Great Short Works of Stephen Crane
Great Short Works of STEPHEN CRANE
Introduction by JAMES B. COLVERT
CONTENTS
Introduction by James B. Colvert
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS
THE MONSTER
STORIES:
An Experiment in Misery
A Mystery of Heroism
An Episode of War
The Upturned Face
The Open Boat
The Pace of Youth
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
The Blue Hotel
Biography
About the Author
Other Books in the Series
Copyright
About the Publisher
ALTHOUGH Stephen Crane’s fiction is often described as “realism” (especially in literary histories), the term is inappropriate and misleading. It is inevitably applied, however, for Crane was doing his major work during the years when realism, under the powerful sponsorship of William Dean Howells, was sweeping the field in American fiction. And like the realists, Crane chose certain characteristic subjects and themes—slum life, war, prostitution, and alcoholism—and insisted upon the freedom to treat them from unorthodox points of view. In this limited sense he is a realist.
But, Crane’s fiction is radically different from that of the realists, and this difference, carefully considered, helps us to grasp the special significance of his work. At bottom his sense of reality is quite apart from those of, say, Norris, Dreiser, Garland, and Twain; for when Crane sees something—an object, event, or person—he does not assume (as they do) that it is a fixed, definable, irreducible fact that would carry the same meaning for any normal, truthful observer. To Crane, reality was complex, ambivalent, ambiguous, and elusive, as much a matter of the play of a peculiarity of mind as of a quality or character in the object itself. This the reader must constantly bear in mind if he is to avoid the errors of those who complain that his fiction lacks “realistic” authority, is irrational, inconsistent, and illogical. Trying to understand The Red Badge of Courage as a straightforward, naturalistic description of war, the reader will find it difficult to explain why we never seem to see things as they “really are” in “real” life. In the book, armies on the march are not likely to appear simply as columns of troops but rather as gigantic dragon-serpents winding their ways over brooding hills. Bursting shells become strange “war blossoms.” Bubbles in a stream appear to the distressed hero, whose mind shapes the perceived world into its own sinister reality, as sorrowful, reproachful human eyes.
This is to say that Crane’s prose is metaphorical rather than literal and discursive, to point out the poetic quality of his style. But it is also a reminder that the style is a reflection of his special way of seeing, and that these elements in his fiction, his style and vision, are finally one and the same thing. The hero of the novel recreates, through Crane’s imagination, of course, the external world in whatever image best expresses or serves hs egotistical yearning, hopes, and fears. In his sentimental self-portrait Henry Fleming sees himself as a hero of nerveless courage and reckless derring-do, winner of the hearts of maidens and the admiration of his comrades in arms. But he also suspects, fearfully, that he is really a coward, and his problem is to refashion the world into a new “reality” by which he can justify or rationalize his failures as a man and soldier. This world, brilliantly imagined, he sees alternately in two ways: as a terrible threat to his self-indulgent egotism, as when it appears in the guise of dragons and serpents, and as a victim of his own awesome power of destruction, as when he imagines in a crucial scene that he has triumphed over a range of threatening mountains. Crane himself, as the narrator describing these mental events, provides a mocking commentary, pointing up Henry’s confusion with a flow of relentless irony.
The main elements of the novel, then, are Fleming’s hallucinatory images, his hopelessly sentimental vanity, and the narrator’s ironic mockery. And when we observe that Henry’s conceits usually have some reference to his interpretation of the natural world—forest, mountains, streams, sky—it occurs to us that his anxiety is really over the uncertain question of his relation to the whole universe, as if he somehow expects Nature to be the final arbiter of his success or failure as a hero. Nature, he arrogantly assumes, will turn out to be either his friend or enemy, and throughout the book he is anxiously trying to read the signs of one or the other of these dispositions toward him. The forest to which he turns for comfort after his ignoble flight from his first battle seems at first to be friendly, a crooning, solacing Mother Nature who provides the little chapel-like bower for the refreshment of his troubled spirit. But when he stumbles upon the obscene corpse in the very nave of the cathedral-like grove, Nature seems cruelly hostile, mocking the trust that he has placed in her. Tricked by his self-glorifying sentiments into the belief that she must recognize him either as friend or foe, he never for a moment considers, as does the narrator, that Nature is after all simply indifferent to him. In its deepest sense, then, The Red Badge examines Henry’s tormented effort to identify himself with Nature, and in so doing touches upon a basic religious problem—one that Crane attacked more directly in his book of poems, The Black Riders.
Taking this approach to the book, the reader perhaps finds a special significance in a key passage in Chapter XVII which describes Henry’s emotions when he learns that his blind charge against the enemy has made him a hero.
He had been a tremendous figure, no doubt. By this struggle he had overcome obstacles which he had admitted to be mountains. They had fallen like paper peaks, and he was now what he called a hero. And he had not been aware of the process. He had slept and, awakening, found himself a knight.
Here in these reflections are the main elements of the novel: the vainglorious hero, the image of Nature as an adversary, and the critical irony of the narrator. The passage in effect summarizes the meaning of the novel up to this point and marks a crucial turning point in the narrative.
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