The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [7]
In these and in other stories, Crane emphasized the potential of all individual experiences to have universal implications. A “youth” struggling to find a physical, intellectual, and spiritual path through the horrors of war parallels the road every human must travel in coping with crisis. Four men in a flimsy boat on a storm-tossed ocean become metaphors for every individual scrambling to survive the whims of an uncaring universe. An aspiring writer first encountering the inspiring poetry of a misunderstood poet becomes the archetype for all artistic epiphanies.
Like most other consequential writers before him and since, young Stephen Crane was blessed with a good number of experiences and encounters that shaped and clarified his artistic path. While it is tempting for a modern reader to reduce these influences to just a manageable few, the truth of the matter is that the genius of Crane resides in his ability to blend so many different biographical experiences, philosophical and theological assumptions, previous and contemporary literary traditions and techniques, and political ideals in a deceptively simple prose style. In Red Badge, for instance, he has the wherewithal to juxtapose a stark account of a war incident drawn according to the precepts of Realism with a scene in which the protagonist, Henry Fleming, reverts to his animal instincts, as befits the tenets of literary Naturalism. Crane sews these two episodes with such a fine stitch that readers seldom see the seams. The possibility that both disparate aesthetic perspectives can appear simultaneously valid in close textual proximity begins to reveal how complex Crane’s vision of the human experience was. Everything Crane was, everything he believed, every meaningful book that he read, every indelible memory from his life, every interesting idea he had ever heard went into the construction of the novel. In the rest of this introduction, I will touch upon a number of these shaping encounters, focusing especially upon those that manifested themselves in both open and disguised ways in Red Badge, taking great advantage in the process of insights by the many astute academic critics Crane’s work has attracted during the past eighty years.
II
As one might suspect, Stephen Crane’s family and childhood appear in Red Badge in covert and private ways. He was born in a parsonage in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871. He was his forty-five-year-old mother’s fourteenth child, but none of her previous four babies had survived beyond their first year. Thus, among the Crane children who survived to adulthood, Stephen became the most indulged, a circumstance encouraged by the age gap between him and his nearest older sibling.
His father, the Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane, named his child after the first Crane to migrate to North America during the seventeenth century and also after a prominent New Jersey ancestor who had been active during the Revolutionary War. (Dr. Crane erroneously thought that the latter had signed the Declaration of Independence.) As biographer Edwin Cady has pointed out, young Stephen grew up as a “preacher’s kid,” a label that immediately defined his relationship with his schoolhouse peers and that definitely set up his subsequent rebellion against religious dogma. At the time of his son’s birth, Dr. Crane served as the presiding elder for a group