The Red Badge of Courage

By Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane described his novel of the American Civil War as a ""psychological portrait of fear."" Although he never experienced the horror of battle himself, Crane based his realistic narrative largely on stories told by Civil War veterans. While those accounts tended to focus on the external action of warfare, the young newspaper reporter aspired to illustrate the internal experience of the soldier. What does a man think and feel when he must kill or be killed? When in the chaos of battle will fear paralyze him or, worse, cause him to turn coward and run? In a sense, modern American fiction begins with Crane's masterful, impressionistic depiction of Private Henry Fleming under fire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781681495378

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1871. He died in Germany on June 5, 1900.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Mary R. Reichardt

University of Saint Thomas

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is a tour de force. A slender yet strikingly original novel that seemed to come out of nowhere, it took the literary world by storm and helped usher American and British literature into the modern era. Remembering the sensation that followed its publication, H. G. Wells wrote of [i]ts freshness of method, its vigor of imagination, its force of color and its essential freedom from many traditions. . . . It was a new thing, in a new school.¹ Ford Madox Ford recalled, "One awakened one morning in the nineties in England and The Red Badge of Courage was not; by noon of the same day it filled the universe. There was nothing you could talk of but that book. . . . [W]ith The Red Badge. . . we were provided with a map showing us our own hearts."²

While today Stephen Crane is considered one of the great American writers, his corpus of work is small and uneven. Crane died at the young age of twenty-eight, and much of his biography, including his literary influences and literary philosophy, remains elusive. Because so little is known, much has been speculated upon, not the least of which is the intriguing matter of how a youth of twenty-three who had never seen war could produce a novel that ranks among the most significant war stories of all time. Writer Hamlin Garland, his friend and supporter, stated at Crane’s untimely death, He was too brilliant, too fickle, too erratic to last. . . . I have never known a man whose source of power was so unaccounted for.³

The fourteenth and last child of a Methodist minister, Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1871. After his father, the Reverend Jonathan Crane, died in 1880 when Stephen was eight, the family moved to the seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, then a Methodist stronghold. A fragile and often sickly child, Crane attended public school and, at thirteen, enrolled in Pennington Seminary, a boarding school near Trenton, New Jersey, where his father had been principal. At sixteen he transferred to Claverack College near Hudson, New York, a semi-military preparatory school. Two years later he enrolled in Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, but dropped out after only one semester. The following semester he attended Syracuse University in upstate New York, but that experience too proved unsatisfactory to the bright and literate but undisciplined Crane, who spent his time doing as he pleased—reading, writing, or playing baseball—rather than attending classes. Interested in journalism, he had already worked for some years writing occasional pieces for his older brother Townley Crane’s news agency. After leaving Syracuse in June 1891, Crane abandoned his plans for a college education and turned full time to newspaper work while also writing his own stories and poems. Over the next few years he lived hand to mouth in run-down areas near New York City’s Bowery with a group of young artists and writers, providing factual pieces, sketches, and stories to various publications. A heavy smoker careless about his health and often malnourished in his impoverishment, Crane by his early twenties was already exhibiting symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him less than a decade later. To friends, Crane revealed that he needed to live fully because he expected to die young.

In 1893 at the age of twenty-two, Crane completed the manuscript of the novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. A starkly realistic, even brutal, account of a slum girl’s fall into prostitution and eventual suicide, Maggie was most likely influenced by the publication three years earlier of Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, an expose of New York slum life. Due to its scandalous subject matter, Maggie was shunned by publishers. Scraping together borrowed money, Crane published it on his own under a pseudonym. To his gratification, Maggie won the praise of William Dean Howells, the champion of American realism, who, while finding some of the book’s language overly coarse, nevertheless was captivated by the vividness of its realistic descriptions and accurate use of dialect. He invited Crane to his home and subsequently became a mentor to the young writer, a relationship Crane treasured for life. Several years earlier, Crane had also met another ardent proponent of the new realism in literature, Midwest author Hamlin Garland, then teaching and lecturing in New England. Like Howells, Garland too recognized in Crane a rising talent along the lines of his own literary inclinations and generously offered to help him edit and place his stories.

Crane apparently began work on The Red Badge of Courage in 1892 when he was twenty-one; by the spring of 1894, he had completed the manuscript. Always fascinated by war, Crane later stated that he had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out through most of his boyhood.⁴ After showing it to Garland, who suggested emendations, he submitted the work to S. S. McClure, cofounder of McClure’s Magazine, which was known for publishing Civil War pieces. McClure held the manuscript with no reply for nearly six months. Crane, frustrated by the lack of response and badly needing money, withdrew it and accepted instead an offer to publish a truncated version of it, which entailed major cuts, with the Bacheller-Johnson syndicate of newspapers. The Red Badge of Courage thus appeared in serial form in various newspapers across the United States on December 3-8, 1894. Crane then submitted the original manuscript to the firm of D. Appleton and Company, who agreed to publish it in book form with some modifications. He willingly revised the work, and Appleton released it in October 1895. Thus two different versions of the novel appeared within a year of each other, leading to a somewhat confusing textual history. Over time the 1895 Appleton version—the one used for this Ignatius edition—has become the standard text.

Upon its release, The Red Badge of Courage was an astonishing success: it went through fourteen editions in its first year of publication alone and has never been out of print. Crane was immediately recognized as doing something groundbreaking in literature in both style and theme. Overnight, the young man went from nearly complete obscurity to an international sensation. Over the next few years he continued to pursue a journalist’s career while also continuing his literary writing. Hired by the Hearst newspaper syndicate as a foreign correspondent, he reported on the Cuban Revolution (1896—1897), where he joined a group of filibusterers in Jacksonville, Florida; when their ship, the Commodore, sank, Crane spent a day and night floating with three others in a dinghy on the Atlantic, an experience that formed the basis of his short story The Open Boat. Several months later he was sent to Greece to report on the war with Turkey, and the following year he covered the Spanish-American War. From 1897 on, he lived with a former prostitute, Cora Howarth Taylor, whom he had met in Jacksonville. Her husband having refused her a divorce, the couple settled in England, where such liaisons were more tolerated. There they rented a decaying medieval mansion, Brede Place in Sussex, where they lived in genteel poverty while delighting in entertaining large groups of friends, including such literary figures as Henry James, Harold Frederic, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. The damp air of the place, however, exacerbated Crane’s tuberculosis. By late 1899 it was clear that he was in the final stages of the disease. Rushed by Cora to a sanatorium in Badenweiler, Germany, for professional treatment, Crane died there on June 5, 1900.

During his seven-year literary career, much of Crane’s writing, beginning with Maggie, provoked controversy, as did the behavior of the man, which some deemed reckless and others scandalous. Like many other preachers’ children, Crane rebelled against his family’s conventional religious pieties. His brief, free-verse poems collected in The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind (1899) are, in particular, steeped in bitter scepticism about the benevolence or even the existence of God in the face of human fear and loneliness; some were initially rejected by publishers on the grounds of blasphemy. Three other novels, George’s Mother (1896), The Third Violet (1897), and the posthumous The O’Ruddy (1903), have been largely ignored by critics. On the other hand, several of Crane’s short stories are superb, including The Monster, The Open Boat, The Blue Hotel, and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, all written between 1897 and 1898. These stories, along with The Red Badge of Courage, became a staple of American literature courses and literary anthologies with the rise of the New Critics in the 1940s and 1950s. High praise for Crane came especially from Ernest Hemingway, who maintained that The Red Badge of Courage was not only one of the finest books of our literature but the only real literature of our Civil War.⁵ Critical studies and biographies of Crane proliferated throughout the second half of the twentieth century and show little sign of abating today.

Although it is clear that Crane was driven to write from an early age, he rarely spoke about his sources or intentions. With an affinity for the realism of Howells and Garland, he read with interest the works of Leo Tolstoy and Rudyard Kipling and clearly absorbed the atmosphere of social and critical realism then in vogue. In a rare statement concerning his literary aspirations, he wrote in a January 1896 letter, The one thing that deeply pleases me in my literary life—brief and inglorious as it is—is the fact that men of sense believe me to be sincere. . . . I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes. . . . To keep close to my honesty is my supreme ambition.⁶

Born only six years after the Civil War, Crane grew up listening to the stories of veterans. As a teenager, he particularly pored over the series of such memoirs published in Century Magazine from 1884 to 1887 and later released in the multivolume book Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1887). He shared his interest with members of his family, including his older brother Edmund, who was something of an expert on a particularly fascinating battle, that of Chancellorsville, which took place in northern Virginia on May 1-2, 1863. Although Crane does not name this battle as the setting of The Red Badge of Courage, critics generally agree that the novel’s setting closely resembles that bloody conflict.⁷ Several facts given in the novel support this conclusion: for instance, Henry Fleming, a youth from a dairy farm, joins the 304th New York Voluntary Infantry and fights his first battle on the banks of the Rappahannock River in northern Virginia, the area where the Chancellorsville conflict took place. Even more significant, a year after The Red Badge of Courage was published, Crane released a short story entitled The Veteran about a now-aged and much chastened Henry Fleming, who, after relating the tale of his first battle, states emphatically, That was at Chancellorsville.⁸ Given the evidence pointing toward Chancellorsville, the question then arises as to why Crane might have chosen this particular battle as the setting of the novel. It was, for one thing, a disastrous battle known for its futility and thus seems to have appealed to Crane’s sense of irony. Fought largely by inexperienced men—untried farm boys like Henry—in a confusing wooded terrain, it resulted in many desertions as panicked men fled. Although the Northern Union forces, led by the incompetent general Joseph Hooker, lost to the Southern Confederate forces, the battle’s effect was essentially a stalemate with little ground gained by either side in advancing its cause. Nearly twenty-seven thousand men lost their lives in the two-day strife.

Yet while he eagerly absorbed the reminiscences of Civil War veterans, Crane admitted to being disgusted by the dryness of the accounts. "I wonder that some of these fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps! he exclaimed. They spout eternally of what they did, but they are as emotionless as rocks!"⁹ In the second half of the nineteenth century, fictional works about the Civil War proliferated, including those by Harold Frederic, Ambrose Bierce, Joseph Kirkland, and John William DeForest. But unlike these writers, who often emphasized traditional matters of heroism and patriotism, Crane chose instead in The Red Badge of Courage to focus on his main character’s internal landscape. For the first time in fiction, therefore, war was depicted from the inside. It is quite striking, for example, that there is no mention in the novel of the causes of the Civil War, the issue of slavery, the politics of Abraham Lincoln, or North-South relations. With just the slightest of realistic settings provided, Crane brings us immediately into Henry Fleming’s mind as he enlists in the army and faces his first conflict with the enemy. Thus, while still very much a Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage achieves a universal dimension that makes it, in essence, about the courage required by every untried person as he encounters a disorienting situation: it is the story of every person’s initiation into a world at war. In so universalizing his story, Crane created a new type of war fiction that not only influenced all such literature to come but also ensured the novel’s survival when many others have long been forgotten. As writer Joseph Hergesheimer stated, after Crane all novels about war must be different; the old pretentious attack was forever obliterated.¹⁰ Yet the irony remains that the novel, which was read by many Civil War veterans, was still deemed so realistic that few could believe Crane himself had never seen war. Famously, one veteran insisted, I was with Crane at Antietam.¹¹ For his part, Crane merely stated that his keen understanding of intense conflict most likely derived from sports: Of course, I have never been in a battle, but I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field, or else fighting is a hereditary instinct, and I wrote intuitively.¹²

Due to the work’s simple plot and fragmented narrative style, The Red Badge of Courage may appear at first glance to be formless. But its structure is actually a study in precision; Crane is known as a fine craftsman. As it recounts a series of Henry’s regiment’s engagements with the enemy, the novel divides neatly down the middle, with the second half mirroring the first half. In the first eleven chapters, the enemy charges twice, and Henry, his fears mounting, flees the battle. In the pivotal chapter 12 he receives his all-important wound, the red badge of the book’s title. In chapters 13-24, Henry’s regiment charges the enemy, and Henry, reunited with his comrades, exhibits the confidence of a now-initiated soldier. The effect of this carefully wrought narrative mirroring, states critic Lee Clark Mitchell, potentially show[s] possibilities for an individual’s growth and maturity, clarifying the development of certain traits by keeping the contexts the same.¹³

As an innovative novel, The Red Badge of Courage defies precise categorization, a conundrum that has preoccupied critics since its release. It has been variously labeled a work of naturalism and impressionism, with critics disagreeing on the extent to which it participates in either literary mode.

Naturalism has been defined as realism infused with a pessimistic determinism.¹⁴ Growing out of the post-Civil War mood of scepticism with its crisis of faith and rapid breakdown of traditional Victorian values, naturalism tends to apply Darwinian theories of natural selection through survival of the fittest to human nature and to society. In presenting the existence of fossil evidence that predated the traditional five thousand years of creation based on the Genesis account, Charles Darwin (1809—1882), in The Origin of Species (1859), opened debate on religious matters long held sacrosanct, such as the origin of creation, the benevolence of God, and the authority of the Bible. In applying Darwinian thought to society—that man may be no more than a type of animal acting on instinctive forces as he struggles to survive in a hostile universe—thinkers such as Herbert Spencer (1820—1903) effectively undermined human free will. Under the influence of such writers as William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Hamlin Garland, and Mark Twain, realism was intent on debunking Victorian pieties and romantic ideals; led by continental writers such as Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and Ivan Turgenev, naturalism added to realism a philosophic stance suggesting that humans are no more than victims of the twin forces of heredity and environment. In this view, nature is at best indifferent to the plight of man and at worst cruel, a far cry from the romantic idealist perception of nature as a soothing haven of regeneration for the spirit. Employing the empirical methodology coming from the new science, naturalism favors a clinically detached narrator who, as it were, puts characters under a microscope to study their reactions to stimuli. Works of naturalism tend to focus on nightmarish, even surreal, landscapes of violence and struggle. To various degrees, American writers such as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Henry Adams, Edith Wharton, and Jack London evince such naturalism in their works.

From the start of his writing career, Crane showed an affinity with aspects of naturalism, especially the plight of helpless man in a hostile landscape. Maggie presents the young protagonist as a victim of her environment and of her own persistent delusions. The Open Boat emphasizes the fearful force of nature and its utter indifference to man’s plight as a group of shipwrecked men cling to life in a fragile boat on turbulent seas. Crane’s epigrammatic poetry typically portrays an uncaring God and the lonely struggle of isolated humans to assert themselves in the face of a potentially meaningless world. If God is absent or indifferent and if man is but a pawn of fate in a senseless universe, humans are reduced to the burden of self-consciousness. Any meaning must be created solely out of individual experience.

Such naturalistic elements appear in The Red Badge of Courage as Henry Fleming’s initial romantic ideals about war are shattered one by one in the violent struggle of battle. Tossed this way and that by quickly alternating emotions of panic, amazement, and outrage, he appears to be no more than a victim of his circumstances, trapped in a violent landscape through which he wanders bereft of reason and will. [T]here were iron laws of tradition and law on four sides, states the narrator of Henry. He was in a moving box.¹⁵ Thronging soldiers were carried along on the stream like exasperated [wood] chips (see p. 41) and at times appear no more than machines of steel (see p. 54). As is typical of naturalism, Crane also peppers his story with animal images to describe his characters’ behavior, suggesting that they are no more than mere beasts. War is a monster, a red animal; the regiment is a huge crawling reptile; the men seem poised to be killed like pigs; the enemy were flies sucking insolently at. . . blood; a colonel scolds like a wet parrot; Henry feels the rage of a driven beast (see pp. 26, 32, 20, 32, 124, 44, 46). In one of the novel’s central scenes, having fled from battle and desperately seeking respite, Henry comes across a beautiful copse of wood that at first glance appears like a chapel bathed in religious half light (see p. 63). When he parts the branches to enter, however, he finds not the welcoming refreshment of Mother Nature but the horrific sight of a decaying corpse crawling with ants.

But although such elements of naturalism clearly exist in the novel, critics disagree as to whether or not the book can be classified as a work of naturalism. While one critic insists that Crane is the first American novelist to deprive characters of moral autonomy, giving them no more than the illusion of freedom in an emotionally precarious, often violent world,¹⁶ another maintains that Henry does exhibit free will and make rational decisions; while he often reacts out of instinct, he is not merely a pawn of his environment, and thus it is possible to judge his actions morally: He obviously possesses a will of his own, a sense of responsibility as a soldier, and a conscience which he is unable to ignore.¹⁷

Crane has also been called an impressionist. A term stemming from painting, impressionism may be described as a focus on how a character’s perception of experience colors and even creates external reality. The author’s interest is not in describing a stable, objective reality but rather in conveying how a character projects reality from his inner state. Impressionism is less concerned with developing an intricate plot, arguing a theme, or presenting an idea than it is with creating a psychological portrait. As one critic has put it, impressionism’s focus on the ephemeral represents the collapse of consistency in thought and literature, and abolishes every form of tradition or precedence. It sees the universe with Bertrand Russell, as ‘all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness. . . .’ ¹⁸ For readers used to realistic works that are driven by plot, this type of internal drama of the mind can be unsettling yet also riveting.

The striking originality of The Red Badge of Courage, which caused a sensation in the literary world when the novel was first published, comes from the fact that Crane was the first American author to use impressionism fully and to excel in it. Earlier nineteenth-century authors had shown themselves interested in the ironic possibilities of the relativity of perception, most notably Nathaniel Hawthorne in such works as Young Goodman Brown, My Kinsman, Major Molineaux, and The Blithedale Romance; and Herman Melville in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno. But unlike these earlier experimenters with the technique, Crane nearly completely abandons plot and other thematic concerns. From start to finish, The Red Badge of Courage blurs external reality to concentrate solely on Henry’s rapidly shifting emotional states. "No other classic American novelist has so masterfully rendered the immediacy of consciousness, the impingement of data on the mind, the creative activity of the perceiving mind in respect to that data, the tricks and hiatuses and sudden shifts in direction that an ordinary mind is capable of", states John Fraser.¹⁹ The Red Badge of Courage paved the way for further experimentation in impressionism in the writing of such authors as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Katherine Anne Porter.

In his use of impressionism, Crane often focuses on the ironic difference between reality as the narrator sees it and Henry’s perception of that reality. Thus The Red Badge of Courage is a masterpiece of carefully controlled irony and its close ally, parody, rendering the novel’s tone complex and ambiguous. At times the narrator seems to view Henry with sympathy; at times the narrator seems to see him as a deluded fool. In some places the narrator parodies Henry’s romantic notions of war and mocks his pretensions; in other places the narrator seems to admire him. The complicated dual tone of the novel keeps the reader wondering which stance is correct. As Perry Lentz has pointed out, Crane’s technique in this regard is remarkably similar to that of Flannery O’Connor: both writers employ a type of narrative as mousetrap in which they entice readers into complicity with the myth-making tendency of [their] characters,²⁰ only to later reveal information that reverses or at least complicates this complicity. Ultimately, Crane’s pervasive irony calls into question the meaning of such concepts as manhood, courage, and heroism.

From the start, The Red Badge