The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [8]
When Stephen was barely eight, his father died unexpectedly from heart complications arising from a viral attack. Stephen’s most vivid memories of his father were likely of him at work in his profession, sermonizing before his flock. As a young man, Dr. Crane had embraced Methodism, in part as a rebellion against his own Presbyterian heritage. He had been studying for the Presbyterian ministry at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) when he began to question that faith’s more strident doctrines, especially the notion of infant damnation, the belief that children who died unbaptized would be consigned to the fires of hell. While concepts such as damnation figured prominently in his sermons, Dr. Crane believed that God tempered His wrath with mercy and divinely discriminating judgment. He converted to Methodism because he saw it as a way to preach a more hopeful and nurturing view of God and salvation. At weekly prayer meetings his son undoubtedly heard his father stress his faith in a merciful God, one who lovingly embraced all. Damnation remained an omnipresent possibility, but Dr. Crane’s God was more interested in saving than in condemning.
Stephen’s mother came from a different religious tradition. Mary Helen Peck Crane was a woman capable of great kindnesses, such as the time she cared for an unwed mother despite the open misgivings of her neighbors. Nevertheless, she piously spouted the caustic Methodism long advocated by her family. The Pecks, according to Stephen Crane, produced Methodist clergymen “of the ambling-nag, saddle bag, exhorting kind.” She passionately focused upon God’s function as avenger of sins committed against His name. As an adult, Stephen fondly remembered his mother’s intelligence, but he often winced at the memory of her religious fervor. Given the obvious difference between the conceptions of husband and wife, Sunday suppers in the Crane household must have produced interesting and, for young Stephen, confusing debates at the table.
These competing views of God appear throughout Crane’s literary efforts, often at allegorical levels in his fiction but at more conspicuous ones in his poetry:
The livid lightnings flashed in the clouds;
The leaden thunders crashed.
A worshipper raised his arm.
“Hearken! Hearken! The voice of God!”
“Not so,” said a man.
“The voice of God whispers in the heart
So softly
That the soul pauses,
Making no noise,
And strives for these melodies,
Distant, sighing, like faintest breath,
And all the being is still to hear.”
I find it interesting that here Crane placed his father’s gentle perspective at the dominant position by having it respond to his mother’s “brimstone.” In chapter XI of Red Badge, Henry Fleming fears derision by the rest of his regiment for his desertion in a manner that resembles how one may fear God’s punishment for sin. Later, in chapter XIII, however, Fleming receives the tender ministrations of two comrades who tend to his wound. If his desertion represents a military sin, then Wilson’s actions suggest symbolic forgiveness by a God who provides for atonement.
The complex dimensions of Crane’s own religious beliefs ultimately had not two but three axes. By the time he was thirteen, Stephen began to rebel against his parents’ values. The precipitating causes may have been the family dejection brought on by the death of his favorite sister, Agnes Elizabeth, in 1884 and the influence of his brother Will, who, like several of the older brothers, had functioned as a surrogate father figure for the boy since Dr. Crane’s death. Will had himself experienced a rebellion, which was more a rejection of his parents’ dogmatism than an embracing of any other creed in its place. Stephen’s rebellion would need eight more years of intense reading