The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [14]
Crane was probably more comfortable in employing devices from Romanticism’s literary cousin—Gothicism. Its chief antebellum practitioner in America was Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales Crane had studied intently in his fraternity library. The 1880s and 1890s proved to be a neo-Gothic era in literature, as evidenced by the publication of works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. American Realists of the period such as Bierce stripped Gothicism of its supernatural components and began to incorporate its other devices to depict the horror in everyday life. Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), had suggested that there were two competing impulses in Gothicism: (1) Relying upon the literary device “suspense,” terror aroused the intellect to a new level of awareness through dread. (2) Its opposite, horror, tried to annihilate thought by confronting the intellect with a multitude of terrible events in rapid succession. Red Badge fuses the two impulses. After standing his ground during the first skirmish, Fleming reacts with blind horror to the second Rebel assault, abandoning his position, his rifle, his comrades, and all of his Romantic preconceptions about war. Ultimately, however, terror does make its presence felt. Fleming dreads what his comrades might say when he returns to the regiment in chapter XIII. He remains in continual suspense about inevitable future battles, about how he will react to the next hostile encounter, and about what his place should be in such a threatening and uncaring environment. Crane combined these defining moments of horror and terror to illustrate the violent perceptual oscillations every soldier must cope with when he is first exposed to enemy fire.
Crane departed from pristine Realist conceptions not only by retreating to past traditions like Gothicism and Romanticism; he also integrated new ideas from emerging artistic schools, which during the 1890s were beginning to question the primacy of Realism in American letters. The strongest challenger was literary Naturalism. With philosophical assumptions arising from and encouraged by the biological theories of Charles Darwin, the political theories of Karl Marx, and, at a later time, the social theories of Herbert Spencer, Naturalism as a literary choice was first embraced by French writers during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Foremost among these was Émile Zola, whose novel about a Parisian prostitute, Nana (1880), likely inspired Crane to begin his American counterpart, Maggie:A Girl of the Streets. As a force, Naturalism did not reach American shores until a new generation of writers, eager to rebel against established literary values, burst upon the scene at the turn of the century—Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Kate Chopin, and Jack London.
Naturalism is similar to Realism in its striving for objectivity in narration, yet it differs from its predecessor in its philosophical assumptions. Among other principles, it interpreted man’s lot determin istically Basically, it advocated that the individual is not in control of the forces that influence his or her behavior. These forces had two sources: one internal, the other external. At one extreme, millions of years of evolution have imprinted instincts in humans that manipulate our conduct. We share these subconscious desires with lower-class mammals—sexual urges, territorial impulses, the instinct to survive, etc. For example, when in chapter VII Fleming observes a squirrel flee when threatened, he equates this instinctual response