his customers knows that ‘he always dresses like that when he wants to make a front!’ (pp. 152–3). Henry lacks a distinctive identity for the townspeople beyond their own received ideas of his position in society. His appearance is already unfixed, but it is about to undergo a further, permanent transformation. The burning chemicals in Dr Trescott’s study leap ‘like a panther at the lavender trousers’ and, after he has fallen, flow ‘directly down into Johnson’s upturned face’ (pp. 161–2). Pulled from the conflagration, reported as dead, he is revived and cared for by Dr Trescott and re-emerges into the life of the town as a ‘monster’. Johnson is transformed from a minstrel into a freak.23 ‘Was it a man?’ wonders Mrs Page after Johnson, escaping from the shack where he has been confined, has terrified the children at her party: ‘She didn’t know. It was simply a thing, a dreadful thing’ (p. 183). Paradoxically, Henry’s face has become the centre of his person now that he has lost it: as a ‘man’ he had been disguised by racial stereotypes; as a ‘thing’ he is instantly, shockingly recognizable. He is, nevertheless, regarded by everyone who sees him (except Trescott), white or black, as a ‘demon’.

The remainder of the novella addresses Trescott’s ethical dilemma over whether to take responsibility for the disfigured servant who has rescued his son, thus destroying his status as the town’s ‘first’ physician, or whether to restore his position by consigning the ‘grim figure’ to an institution. After the fire, Judge Hagenthorpe had argued that the man should have been allowed to die, for his own benefit and for the benefit of others, and he has told Trescott that his act of charity in saving Johnson’s life is ‘one of the blunders of virtue’ (p. 168). ‘It is hard for a man to know what to do’ is his weak attempt at an ethical response to Trescott’s protestations. Trescott’s initial response to Hagenthorpe’s warning that he will create ‘a monster, and with no mind’ is to offload his patient into the care of an ‘old negro’, Alek Williams, and his family. But after Johnson escapes, unwittingly terrifies the community, and is pursued by an angry crowd, the doctor takes him back. By the close of the story, Trescott has remained firm in his convictions, having formed a bond with the ‘monster’. But now he has forfeited his own social identity and made a pariah of his wife. In the final, powerfully understated chapter, Trescott surveys the drawing-room where his wife has set out tea for her traditional Wednesday gathering, this time for guests that have not and will not come. This conclusion is one of a number of uncanny parallels in the story; Mrs Trescott’s abandoned tea party mirrors the abandonment of Mrs Williams by her ‘lady callahs’ (P 173)

By dividing the narrative into two distinct units, one foregrounding the character of Johnson and the other centred on Trescott, Crane prevents the story from being concentrated on either of his ‘heroes’. Substantial digressions into group activity, such as the evening scene at the park and the description of the boys’ response to the fire brigade, distract the reader from emotional investment in the plight of the main characters. What makes the story particularly disturbing is that Johnson gives way to Trescott as the focus of attention after his transmogrification; his fate is recorded pitilessly and, although he motivates the narrative, he (‘it’) is nevertheless made to seem marginal to it. By having Johnson function as Trescott’s creation, The Monster becomes a version of the Frankenstein myth. This is made clear when Judge Hagenthorpe tells Trescott: ‘Nature has very evidently given him up. He is dead. You are restoring him to life. You are making him, and he will be a monster’ (p. 169). The ethical dimension of the novella is based on whether Trescott (and the reader—the narrator does not comment) accepts this ‘judgement’. But The Monster differs from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the crucial matter of agency. Trescott resembles Victor Frankenstein in his desire to meddle with the forces of nature; the ‘burning garden’ of chemicals which disfigures Johnson is in an ‘apartment which the doctor had fitted up as a laboratory and work-house, where he used some of his leisure, and also hours when he might have been sleeping, in devoting himself to experiments which came in the way of his study and interest’ (p. 160). Having worked against his ‘interest’ he is to some extent culpable for what happens to Johnson. And, like Frankenstein, he produces a ‘monster’ that destroys him. However, in Crane’s version, the monstrous effect is brought into being largely by uncanny chance: although the housefire ‘had been well planned, as if by professional revolutionists’ no cause is actually discovered; Johnson is only ‘dead’ by false report; and Trescott feels obliged to save him because he rescued little Jim. In Frankenstein, the monster is a sentient, cultivated being who chooses between good and evil. Henry Johnson’s inner state is unknown. Both before and after the accident he is portrayed as a creature of surfaces, and his heroic act is motivated by impulses beyond his control. At the scene of the fire, he falls back into what the narrator presents as his racial past: ‘He was submitting, submitting because of his fathers, bending his mind in a most perfect slavery to this conflagration’ (p. 160). Halting momentarily at the threshold of the burning apartment, he cries out ‘in the negro wail that had in it the sadness of the swamps’ (p. 161). This atavistic wail is reprised when the ‘monster’ responds to being taunted by Jimmie and his friends by crooning ‘a weird line of negro melody that was scarcely more than a thread of sound’ (p. 189).24 Crucially, although Johnson is given a voice, he is never allowed to give his own account of events. He loses his face, but his ability to speak for himself has been effaced from the very beginning. This is in stark contrast to Frankenstein, for, as Chris Baldick notes, ‘The decision to give the monster an articulate voice is Mary Shelley’s most important subversion of the category of monstrosity … the traditional idea of the monstrous was strongly associated with visual display, and monsters were understood primarily as exhibitions of moral vices: they were to be seen and not heard.’25

The racism of the narrative voice in The Monster denies Henry Johnson the moral subjectivity granted expansively to Dr Trescott. Even as ‘the biggest dude in town’ Johnson is never much more than a thing without the benefit of ‘humanity’. His courting of Bella Farragut, with face showing ‘like a reflector’ and teeth ‘like an illumination’, is depicted as a travesty of white bourgeois society; ‘planted’ in the living-room, Henry, Bella, and Mrs Farragut ‘bowed and smiled and ignored and imitated until a late hour, and if they had been the occupants of the most gorgeous salon in the world they could not have been more like three monkeys’ (p. 154). Johnson is all inarticulate visual display, with or without a face. Prior to the accident, his speech is presented as an imitation of genteel mannerisms. After the accident, he can still assume the same mannerisms. Now, however, because they issue from a faceless man, they are treated by the shocked citizens at whom they are directed as incomprehensible babbling, manifesting what Lee Clark Mitchell calls ‘something like the force of Jove’s thunderbolts, galvanizing all who hear them’.26 And Johnson’s conventional speech is augmented by the ‘negro wail’, which vocalizes his reversion to slavery. But although this keening voice testifies to the novella’s racist division between Johnson’s ‘superficial’ and ‘primitive’ identities, it also marks the point where disfigurement becomes a metaphor for Whilomville’s social malaise.

Although The Monster treats its African–American characters as minstrel-show caricatures, its satirical examination of the racist undercurrents of small-town society allows for a subliminal questioning of racial issues. As we have seen in The Red Badge of Courage, Crane’s use of the term ‘blackness’ carries negatively racial connotations even when not directly referring to ’blacks ’. The Monster is a narrative of transformations in which Johnson’s fate is linked to mutations affecting the whole town: individuals coalesce into crowds, and crowds threaten to turn into something unspeakable. With the outbreak of fire, the peaceful ‘mass’ in the park becomes a ‘black crowd’ pouring in a ‘dark wave’ after the fire brigade’s ‘machine’ (the story begins with Jimmie imitating an ‘engine‘as his father mows the lawn portentously with ‘the whirring machine, while the sweet, new grass blades spun from the knives ’), and the avenue full of people represents to one woman ‘a kind of black torrent’ (p. 156). The fire, in which an engraving of ‘The Signing of the Declaration’ bursts ‘with the sound of a bomb’ (p. 158), and which leaves a ‘black mass’ in the middle of the Trescott property (p. 184), configures a monstrous darkness at the heart of the entire community, exposing the repressed violence of polite small-town life. This becomes manifest with the transformation of the townspeople into a rioting crowd firing rocks at the fleeing ‘monster’. The officer’s report of the event to Trescott gestures at the crowd’s unspeakable motivation: ‘Of course nobody really wanted to hit him, but you know how a crowd gets. It’s like—it’s like ‘‘Yes, I know’, replies Trescott (p. 185). What they both know to be most likely is that the crowd is on the verge of becoming a lynch mob, like the mob Crane’s brother observed at his (northern) home town in 1892 hanging Robert Lewis.27

At this point in the story the term ‘monster’ becomes more applicable to the town than to Henry Johnson. Johnson’s disfigurement has been imbued with the name of monstrosity by citizens whose hysterical fear testifies to their own moral distortion. His erased visage, with its one ‘unwinking eye’, turns the town’s gaze back on itself, revealing the darkness of blind prejudice. This is what Ralph Ellison has called The Monster’s ability to give ‘symbolic equivalents’ for the American nation’s ‘unceasing state of civil war ’.28 Crane is the most sophisticated of ironists in that his fictions question, or disfigure, the complicity of their own narrative voice in the ideology of naturalism.