The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [13]
The ultimate greatness of Red Badge may be not only that it tells a basic truth about war; it simultaneously distills the essence of a human will responding to any sort of crisis. In doing so, Crane creates an atmosphere of war with which an audience could readily connect, more so than they could with a text produced by a combat veteran. That veteran often had a subconscious misgiving that only soldiers who had experienced war could truly appreciate his account. With the swaggering confidence of a young writer, Crane made no such assumptions and instead trusted that pain and horror were universal enough so that all civilians could empathize with the plight of the soldier.
One other tactic existed in the game plan of an American Realist. As all good literary traditions had done before it, Realism rebelled against the aesthetic values of its predecessor—in this case, Romanticism. Popularized by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman from the 1820s to the beginning of 1861, Romanticism and its beliefs, especially its pursuit for and contemplation of the ideal, had been se verely tested by the savage realities of four bloody years of civil war. One postbellum consequence of this new national literary sensibility was that in their novels Realists often lampooned Romantic values. Oftentimes, the Realist would create an idealistic character with lofty beliefs and ambitions just so that the everyday realities of life could defeat him.
Like his Realist mentors, Crane challenged in his novel the Romantics’ assumptions about war. Before his first taste of enemy gunfire, Fleming envisions war in terms of heroic struggles. Individual effort will be acknowledged and glorified in epic grandeur. The youth sees himself as a modern-day Achilles, perhaps destined to die but only after earning the accolades of his grateful comrades and cherished me morializing by his home town. Fleming soon finds out that war is a “blood-swollen god” who gobbles down human flesh, that individuals lose their identities in the great “blue demonstration,” from endless drilling to the maneuvering of hapless men toward what to them seem to be meaningless battles.
Just as he could not free himself completely from the dogmatic aspect of his mother’s religion, however, Crane likewise had difficulty in rejecting all dimensions of a Romantic sensibility. Long before the age of Sigmund Freud, British and American Romantics had explored (in a nonscientific way) the psychological basis of human behavior. Above all else, they valued the human mind and the individual it defined. The self became inviolable. For all of the onslaught by war, society, and fate upon his well-being, Fleming, during each reevaluation of his place, never surrenders his ego to the indifference of the universe, even at the end of the narrative:
With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man (p. 130).
I suspect that one reason Howells disapproved of Red Badge was that by the novel’s end, all Henry Fleming had accomplished was to replace one