STEPHEN CRANE%» a PA I NTER's EYE, a DEFINIT!ON of CRANE's IMPRESSIONISM Brian F^W. G a Rfie Ld a Thesis Submitted to The
Stephen Crane; a painter's eye; a definition of Crane's impressionism
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Authors Garfield, Brian, 1939-
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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/566731 , STEPHEN CRANE% » A PA I NTER'S EYE, A DEFINIT!ON OF CRANE'S IMPRESSIONISM
; by : Brian F^W. Garfield
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH in Parti at Fu i f i 11ment of the Requ irements For the Degree o f
MASTER OF ARTS In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
19 6 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfillm ent of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.
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b j/9 6 ~ 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
1 DEFINITION AND PROPOSAL,. 09.000 00900 O 9 0990099 O
I I COLOR IN LITERATURE, AND THE IMPRESSIONIST
P A I NT ERS o 0 0 9 0 0 OOOOOO o O O 0 0 0-0 0 0 O o o o 0O 0 000 O 0 0 OOO O 18
.II I THE EARLY YEARSs BEFORE THE RED BADGE OF . ■ COURAO E 00 000 00600 0000 oo@ 000 00 0 O' 0 '0 o O’ o o 000000 ^0 00 3 3-
I V THE COLORS OF THE RED BADGE OF COURAGEp.0 00. . . 53
V AFTER THE RED BADGE,.,.0 0, 0000000, 00, 000000,00 86
VI THE SOURCES OF CRANE'S IMAGERY,, . . . 0 . . . . 102
A PPEND1 Xo O 0 0 0 .0 0 O 0 OOO O 0 0 0 O 00 O O OOO O O O OO O O 0 0 , 0 0 0 0 6 000 0 0 , 0 112
LIS T OF WORKS CONSULTED,o., o, ,, . . ,, . ,00..,. 114 I DEFINITION AND PROPOSAL
Like a Homeric characterj Stephen Crane (1871 - 1900) is a figure on whom it has been a favorite pastime to heap epithets. He is Realist Crane, Naturalist Crane, Crane the
Undisciplined Natural Genius, Crane the Burnt-Out, Crane the
Rebel, Crane the Imagist, Crane the Symbolist, Crane the
Impressionist,
Epithets, obviously, are merely names with which we try to f i t one man into a category shared by many others.
Words like "Imagist11 and “ Impressionist" have to be used . loosely or not at all; it Seems hardly possible that they could mean exactly the same thing when applied to two different figures,
For example, the literary Natural ism found in the - ' i work of Stephen Crane did not take the same clumsy form as did Dreiser 1s, nor did it ever seem to attempt the b itte r, scien tific experimental ism that Zola’s Naturalism called for,
Whe subject of Crane's literary Naturalism has been surveyed In Richard J, Fisher, “Stephen Crane's Natural ism 11 (unpublished Master's Thesis, Department of English, Univer sity of Arizona, 1951) »
1 ' .. ■ "■ ' ■ -" : 2 And If Crane is an Imagist, he certainly displays a different
brand of I mag i sm from the cadences of senseless sounds found
in some early twentieth-century Imagist poets.
Epithets and categories 5, then, are conveniences which at times may serve to conceal more than they reveal.
And often what they do not conceal, they confuse. Such is
the casej apparently, with the Impressionism that mbny critics
have found in Crane's writing technique.
The particular problem that this paper seeks to exam
ine is a question of influences (or sources; the difference
1ies only in point of view). One group of c ritic s of Crane' s work has contended, with some vigor, that Crane owed a great
deal of his style -- at least in his later works -- to the
painters of the impressionist school. Crane's fiction and
poetry have always been known for their colorful descriptions;
there is no question but that Crane made more use of color
adjectives per page than did any other writer in English. His
images depend largely on sensory perception (color, light, :
and sounds), and in some of his works, such as "The Blue
Hotel ,11 "Horses -- One Dash," and "The Open Boat," a large
part of the effectiveness of the tales depends on the calcu
lated effects of the color images. In the presentation of
these images, the above-mentioned school of thought contends.
Crane owed much W his knowledge of Impressionist painting. 3 This idea in turn has led to considerable confusion as to the meaning of the term "Impress ionist" as it is ap plied to Stephen Crane. The purpose of this thesis w ill be to lim it the definition of that term.
An important difference exists between Impressionism
in literature and Impressionism in painting, at least as the terms are commonly used. Literary Impressionism, with which this paper is not particularly concerned, is primarily a mat ter of descriptive selectivity, although in its broader senses the word covers a vast number of meanings. The Impres- *' ' O sionist writer is one who "carefully selects his details,"
He is a writer to whom, if "one feature of a landscape is successfully exaggerated, a 1# the rest of it w ill reside be fore the eye," Crane was just such "an observer of s ig n ifi cant d e ta il,"3 When Amy Lowell says that Crane displayed "a 4 keen, impressionistic perception of people and things," she
2james Trammel 1 Cox, "Stephen Crane as Symbolic Nat uralist: An Analysis of ‘The Blue Hotel,‘" Modern Fiction Studies I I I (Summer 1957)„ 147. See also Rusself Roth, "A Tree in Fiction: The Short Fiction of Stephen Crane," New Mexico Quarter ly XXI 11 (Summer 1953)» 190,
3D on Honig, ih the Introduction to Stephen Crane, "An I 11us ion 1n Red and White" and Ten Other Stories Not Available i n Any Other Book in Print (New York: Avon Book Division, The Hearst Corp., T 962), p.8,
^1n her Introduction to The Black Riders and Other LJnes, Vol, VI of the series The Work of Stephen Crane, ed, WlIson F o llett (New York: Alfred A, Knopf Co,, 1926), pp. xv-xvi, Hereafter the series w ill be called the Work, : : : , ; , . “ is probably referring to his writing style rather than any
significant parallels with painting.
Formal definitions are so broad and vague that they ' ; ■■ : : . / ■ ■' ; , ' ■' ' ■ ■■ seem of l i t t l e help. For example, Benet1s Reader's Encyclo^
pedia te lls us only this:
Impressionism [is] a movement in painting, music, and literature in the latter half of the 19th century, originating in France, the aim of which was to por tray the effects, or "impressions", of experience upon the consciousness of the a rtis t, . . . rather than the objective characteristics of things and events. o > o In poetry and the novel, impressionism . „ . [applies.to] symbolism, imagism, and related movements, and fiction making use of the stream-of- consciousness technique, as well as other writing which may not f i t into any formal category.5
Certainly the definition would be more useful were it less
';v';vague./;:::v<::^ ; v? f
The important point of difference between the literary
and graphic kinds of Impressionism would seem to lie in the
kind of images used and the technique of presenting them.
With reference to Crane, we find ievera1 statements to such
things as his "prose pointillism ,"^ and his style amounting
to painting "with words exactly as the French Impressionists
paint with pigments; both use pure colors and contrasts of
colors. For the purposes of this paper, such statements as
5wi11iam Rose Benet, ed», The Reader's Encyclopedias An Encyclopedia of Wor1d Literature and the Arts- (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell” Co,, 1948), p. 537. ^Robert Wooster Stallman, "The Red Badge Of Courage," i n his The Houses that James Bui 11 (Ann Arbor: Hi chi gan State University Press, 1W T), p. 83» ' v , 7 |bi d l, p. 84. ■ : v ■ ■ . : 5 the last two are of more interest than one, for example, like this: "He [Crane] is rather the best of our writers in what is 8 called ‘description 1 because he is the least describing."
B riefly, then, the purpose of this thesis is to study the singular imagery in Crane's work, with special attention to color images and light-dark contrasts, in an effort to decide whether or not painting (and, in particular. Impres sionist painting) had an influence on him -- and, if there was such an influence, how great it was,
It w i11 probably prove impossible to provide any definitive statements about the exact or intended meaning of any particular symbols or symbolisms that exist in the works, and it is hardly more likely that the information gathered in this paper w ill be of much help when it comes to trying to produce evidence that w ill corroborate or contradict existing interpretations of Crane's work. But the collection of imagery and the comparisons of c ritic a l views that w ill be presented in the ensuing chapters may very well be able to clarify points that are currently disputed, and perhaps even eliminate certain critical contentions that have not taken into account the whole of the evidence on which they should rest, ■
^Willa S[ibert] Gather, "Stephen Crane's 1 Wounds in the Rain,'" in her On Writing (New York: Alfred A, Knopf Co., 1949), p. 70. . 6
As several critics have pointed out, no book-length
c ritic a l study of Crane has yet appeared. Only recently has
criticism begun to take him seriously as a figure of literary
importance.^ And those c ritics who have devoted appreciable
attention to Crane Lars Ahnebrink, Thomas Beer, John
Berryman, the ubiquitous Robert Wooster Stallman, and a few others -- have concerned themselves primarily, and almost
exclusively, with Crane's major works. These include one
short novel -- The Red Badge of Courage and perhaps half a
dozen short stories, including "The Blue Hotel," "The Bride
Comes to Yellow Sky," Maggie; A G irl of the Streets, and
"The Open Boat".
The fact is that these works constitute only the
skimmed cream of his work. The incomplete collected writings 10 f i l l twelve volumes; and for our present purposes, it seems
advisable to widen the study to include not only those works
that have already been considered in some detail by c ritic s ,
John Berryman, for one, has observed this, in his Stephen Crane ,(NdWr York: WiT 1 iam SlOahe Associates, Inc. , 1950), 264, pp. x ir x ii. See also H.L. Mencken, in his Introduction to Stephen Crane, Major Conflicts, Vol. X of the Work, p. x i i i .
^The Work. but also others that may be representative of particular periods in Crane's writing career and certain changing mani festations of technique. For example, this ppper proposes to discuss the various arguments that Crane did or did not know anything about painting, and that painting did or did not influence his writing. Those who argue that he knew about the Impressionist painters and their work, base their argu ments largely on the facts that in late 1892 and through 1893,
Crane spent some of his time in illu s tra to r Corwin Knapp
Linson's studio; that in ip ri1,1893, Crane lived at the Art
Students League in New York, where a great many young painters lived and worked; and even that "Crane knew Albert Pinkham
Ryder personally. . „ ." Certainly,then, it will be of interest to examine those pieces ( Tike the Sul 1ivan County
Sketches) that Crane wrote before he moved to New York and became acquainted with painters and talk of painting. Compari son of these early works with later works may be of great sig nificance in any attempt to determine the extent of influence the graphic arts may have had on him.
M ; Stallman, p. 83. Stallman cites no evidence in support of his statement; Crane * s biographer in effect denies it (Berryman, p. 289). Berryman, however, makes the interest ing (aid also undocumented) statement on p^ 140 that in 1896, at 165 West 23rd Street in New York, Crane's apartment had "impressionistic landscapes on the tinted walls." : : . ■ ' .. . ■ 8 To make unlimited study of Crane's imagery would
necessitate a thorough discussion of a ll the c ritic a l theo
ries that have been applied to his workss for this reasons
every school has its own interpretation of the imagery, and
each interpretation serves to defend the c ritic a l theory
proposed by that particular school. And since it is not the
purpose of this thesis to determine whether or not Crane was
Christian, anti-Christian, Naturalist, existentialist,
ironist, or classicist (a ll have been proposed), the study
/ r , • of images that follows will of necessity be representative
rather than all-inclusive. Thus, unless close textual analy
sis of imagery proves that oh 1y one c ritic a l interpretation
is valid (and that possibility is more than doubtful), gen
eral c ritic a l theories about Crane's works must remain outside
the province of this paper, ekcept insofar as they may be
cited now and then for the purpose of clarifying or suggesting
the interpretation of a particular image or set of images.
A further problem that must obviously be considered
in this introductory chapter is the question of the validity
of studying images, symbolism, and techniques. According to
some c ritic s , it is unwise to try and separate the parts from
the whole, where a work of art is concerned. [ 8t is a mistake tp follow] the current obses sion with the search for symbols, allegories and mythic patterns in the novela search conducted on the unanalysed assumption that to locate such symbols in a fictional work is some how tantamount to a demonstration of its excel lence, The fact that the same symbols and pat terns are just as easily discoverable in the worst as in the best novels counts for nothing among the pursuers of this type of research , *2
This comment was prompted by the excessive lengths to which
Stallman seems to have gone in his analyses of some of Crane's . . . .• , '. . . ' ■■■. ' ' ; ' , ' ' works. It is no doubt an excellent argument; at the moment it should suffice to say in this paper's defense that it will not try to demonstrate that any work is valuable because sym bols can be discovered in ?t 9 nor to isolate any patterns of symbolism simply for the pedantic purpose of isolating them.
The purpose of this paper is to try to establish and clarify* or destroy beyond a doubt* the proposed relationship between
Impressionist painting and Stephen Crane's w riting, and to base this establishment or destruction on more substantial evidence than has heretofore been produced.
The presence of visual imagery --of colors and con trasts -- in his work may be more than what narrative-writers
^ P h ilip Rahv, "Fiction and the Criticism of Fiction," in Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E, Hudson Long, eds,, Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (New York; W,W, Norton and Co., 1 nc, ,"11)6217 p, 289, First published in Kenyon Review, CVIII (Spring 1956)» 276-291, , v 10 call "description;" it may be a fundamental structural material, without which the entire substance of Crane's artistic effectiveness might collapse. My intent is not to extrude definitive meanings from ambiguous statements which may or may not have symbolic value, nor is it to pro vide nebulous reasons in support of any statements about the worth of Crane's works, Philip Rahv, again, discusses the problem clearly:
Moby Dick, for instance, is a work of which certain basic elements, such as the whale, the sea and the quest, have both symbolic and direct representational value. There is no consensus of opinion among commentators as to what the sym bolic value of those elements comes to in specific, exact terms; and it is a proof of the merit of this work that no such consensus is in fact possible.. The narrative, not being an allegory, has no mean ings that can i?e mentally tabulated and neatly ac counted for. Its symbols are integrally a part of its fictive reality, and it is precisely their organic character that renders them.immune to purely intellectual specification.*5
Rahv continues, contending that we should not "attempt to re duce the complex structure and content of the novel to its sum of techniques, among which language is again accorded a paramount place.But there are a good many critics who take the position that Rahv has deplored. Among them, as was
T h ' This seems a curious comment, in view of Rahv's opinion as.quoted supra, p. 9.
15Rahv, pp. 294-295.
I6 lb?d., p. 289. . 11 mentioned above, is Stallman, who has devoted much attention to Crane, and is particularly known for his theory that The
Red Badge of Courage is a religious allegory, in which Jim
Conklin, the soldier who dies, represents the Savior. S ta ll man argues that Conklin's in itia ls and a number of what seem to be ambiguous statements in the book all go to support his contention.^ This interpretation leads Stallman to a lengthy examination of the celebrated "red wafer" sun image in The
Red Badge of Courage -- an interpretation which Rahv and sev eral others see as utijustifiable and patently absurd; 11, „ .
Hr. Stallman's far-fetched religious exegesis is mere 18 Ze i tge i s t pa 1 aver . 11
" It is," Rahv adds, "the inescapable logic of [an] obsession with symbols and allegories that is bound to de cline into a sort of mechanistic Kabbala that scrutinizes each sign and le tte r of the printed page for esoteric or super- 19 natural meanings," so that presently we forget that we are treating literatu re and begin to work as though the only con cern of c ritic or scholar is symbolism. Rahv may well be right; however, we have Crane's own statement of belief, that
''The whole argument w ill be found in Stallman's Intro duction to.Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (New York: The Modern Library [Random House, Jnc.T,- T951), pp. y-xxxyi i .
l 8Rahv, p. 292. / : ' 0
W b id .V pp. 292-293. ' ' 90 a story's meaning should not be made too obvious, and this in part may help ju s tify Stallman's investigations, if not his conclusions.
Mr. Stallman insists that Crane was a symbolic writer (Berryman agrees on this point; it is most1y the older critics who thought of him as a re a lis t), but he makes too much of the dis tinction,^as though the alternatives excluded each other1, and often neglects to say just what it is that Crane symbolizes. . . . [Stallman tries to make] it appear that the presence of symbols or metaphors is the sufficient condition for a work of a rt. I dare say this is not Mr. Stallman's actual opinion, but he comes perilous ly close to it in his desire to show that Stephen Crane was not chiefly a re a lis t. But as there is no reason why the work of a realist should not abound in symbols and metaphors, this much of _ Mr. Stallman's commentary is beside the point.
This observation, of course, ignores Stallman's own statement that much of Crane's work is nonsymbol i;c. ^ But in general it seems clear that on several points Stallman has laid himself open to the attacks of critics armed with logic
And it is to avoid the same kind of p itfa ll that thisstudy w i11 confine itself to arguments that will be as direct and logical as possible.
A case in point is the fact that Stallman's thought, noted in the previous paragraph, can be applied to Crane's
ZOstdphen Crane, Stephen Crane; An Omnibus, ed. Robert Wooster Stallman (New York: AlfrecTA. Knopf, Inc., 1952), p. 218. .. ■ ; .. :
21|^aac Rosbnfe1d, "Stephen Crane as Symbolist," Ken yon Review XV (Spring 1953), 312-313.
22sta11man. Houses '. . . , p. 82. use of color words; not every one is a symbol„ This is obvi
ous. No one could ju s tify trying to squeeze a symbolic mean
ing out of every statement like "the grass was green , 11 But
it seems safe to assume, on the evidence that w ill be presented
in the course of this paper 9 that many of Crane's color words are placed more for effect than for verisimilitude. However,
the fact that a particular color word appears in a particular
place w ill not, in many cases, afford us license to label the color word with a "meaning". As Sigmund Skard warns, "The
interpretation of symbols may dasily be,exaggerated, and the
’ 23 codification of the 'meaning' become too rig id,"
Within the limits outlined above, this inquiry will
focus on Crane's literary technique and its parallels with
painting techniques. The following chapters w ill take a close
look at some of the most colorful images Crane painted in words, and try to determine whether they are merely attempts
to shock or s tartle , and whether they owed any great part of
their o rig in ality to painting.
The work that has been done up to now, as it applies
to this investigation, is interesting but, unfortunately,
scanty and fragmentary. Most important, probably, is James
Trammel 1 Cox's "The Imagery of The Red Badge of Courage,"
23The Use of Color in Literature; A Survey of Re search. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society XC (Phi 1 ade 1 phiaAmerican Philosophical Society, and Lan- cas.ter. Pa.: Lancaster Press, In c ,, 1946), 178. ' . ■ . . . ; ■ . . V . ' .. . . • ■ . ' 14 which contains a fairly detailed analysis of the supposed
symbolic significance of several kinds of imagery, but only 24 for the one book* Of somewhat lesser significance is
Claudia C, Wogan's"Crane's Use of Color in The Red Badge of
Courage, " which is quite brief ( 3 T/2 pages) but of some
help in that it ta llie s the number of times each color-word • or ' • 1 appears in the book, and makes a few tentative observations
about the distribution and possible function of those color-
wordso ^
There are/ alsC, Mr. Stallman's scattered and tanta-
lyzingly unfinished statements about Crane's use of color.
, 27 ' These references appear in several publications.
Of additional help are Joseph J. Kwiat's ''Stephen O Q 1 ' ' ? I , • 1 « Crane and Painting," Stanley B. Greenfield's "The Unmistak
able Stephen Crane,and John E. Hart's "The Red Badge of
Z^Modern Fiction Studies V (Autumn 1959)V 209-219.
25Hodern Fi cti on Studies V (Autumn 1959), 168- 172. Miss Wogan finds 235 color adjectives in the bopk; my own count is 245., and the difference seems to be largely in such words as "brass," where Miss ,’Wpgan; finds one reference and I find fiv e , A careful reading in Context seems to indicate that Crane had color as well as metallic quality in mind.
26jn the Appendix #6 this paper w ill be found a chart listing the appearances of color-words and color-suggestive references in several of Crane's works.
27The Houses that James Bui I t , Omni bus, The Modern Library Edition, Stephen Crane: Stories and Tales, Stephen Crane, Letters, and others that WiT T be mentioned as tney are "quoted. . 28American Quarterly IV (Winter 1952), 331-338, 29pMLA LXXm (December"1958). 562-572. 5 ' ^ ' ■ ^ •. : • : ' ; .■ . ■ ] 5 ■
30 Courage as Myth and Symbol," Each makes mention of colors and their possible functions in Crane’s work.
After these; thefe is a large amount of material, consisting of short periodical articles and introductions to recen.t_editions of Crane’s work (many in paperback), in each instance of which some small reference to Crane’ s use of imagery can be found. Almost everyone who writes about Crane has seen f i t to say something about his extraordinarily colorful and startling images. For example there is this statement: "Crane builds his stofies around a single mood, to 31 which, as one can see, his use of colors contributes," In
1896, Charles Dudley Warner said he did "not know how much of this effect [of intensity in The Red Badge of Courage] was due to the scheme of color."^ these ard but representative; a complete recapitulation of critical references to Crane’s color and visual imagery would require many pages, the main effect of which would only be useless repetition. But in spite
^U niversity of Kansas City Review XIX (Summer 1953)s 249-256. : — ^
3 ^Austin McC. Fox, in his Introduction to Stephen Crane, Maggie and Other Stories (New York: Washington Square Press, TfSoTT p T x y T T - ~ 0 /
32"the Editor's Study: Color in Literature," Harper’s Magazine, XC1I (May 1896), 9b2.
: 33"Stephen Crane from an English Standpoint," North. American Review CLXXI (August 1900), 234, of this c ritic a l attention, nothing definitive has been
stated. Claudia Wogan put it this ways
The opening paragraphs of almost any Crane story are heavily spiashed with color, the famous fir s t paragraph of "The Open Boat" being a typical example03i*- That Crane used color widely in The Red Badge of Courage is a commonplace. Few critics of Crane's fiction have neglected to mention it; as a matter of fact, this use of color was one of the elements of Crane's style which was criticized by contemporary reviewers of the novel.35 As far as I know, however, there has been no detailed study as to what, s ty lis tic a lly , is gained By this Bsdotiar handling of color, or how Crane's color images function within the impressionistic technique.3b
The existing material, then, though large in quantity^: is
inconclusive.
Other published material of help by way of a guide was
Wilson C» Clough's "The Use of Color Words by Edgar Allan Poe; and, of course, there were two indispensible discussions of color in literature: the remarks of Goethe in his A Theory of 2 d Color, and the standard scholarly work by Sigmund Skard,
3^The paragraph is quoted in fra , p. 103.
35pQr example: "Mr. Crane has not learned the secret that carnage is its e lf eloquant, and does not need epithets to make it so. What is a 'crimson roar'? . . . Color in language is just now a fashionable affectation." [A.C. Sedgwick, in a review] ?n Nation LX111 (July 2, 1896), 1 5 . .
36claudia C. Wbgahsi p. I6 9. '
37RMLA XLV (April 1930), 598-613.
38johann Wolfgang von GOethe, A Theory of Color, ex tracts translated by Eleanor C. Merry in Maria Schindler and Eleanor Ce Merry, Pure Colour (London: New Culture Publica tions, 1946), pp. 69-97, r The Use of Color in L ite rature: A Survey of Research,
All these, and many others as they become usefuls w ill be cited in the body of this paper. II — COLOR IN LITERATURE,
AND THE IMPRESSIONIST PAINTERS
The imagery to be found in the work of Stephen Crane
generally can be said to fall into three categories; animal
imagery 5, mechanistic imagerys and color Imagery. In additions,
of course, one can find many images that f i t no particular
arbitrary classification* But within the obvious 1imitations
of any such broad generalization, the general statement holds
true.
The basic difference between the last category ==* color
imagery --a n d the fir s t two, is the fact that both animal and
mechanistic imagery are metaphorica 1, while color imagery need
not be. For example, in The Red Ba'dqe of Courage*^ there are
many instances where war is compared metaphorically either to
an animal or to a machine. Brief studies of both kinds of
1 Henceforth, unless otherwise specified, this novel will be called the.Badge, and references will be made to the Norton C ritical Edition, edited by Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long (NewYorks, WoW. Norton and Co,, Inc., I962). , -■ -,. _. .. .
18 ^ " ; : . V . . , ■> :. ■i;'-;. . • 19 . ■ ; . : ; . 2 comparisons have been published. It is probably sufficient
to say here that neither kind of imagery is essentially visual, nor can it be related to painting, and thus neither lies within the scope of this paper. Descriptions of war in terms of machine-images bring to mind the suggestion that war is imper sonal , indifferent, and relentless; but they usually do not cause vivid visual impress ions. From time to time, though -- as when Crane describes war as a "red animal" — a few of these
images w ill be cited, but only for their visual and colorful effectiveness, and not for the sake of pointing out places where Crane may have made use of the pathetic fallacy or dem onstrated his belief in determinism.
Since evaluation presupposes definition, it would seem
imprudent to advance further without fir s t mentioning that in most instances in this paper, the word "visual" should be taken to apply not so much to forms or shapes as to colors, tones, shades, and contrasts between lightness and darkness or between colors. The reason for this distinction w ill become
^Among them are Cox’s a rtic le on "The Imagery of the Badge, " and Mordecai and Erin Harcus, "Animal Imagery in The Red Badge of Courage, 11 Modern Language.Notes LXXIV (February 19597, 108^T 11, deafing respectively with machine and animal images, Greenfield^ Hartj Joseph N. Satterwhite, "Stephen Crane's 1 The Blue Hotel's The Failure of Understanding," Modern Fiction Studies 11 (W inter.1956-1957)$ 238-241 1 and others also have mentioned these two forms of image patterns, as has S tal1man. . 20
more clear when the definitions of Impressionism appear below;
at the moment it may suffice to assert that Crane is known
mainly for his unusual use of colors9 and not so much for any
images that have to do with shape, size or mass. All narra
tive writing must include some kind of descriptions of shape,
but there is no necessity that a writer employ images of color
unless he chooses to do so. Doubtless Crane's noted “ta ll
soldier" is not the only ta ll soldier in fiction; but it may
well be that only in Crane is war a red animal or an oath
crimson.
With that much established, it is now possible to
concern ourselves with a brief survey of what l i t t l e has been written on the question of color in literatu re, and then a
short discussion of those facets of graphic Impressionism
(the Impressionism of the painters, as differentiated from
that of the writers) that may have a bearing on Crane's work.
The only work of any length that has devoted its e lf
exclusively to the former problem is Sigmund Skard's The Use
of Color in Literature; A Survey of Research, About eighty-
five pages long, it includes an impressive bibliography and
a commentary on the work done in the fie ld . As a survey it is
an interesting essay, arranged along historical lines, exam
ining scholarly attitudes toward color in literature and how
these attitudes have changed over the centuries. Nowhere . " - 21 does Skard mention Crane, The only American author of note whose work is mentioned in the bibliography is /Poe, Skard1 s work is of interests, suggesting a few avenues of approach but unfortunately it is not of fundamental value to this particular study. Only a few of his remarks seem useful, He points out the traditional use of color as religious and■super- - . 3 ■ : ■ . stitious symbol; in his only mention of the Naturalist writers, he states that "the colors are an important criterion"
a vague enough statement; and he reminds us of the fact that "the rendering of color impressions is connected with and
: . ' ■ : ■ ' C conditioned by the entire structure of the language- None of this Seems of startling value. He seems fo suggest some thing about the effect of Impressionism in this statement --
[After the 18801s] the mark of the young gen eration [of scholars] was a new openness toward reality: the colors were no more listed as ex amples of mechanical rule but seen as indicators of the dybamics of forces with a widely ramified mental structure,®
3 »bid,v p, 177.
4|bid,, p, 202,
Sjb?d, » p, 175.
6 ibid,, p, 172, . ; , ■ : 22 — but when we re-read i t c a re fu lly ,we find he I? discussing scholarss not w riters„ The "new openness" was a resuIt of the newly popularized science of optics, which distinguished for the fir s t time between the colors of light and the colors of pigment; this new development was part of the cause, and not a symptom] of the Impressionist movement in painting.
One of Skard's statements worth repeating is this cautioning ones
The use of color in poetry and in painting [differs] in spite of all fir s t glance sim ilarity. The colors of the painter are relatively unambiguous and stable. The hues may be defined with considerable exactitude and the composition often may be brought down to simple formulas. In this regard the painter colors have only l i t t l e in common with the vague, suggestive, and elusive means of expression in language,/
Within lim its, though, we should note that comparisons can remain valid, especially in the case of a w riter like Crane whose colors are so frequently used and confined to simple, primary tones for the most part,
Skard also reminds us of Goethe's great influence on nineteenth-century feelings about the symbolic importance of colors,^ and this fact is of importance, for as we w ill see below, Crane is reputed to have read some of Goethe's remarks.
71b1d,, p, 181,
8 Ibid,, p, 165, ' . . ' 23 . ■ ■ / ■ r _ ■ . - "Experience teaches uss" Goethe says, "that individual " • . ; ■ • ■ ' 9 ■ ■ colors produce definite mental impress ions6" Furthermore, he adds, color "affects the mind in a manner directly moral. » „ ,
Hence colour, regarded as an element of art, can be used for 10 the highest aesthetic purposes„"
Presumably, again, Crane knew of Goethe1s theories; and if he did, he probably ran across some such statement as the following:
[In its symbolic use, a color is] used according to its effectso . If , for example, one were to introduce ruby-magenta as representative of majesty, nobody would feel any doubt about this being correct. „ 0 » Another use of colour which is related to the former, may be called the allegorical one„ This is somewhat more hazardous and arbitrary -- qrte might even say conventional, as it conveys l i t t l e unless one has learnt the meaning beforehand; as, for instance, in the case of green, which is said to be the colour of hope. And fin a lly one can well imagine that colour has a mystical significance. For, as every dia gram that shows the many colours is suggestive of primeval conditions which belong equally to man1s perceptions as to Nature, so there can be ho doubt that they are able to serve us as a lang uage in which to express those primeval things, which in themselves are not able to affect the senses powerfully, nor are they so easily acces sible fo them.11
^Goethe, p. 70.
10lb?d. , p. 69.
* Ijb id ., pp. 86=87o 24
It is interesting to note that in this last, or mystical <, category, Goethe says that the green represents the earthly, and red the heavenly,^^
Elsewhere, he outlines the supposed "moral" (prob ably psychological) effects produced by the various colors.
Each color has a plus value and a minus value, he says; the warm colors are more active than the cool ones (for example, scarlet stimulates to activity, vitality and effort, while 13 blue represents coldness and is "a stimulating nothingness")»
How closely we can pursue any Supposed relationship between these theoretical effects of various colors, and the use of colors in Stephen Crane's work, is a question the answer to which is probably too nebulous to allow its inclu sion here. For that reason, it seems unimportant to include the specific effects Goethe delegates to each particular color. But Goethe's general theory may in part account for the color choices in Crane's images,
Whether Goethe's theory w ill also account for the fact that Crane chose so markedly to emphasize colors is another question entirely, and best le ft until later,
121 bid, , p, 87 , . \
^3Goethe's remarks w ill be found in the above-men tioned work, with the specific color-references and effects on pages 71-84, Others have also constructed systems of color =*refererVc emotI ons and effects - - 1iturgical symboli sms , the symboli sm of heraldry, even psychotherapeuti c symbol I sms* The relative value of any of the various coTor-coded symbol isms is doubtful in any such investigation as this one.
It requires too great a stretch of our credulity to try to believe that any particular colbr^ in the work of an author, stands always for some particular quality or its “minus11 opposite. To accept such an idea would be no more d iffic u lt than to try to apply to Crane's work some such theory as the one that tells us what colors extroverts prefer and what colors manicSi, bystericals^ schizophrenics, and paranoids prefer. As one writer says,,“any attempt to carry over
[the last kind of data] into the study of the lite ra ry use of color is beset with peculiar difficulties." There is, he points out, hardly any wOrk on the subject available, and'“we V ■ ;■ V: ; ,.■■■■■■ - 1 C ; ' ■' - \ have almost no scientific yardsticks to apply. 11
S t ill, as Faber Birren says, "Color associations exist by the score."
Man finds in the hues of the spectrum emotional analogies with sounds, shapes and forms, odors, tastes. Color expressions work their way into language. Symbolism, tradition, and superstition. . . . Color conveys moods which attach themselves quite autpmatlc human feelings.
•^These data w ill be found in Faber B i rren 8 s Color Psychology and Color Ihefapy (New Hyde Park, N.Y.; Univer- sity Books, Inp., 196TK 15clough, p. 598. I631 rren, p. 162. Undoubtedly there are certain emotional attitudes toward color that are almost universal in the Western world
attitudes such as these:
» » o red is an ardent and passionate color, assigned to saints and sinners, patriots and anarchists, love and hatred, compassion and war. . « «
Yellow is a despised hue. Though it once referred to the heathen, it now marks the scoundrel, , , ,
Green [marks] jealousy, , „ , inexperience, „ V ■> [nature]» Blue , v o once referred to the insane, then to mental depression in general,
[Brown is d ir ty ,] -
Black connotes despair and an evil conscience, “White" expresses . , , vanity [or pride, and right eousness],'/
It Is not in the search for ersatz symbolic meanings for colors that the above summary is presented. It is, rather, in an ef fo rt to simplify the problem. There is no doubt but that a broad pattern of racial attitudes, such as the above, had some effect on Crane's choice of the color “red" to describe war, battle, courage, anger and the like, and the color green for the warm, quiet woods into which Henry Fleming slinks during his ignominious retreat from the battle, in the Badge, No mysterious chart of color-meanings overhung; Crane's writing desk. Without question, a great many of the colors in his
17lb id ,, pp, 169-170, 27 works are there because they are rea lis tic or symbolically
conventional„
But many are not. Primarily^ it is these latter with which we are concerned.
But before entering into a discussion of Crane's
images9 we must fir s t do a l i t t l e more by way of pinning down the term "Impressionism-"
Maurice Grosser^ a well known painter himself, has written one of the best and most readable accounts of Impres sionism in painting in The Painter's Eye- Grosser describes
Impressionism, in part, as "the theory of broken color, as a
revolt against the brown sauces of the academic painters-"
This revolt, he points put, caused "not only our liberation 19 from a moribund Romanticism, but also the invention of the techniques and the establishment of the traditions of the 20 painting of our time-"
18(New York: Mentor Books [New American Library], 19565 Fourth printing, 1961) 5, p. 8 6-
T^lt w ill be noted that, sim ilarly, the breaking away from Romanticism in literature is, in Crane's work, accompanied by the advance of techniques that are termed Impressionistic- Natural ism in literature for some reason seemed sometimes (but not always5 note Dreiser) to accompany Impressionism- Grosser adds that "The Impressionist theory - . - is that the painter is a disinterested spectator- His eye is pure . - . and [he] records the variations of light his eye receives in terms of spots of color- 11 ( Ibid - - pp- 89- 90)
2 0 1b i d- - p- 91 o 28
" I t is the Impressionist revolution which Is the source of all the painting of the present day,". he remarkss and adds, "The painter knows > » > that technique and sub ject matter are not independent, A new subject requires a new way of painting, , , The essence of this new way of painting was fundamentally simple; "What he [the Impressionist]
is painting is not form but light,
Grosser exp 1a i ns how, in the n i neteenth century* a revolution took place in painting techniques; the theretofore common technique (of drawing in the picture's outlines* then painting a monochrbme-wash composition* and fin a lly laying on the fu ll colors of the final paints) wbs replaced by the newer technique of painting In fu ll color from the beginning* empha sizing color and light rather than form* and following no pre arranged drawing. This technique Grosser calls "methodical
improvisation*" and he sees it as a change of powerful s ig n ifi cance? since that time* virtually all painting has had the same quality of improvisation,^^
Crane's work seems strikingly in parallel with the underlying feeling of this revolution as Grosser describes it;
Crane* too* used colors not as a fin al* separate element laid
21 Ibid,, p, 8 6, ; ^21bidi, * p, 5,
23Ibid, ? p, 8 6,
24|bid,, p, 49, ' ; : ; ' ^ ;; - . ■■■ ' . ' 29 on top of an already existing structure; in Crane's work, a ll
indications seem to point to the idea that colors and visual
imagery are no longer merely background materials used for the purposes of increasing verisimilitude and providing scene and mood. He re, i n hi s poems and stories, we see the visual tones used not as background, but as important structural elements.
How this comes about w ill be examined in the following chapters.
But it is vital to the subject that we remember the distinction between colors as ornaments and colors as structural materials.
Grosser puts it this way;
A picture constructed on a framework of light and dark, with fa irly simple colors superimposed, suffers less from the degeneration of one of these colors than does a picture of the Impressionists. . . . A red fades in a Titian; nothing essential is lost. The picture be comes simply a Titian without red. But if a red fades in a Van Gogh, the whole effect of the picture is distorted.25
A number of interesting, if not conclusive, parallels can be drawn between Impressionist painting theories and some of the imagery in Crane's work, particularly his later fiction
(The Third V io le t, for example). Notable among these parallels
is that the "sketch became the picture. And the big picture -- which always takes a certain time to paint -- became a series 26 of sketches superimposed one on top the other . 11 Grosser goes on to explain that in general, the larger Impressionist
25 ibid., p. 6 1.
26 |bid. , p. 8 6. 30
paintings were not as successful as the smaller ones, because
in the presentation of composition^ unity and singularity of
object were the goals 9 and a large picture that sought this simple kind of unity seemed too empty.^7 |n this context, we
can recall that Crane's most successful work was his short work ( “The Open Boat," “The Blue Hotel") and that his only
novel of merit =-■ the Badge *•-' is, in fact, an extended short
story, made up of a loosely interconnected series of episodes, much like the “series of sketches superimposed one on top the
other" which Grosser gives us as a definition for the big
Impressionist picture. Crane's other novels, more conventional
in form -- Active Service, The O' Ruddy, The Third Violet -~ were not very good; and a reading of The Third Violet indi
cates that one reason for its disappointing lack of merit is
the fact that it takes altogether too long to deal with a
simple situation and a few hastily Sketched characters.
Another parallel can be seen in Grosser‘ s statement
that the Impressionist painters' dots of colors were not
“blended on the canvas. They were intended to be mixed in the 28 .. - ' : ■ • ■ - .■ spectator's eye." It would seem, as several c ritics suggest.
27 |b? d.
28|b |d. , p. 94. 31
that Crane's "prose point! 111 sm11 follows exactly the same
idea. Whether Crane's attempt was successful is not certain; and whether its source was the painting of the Impressionists
is a debated question, the answer to which we seek in these pages„ But the nature of the attempt, regardless of its source, seems beyond tjbest ion „
For another instance. Grosser points out that the
Impressionists painted not from a posed model for the most part, and not in an academic tradition, but from life , from 29 nature, usually out-of-doors. Crane, except for the "pretty
little patent-leather finishes he put on some of his later
•tales"3.® 1 i ke The Thi rd Vio le t, certai nlyfol lowed no academ
ic or formula traditions, nor did he pose his modeIs.
Grosser also reminds us that one of the recognizable marks of the Impressionist school was its departure from the old idea of darkening a color (by adding gray or black) to
indicate shadows. Instead, the Impressionist painters mixed an entirely new color -- a color that would contrast with the
lighter areas of paint, rather than duplicate them in darker t o n e s * How like this is the passage in The Third Violet wherethe young painter sets up his easel and paints "in
29 ib?d. , -p.. 87 . ■ ' : 30Sherwood Anderson, in his Introduction to Midnight Sketches and Other Impressions, Vol. XI of the Work, p. xv.
31Grosser, p. 92. front of some fields of vivid yellow stubble on which trees
made olive shadows. . , Monet's shadows, sim ilarly, were
often olive or violet, as in his painting of 1866 title d
"Terrace at the Seaside, Near Le Havre,"
The above notes of interest are indicative but not conclusive,. Parallelisms do not close a case. There is always
the possibility of coincidence. S t ill, the evidence seems
strong enough to bear looking into. Crane is undoubtedly a colorist, and the next group of chapters w ill concern its e lf with several of his works in d etail, examining the representa
tive colorations of the prose and whatever comments critics may have made about them, and trying to construct a pattern of growth or consistency in the imagery, so that when we fin a lly come to a discussion of the several proposed sources for those
images or their prototypes, we w ill have evidence on which to base a decision.
32stephen Crane, The Third Violet (New York: D, Appleton and Company, 1897) , p" 1.3• I I I — THE EARLY YEARS9 BEFORE
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
Many c ritics have marked the fact that Crane was to some degree at least obsessed by colors. Whether a simple affectation or a matter of structural importance, it was at least singular, in the short story called "Horses -- ' i One Dash, 11 which is about 59000 words long, there appear no fewer than forty-seven references to specific colors, thirty eight references to lightness or darkness or their equiva lents, and forty-two color-suggestive references such as
"fire," "pale," "hue," "torch," and "color," for a total of at least one hundred and twenty-seven color images and pic to ria l contrasts. This amounts to roughly ten such images per page. Nowhere in the work of any other Eng 1ish-language author are we lik e ly to find anything like Crane's concentre tion of colorful description and images that are plainly cal cu la ted to evoke in the reader's mind scenes splashed! wfnth
iMost recently published in "An 111 usion jn Red and White" and Ten Other Stories . . , pp. 40-53.
33 34 2 color and 11ght»
It seems sensible to begin with Crane's earliest
works; the study that follows w ill take a chronological order.
F irst, then, we can valuably have a look at the sketches
Crane wrote while s t ill in college.
2"Life came to him [Crane] in its primary colors, blue, red, and yellow, and he asked its meaning," From the Literary History of the United States, op, c it,, p, 1023o It seems curious that so many c ritic s or Crane's fiction use metaphors of color when discussing either his life or his work. Such statements abound, "Stephen Crane was more a painter than a narrator," says Rpbert L it t e ll, in "Notes on Stephen Crane," New Republic LIV"(May 16th, 1928), 391 <> Edward Garnett, in Friday Nights (New York; Alfred A, Knopf, 1922), p, 204, mentions his "view of Crane as a born impressionist," Austin McC, Fox, in his Introduction to the Washington Square edition of Maggie, says, "Of a ll Crane's quality as a writer it is, 1 think, his metaphorical imagination that most im presses the reader. Again and again one is struck by some particularly vivid piece of imagery," P, xiv. Stallman in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of the Badge, says that the Badge is "an impressionistic painting notable for its bold innovations in method and s ty le ," p , x i, Joseph Conrad wrote to Edward Garnett that Crane "is the only impressionist and only an impressionist," (From a le tte r, number 213, December 5, 1897, in Stephen Crane: Letters, p/155.) In his edition of the Omnibus, S ta l1man says, "A Striking analogy is established between Crane's use of colors and the method em ployed by the impressionists and the neo-impressionists or divisionists, and it is as if he had known about their theory of contrasts and had composed his own prose paintings by the same principle." P, 185, He also says, in his Houses That James Bui i t , "Crane's style, is prose pointillism . It is com posed "of disconnected images, which coalesce like the blebs of color in French impressionist paintings, every word-group hav ing a cross-reference relationship, every seemingly discon nected detail having interrelationship to the configurated whole," P, 83, Don Honig, in his Introduction to "An 111 usion in Red and White . , , ", says, "With images and metaphors as start 1ing as they are abrupt, he paints his pictures. [He has] a striking use of colors, P. 11. - \ , : ' Any reasonably close textual analysis of the several
Sullivan County sketches. Crane's fir s t published fiction of any significance, w ill reveal immediately the one characteris tic shared by all of them; all are grotesque. There is a distinctly Gothic element in these morbid l i t t l e tales. Witness the following excerpts;
"From out his wan, white face his eyes shone with a blue light.^ ' v " . . •
"He [the bear] rolled back his lips and disclosed his white teeth. The fire magnified the red of his mouth,"
The dying sun created a dim purple and flame- colored tumult on the horizon's edge and then sank until level crimson beams struck the trees. As the red rays retreated, armies of shadows stole forward, A gray, ponderous stillness came heavily in the steps of the sun,®
" In the wilderness sunlight is noise. Darkness is a great, tremendous silence, accented by small and distant sounds,
JLb® Sul 1 ivan County Sketches of Stephen Crane, edited with an Introduction by Melvin SchoBer1in (Syracuse, New York; Syracuse University Press, 1949)» hereafter cited as the Sketches,
^"The Cry of a Huckleberry Pudding," Sketches, p, 69,
5"A Tent in Agony," Sketches, p, 62,
^"Killing His Bear," Sketches, p, 51,
7"A Ghoul's Accountant," Sketches, p, 39, " T h e iour men fi shed intent 1y unti 1 the sun had sunk down to some tree-tops and was peering at them like 8 the face of ah angry man over a hedge,11
", , o said the slate-colored man in a voice of
•' .9 somber hue,"
" , , , a mass of angry, red coals glowered and hated the world,'1-® :
A great, gray stone, cut square]y like an a lta r, sat in the middle of the floor. Over it burned three candles in swaying tin cups hung from the ceiling. Before it , with what seemed to be a small volume clasped in his yellow fin gers, stood a man. He was an in fin ite ly sallow person in the brown-checked shirt of the plows and cows. The rest of his appahel was boots, A long gray beard dangled from his chin. He fixed glinting, fiery eyes upon the heap of men, and remained motionless. Fascinated, their tongues cleaving, their blood cold, they arose to their feet. The gleaming glance of the reeluse swept slowly over the group until it found the face of the Tittle man. There it stayed and burned,1'
Altogether, the ten sketches Mr, SchoberVin has included in the 1it t le volume do not contain more than twelve thousand words. Colors and irony are the two most immediately obvious features of the Sketches, and in most cases the colors serve
®"The Octopush, 11 Sketches, p, 35,
911 The Black Bear," Sketches, p, 45,
"A Ghoul's Accountant," Sketches, p. 40,
"Four Men. in a Cave," Sketches, p, 2 8, to heighten and emphasize the irony. “The Black Dog" ends with these lines; "On the bed, the old man lay dead. With out, the specter [a black dog with yellow eyes] was wagging ' , 9 ' ' ' ' ■ its tail," The old man referred to is the "slate-colored man" mentioned above, who spoke in "a voice of somber hue."
Schoberlin, interested in the same thing, also marks the
irony of the final lines of "K illing His Bear": "He ran up and kicked the fibs of the bear. Upon his face was the smile of the successful lover . 11 ^ Schoberlin, fortunately for our hard-chewed pencils, has gone to the trouble of counting col or-words %
Color and light flood the pages of The Sul 1ivan County Sketches. Therein appear 139 adjectives denoting color: gray -- 3 9 $ black -- 22, red -- 21, yellow — 15, brown -- 11, white -- 7 , green -- 6, blue -- 4, silver 2, orange -- 1, pur ple — 1, and miscellaneous hues -- 10. But of his extraordinary technique in the employment of color adjectives ( i t was nei ther a trick, an af fectation, nor a febrile straining for effect, for his conversation was even more colorful, b ril lia n t, and sparkling with fresh word combinations than either his prose or poetry), Crane was not yet master. S t ill, we cannot fa il to admire the facile imagery of such phrases ass "the torches ^ became Stwdies in red blaze and black smoke". . . . r
The Sketches were written between January 1891 (when Crane
*^Sketches, p. 49.
^ Sketches, p. 54.
^Introduction, Sketches, p. 15. 38 was s t ill at Syracuse University) and June 1892s. by which time he was already working on a second or third draft of Maggies
A Girl of the Streets. The ten sketches included in Schober- lin 's l i t t l e volume, plus several others (lik e "An Experiment in Misery," in which Crane mentions the "pitiless hues" of the Bowery buildings ) were fir s t published in the New York 16 Tribune. As polished works of art, they all probably leave something to be desired. But as early evidences of
Crane's penchant for colors and contrasts, they are quite valuable. We can find in them the beginnings^ already quite thoroughly worked-out, of what was to become the mark of hi s style for example, the comparisons Of sunlight with noise, of darkness with silence.
In some of the Sketches, indeed, the entire effect of the tale seems calculated to result from eerie lights and s tartlin g , cjbostly colors. Even one or two of the title s --
"A Black Dog," "Four Men in a Cave" suggest the bleak and dismal tones with which they are painted.
During th®s same period, as was mentioned above.
Crane had been roughing out the f ir s t draft of Maggie in
^ ln Midnight Sketches, XI of the Work, p. 22. The story has many color images.
^Schoberlin. Introduction to the Sketches, p. 2. 39 17 the Delta Upsi1on house at Syracuse (in the spring of 1891),
The final manuscript was completed in the winter of 1892-1893, and after it was turned down by every publisher he could think o f, Crane borrowed a thousand dollars from a brother and pub- 18 lished the book under the pseudonym Johnston Smith,
In Maggie we find colors used much more significantly
( i f not as obtrusively) as they were used in the Sketches,
Here, for the fir s t time. Crane seems to have chosen his colors not so much to startle as to emphasize the narrative's theme. He seems to have begun to exercise control over his images, so that in Maggie they count for something.
Most older critic s saw f i t to pass over Maggie ligh tly, in their considerations of Crane's work. To George
Snell, "The distinction of Maggie [was that it was] a pioneer- 19 ing e ffo rt," To Wilson F o lle tt, i t was "a cornerstone of 90 American fictional history," It was a "first," they held, but not really a work of art,
^ Stephen Crane, Letters, p, 7-8, and p, 335,
J8|hi do g Po 13,
i9"N@tura##sm Nascent: Crane and Morris," The Shapers of American Fiction, 1798-194? (New Yorks E«,P, Dutton and Co., Inc,, 1947), p, 224,
2011 Second Twenty-eight Years," Bookman LXVISI (January 1929), 537, . - . - - Recently, however, the current of thought seems to
have undergone a change. The new theory is more along these
Tines: "Stephen Crane's Maqqie lift s the material of slum
life to an aesthetic level never before attained in slum ' ? 1 fic tio n ," Before, Maqqie was regarded as a poorly organ
ized, crudely written piece of early American Natural ism.
Mow, by S t a l l m a n ^ and others, it has been reassessed. What once was thought to be undisciplined jerklness in the narra tive flow is now regarded as freshness of approach, a part of
Crane's inimitable style, "Not logic but mood defines the
relationship between images and episodes," Stallman asserts,^ and it seems that not only do the images relate to the episodes* but they also create the close relationships between episodes,
. , , the knots of blue ribbon on the dingy cur tain , , ^ "appeared like violated flowers;" 24 the epithet."violated" transfers to Maggie's plight. The sordid reality she seeks escape from is imaged in the clock that "ticked raspingly" in its bat- 2r tered box of varnished [Stal1man's italics] wood. But always Maggie seeks escape from reality in trans cendent dreams, , , ,^°
21 Blanche Housman Gelfant, The American City Novel (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press," 195^7s P° 63.
22I1 Crane's Maggie: A Reassessment," Modern Fiction Studies V (Autumn 1959)7~251“259, 23ibid,, p. 252, 24|v|aggie, in Major Conflicts, X of the Work, 163, Henceforth a T ic i tations to Maggie, unless otherwise marked, will refer to this edition,
25jbjd ., p . 161, 26"Crane's Maggie: A Reassessment," p. 253, \ ' ' 41 Admittedly there is room for argument with Stallman's partic ular interpretations. He seems to have a habit of attaching what appears to be undue weight to words like "varnished", which, after a ll. Crane himself did not ita lic iz e . Nonethe less, Maqqie -? with eighty-eight color-adjectives and about two hundred tone-suggestive words -- is a story in which
Crane's attitude toward the use of these words seems to have changed somewhat from the earlier Sketches,
When, in the book's beginning, "a worm of yellow con victs came from the shadow of a gray, ominous building and , ' ' ■ ' V V - 27 ■ crawled slowly along the river's bank," Maggie's young broth er Jimmy is just then in the midst of a fis t-fig h t against one
"Blue B illie " , (P ,137) The yellow of the convicts and the gray of the prison are perhaps indicative of Jimmie's own bleak future. Again: to get,to Maggie's home, we must pass through a gruesome street in which an autumn wind raises yel low dust, (P ,1^1) Maggie's mother drinks from "a yellow-brown bottle," and lays her baby to sleep in "an old quilt of faded red-andigreen grandeur," (P,l4b) In anger, her face turns from red to purple; and in response, the l i t t l e boy flees to the balls and flounders "about in darkness," (P ,146)
The story's colors are all disagreeable, we find, until
^ Maggie, p, 138, References that follow are from the same source; pagination is indicated in the thesis text by parentheses. suddenly when we meet Maggiq, and her face Is thin and white,
(Pol50) Hereafter we find a succession of images in which
Maggie is juxtaposed with a flower. While Jimmie fights
blood and honor, Maggie's fir s t crime Is that she steals a
flower. Its color we do not learn; but while Jimmie grows up through "red years", (P ,151) brandishing his "flame-colored
fis ts ", (P ,155) Maggie "blossomed in a mud puddle," (P ,156)
She goes to work in a col 1ar-and-cuff factory "where
sat twenty girls of various shades of discontent," (P,156) and
is tempted by the dandy Pete, who'/wears a "blue, double- breasted coat, edged with black braid, , . , buttoned close
to a red puff tie , and [whose] patent-leather shoes looked
ISke weapons," (P ,157)
, Maggie then sees "the golden g litte r of the place where Pete was to take her. It would be an entertainment of many hues and many melodies, where she was afraid she might appear small and mouse-colored," (P ,163) Here, for Maggie's
drearn-eyes, is "an orchestra of yellow-silk women and bald-
headed men, on an elevated stage near the center of a great, green-hued hall, , , ," (P ,163) Actually, of course, the
place 1s not green, but gray and dirtys "Clouds of tobacco smoke rolled and wavered in a ir above the dull g ilt of the chandeliers," (P,164) . Haggle 9 who has been referred to on page 163 as a
"violated flower 911 as Stallman pointed out* soon begins to
"see the bloom upon her cheeks as something of value , 11 (P, 169)
To her, Pete looms "like a golden sun," (P ,170) and in the
plays to which he takes her, "the dazzling heroine" is res cued by a hero who comes out of "pale-green snowstorms," and saves her with the help of a "nickel-plated revolver." (P .171)
During this time, Maggie's mother becomes more gray and more crimson than before. (P .173) Then Maggie leaves home and goes to live with Pete -- and immediately the colors suf
fer a reversal, taking on ironic values, the opposite of what
they seemed to mean before, Pete stands in his white jacket behind a nickel-plated pash register, surrounded by "many- hued decanters" and lemons and oranges, all arranged around the "shining bar of counterfeit massiveness." (P .181)
The celebrated fis tfig h t between Pete and Jimmie is a colorful one,splashed with reds, and Occasional whites,
(Pp, 18-4-187) Then Crane's irony doubles back on its e lf; Pete takes Maggie to a night spot again, but this time she sees no more greens or golden g litte r; now the orchestra is submissive and the conductor a frowsy man "in soiled evening dress," and,
"A ballad singer, in a gown of flaming scarlet, sang in the
inevitable voice of brass." (P,188) Maggie turns pale. She recognizes the gray, "smoke-filled atmosphere," but s t ill 44 imagines "a future rpse-= tinted because of its distance from a ll that she had experienced before." (P .18$) Nonetheless, here in the saloon the air is a haze, through which gray headed men state at her, (Pp, 189-190)
The mother, reacting self-righteousTy, has "never considered Maggie as a pearl dropped unstained into Rum Alley from Heaven," (Pp,190-191) but s t ill is b itte r. She cautions
Jimmie to " 1 keep di s t U ng dark, see? *11 (P, 192) and thence forth goes "through life shedding large tears of sorrow. Her red face was a picture of agony," while she tries to drink the Bowery dry, (P ,194) When Pete for the last time takes Maggie to the saloon the waitei's have become soiled, the "usual smoke cloud" is present, and "dusty monstrosities [are] painted on the waiIs of the room," (P„194) N ellie, "a woman of brilliance and audacity in black dress, tan gloves and dark hai rJ*comes to lure Pete away, (P ,195)
In the next chapter, a girl whom Jimmie has discarded
— much as Maggie is to be discarded -- goes forlorn along
"a lighted avenue," her features having assumed "a shadowy look , , , like a sardonic grin," (Pp,200-201) And Maggie, ruined as wel 1, soon waiks past open doors that send "broad beams of inquisitive light into the darkness of her path."
(Pp.203-204.) , - 45 Months later we find Maggie on a boulevard under the arc 1 amps» "A flower dealer 9 , 0 stood behind an array of roses and chrysanthemums$11 (Po208) again reminding tis ironi cally of Maggie's "violation". Maggie is now, bluntly, "a g irl of the painted cohorts of the c ity ," approaching man after man. One wears a chrysanthemum; he turns her down, as do a ll the others. (Pp.208-209) She goes "into darker blocks than those where the crowd traveled," but makes no conquests.
Finally, like most of Crane's main characters, she finds her self alone in solitary fear. A blond young man, a drunk, "a man with blotched features" and, "farther on in the darkness,
. . . a ragged being with shifting, bloodshot eyes and grimy hands" — a ll these turn her away, as she goes "into gloomy districts near the river, where tall black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of light fe ll across the sidewalks from saloons."
She went into the blackness of the final block. The shutters of the ta ll buildings were closed like grim lips. The structure seemed to have eyes that looked over them, beyond them, at other things. Afar o ff, the lights of the avenues g littered as if from an impossible distance. (Pp.210-211)
Now the end comes for Maggie:
At the feet of the ta ll buildings appeared the deathly black hue of the river. Some hidden fac tory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping o ilily against timbers. The varied sounds of life , made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came fain tly and died away to a silence. (P .211) Thens In the final chapter, a woman in black comes to comfort
Maggie’s mother.
The woman in black raised her face and paused. The inevitable sunlight came streaming in at the window and shed a ghastly cheerfulness upon the faded hues of the room, (P,217))
And Maggie's mother cries, "Oh yes, I ' l l fergive her!"(P,2l8)
The foregoing has hardly tapped Maggie's imagery.
It Is, however, representative, and shows how, to an amazing degree, the story of Maggie can be told almost entirely in terms of the color references. Hardly a page of Maggie passes without a forceful series of images that not only add to, but actually build, the story. Plainly, Crane told his stories to a great extent in terms of hues and tones.
As for the "meanings," attached to the various colors, most of them seem quite clear, and not far from the ordinary.
Blacks, grays, and dirty yellows are the disagreeable tones; reds and crimsons indicate the blind and unreasoning hatreds of anger and conflict; the whites, golds, and pure yellows suggest happiness or the search for it, and in certain places, the ironic opposites of those meanings or the equally ironic unattainable joys that Maggie's dreams seek. The significant recurring image --th e flower which finally wilts without care
— is also far from unusual.
Most of the color imagery seems generally in accord with Goethe's theories, and with the conventional symbolic - : ■■■ ' 47 values that we ordinarily attach to the various primary colors 0
Admittedly, Maggie is a colorful word-painting; but the colors
are not unusual colors, except in the lavishness of their use;
and it would be d iffic u lt if not impossible to establish on
the basis of interior evidence in this book that Crane was
under any influence from Impressionist painting. The images
are Colorful and, for the first time, strongly functional; but
insofar as their composition is concerned, they might as easily
depend on Goethe or the academic painters as on the Impres
sionists.
Therefore, we must look farther, if we hope to find
any link between Crane and the new painters. Apparently we w ill
have to look ahead at least as far as The Red Badge of Courage,
and perhaps even farther.
The writing of the Badge was begun in the spring of
" . % ' 1893s before Magg?e had even been published. Concurrent with it was the writing of the fir s t of the poems that were to
be published in the two volumes title d The Black Riders and
Other L i nes (1895) $ and War I s Ki nd (1899) Though the
poems were not pub!ished until after The Red Badge of Courage
had given Crane's work a market, it iS generally agreed that
^Stephen Crane, Letters, p. 10.
&9|bid., pp. 37-38. ' V : - , . ' '' ' ' ■ 48
few if any of the verses reached the level of art 1stic devel opment that the novel achieved. For this reason, as well as the reason of convenience, it seems opportune to make some mention of the poetry at this points, and to lump a ll the poetry
together in this section of the paper for the purpose of discuss ion.
The mild debate over the years, about whether or not
Emily Dickinson was the source and inspiration for Crane’s poems, is not within the province of this paper; but what it has done has been to obscure Crane's poetry almost entirely behind a cloud of source-hunting, so that the c ritic a l apprais als have been unbalanced in the direction of influences, and almost no comments have been made about the poetry qua poetry.
Some of the poems are popular with undergraduate , ) readers, much as William Golding's and Salinger's stories are popular with the same set. The reason for this is easy to finds Crane's poetry is generally rebellious, with the poet
in violent conflict both with himself and with the world, denying God and in the same breath cursing Him, It is simple poetry, composed in the.freest of verse, and filled with irony that is at times powerful but never subtle,
A man said to the universes "Sir, I existi" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation,"^®
^©Stephen Crane, War Is Kind (New Yorks Frederick A, Stokes Co,, 1899)s po 21, In hollow echoess the poems reflect the plight of modern mans with blunt terms and b itte r pass ion. Surely they are hot deathless poems, most of them. At best they are minor works; ybt they are representative of the a rtis t who created them.
Amy Lowe 11 was one of the few to have kind words for them. She wrote of the " v ir ilit y and harsh passion of
Stephen Crane's fis tfu l of versess,11^* and Went oh to say,
"Strangely enough, it [Crane's poetry] is almost devoid of those pictorial touches which make Crane's prose so striking.
Yet those poems.’which Hi ss Lowe 11 cal Is "Crane 1 s high-water mark in poetry" are almost a ll poems which she Commends for their "vigorous handling of colour;" they are poems "where - ' ' 2 4 ■ colours flash in tohe and songs tremble in colour."-
Two of those poems, from War Is Kind, are these:
Each small gleam was a voice, A lantern voice =•- „ In l i t t l e songs of carmine, v io le t, green, gold. A chorus of colors came over the water; The wondrous leaf-shadow no longer wavered. No pines crooned on the h ills . The blue night was elsewhere a silence. When the chorus of colors came over the water, L ittle songs of carmine, v io le t, green, gold.
^^In her Introduction to The Black Riders and Other Lines, Vol. VI of the Work, p. ix»
32 lbid., p. xx.
331bj d. , p. xxiv.
3^|bid. , p. xxvi. . 50 Small glowing pebbles Thrown On the dark plane of evening Sing good ballads of God And eternity, with soul's rest. Little priests, little holy fathers. No one can doubt the tru th of your hymning. When the marvellous chorus comes over the water. Songs of carmine, violet, green, g o Id ,35
"T have heard the sunset song of the birches, "A white melody in the silence, 111 have seen a quarrel of the pines 0 "At nightfal1 "The l i t t l e grasses have rushed by me "With the wind men, "These things have I lived," quoth the maniac, "Possessing only eyes and ears, "But you ..Tr "You don green spectacles before you look at roses,"
S till another poem cited by Hiss Lowell begins with
these lines: "A slant of sun on dull brown walls, / a forgot
ten sky of bashful b lu e ," ^
Several of the verses include colorful images. There
are the "silvered passing of a ship at night," and knights, men of steel, flickering and gleaming "like riot of silver
l i g h t s ,"3^ There are a "red sword of virtue" and a "crimson
clash of war,"39 in, most cases, then, when we do find colors
they are conventional colors. One or two of the poems have
their surprises:
35pp0 63”64,
36 8bid, 9 p, 27,
37ibid,y p, 42,
38|bid, , p, 28,
39jhe Black Riders, p, 46, v . \ ■■ . ■■ ■ 51
Many red devils ran from my heart And out upon the page. They were so tin y The pen could mash them. And many struggled in the ink. It was strange To write in this red muck Of things from, my heart.
Red, as several critics have noteds is one of Crane's favorite
colors, Witness its variations here;
There was a man who lived a life of fire Even upon the fabric of time. Where purple becomes orange And orange purple. This life glowed, A dire red stain, indelible; Yet when he was dead, r , He saw that he had not liv e d .
These last two poems are unusual, for Crane, Ordinarily his verses seem to confine themselves to the simplest of image
contrasts;
I was in the darkness; I could not see my words Nor the wishes of my heart. Then suddenly there was a great light --
"Let me into the darkness again,"^
Similariy, the black riders of the title poem are representa
tive of sin; and there is this ironic little piece:
401 bid,3 p, 79» 41 Ibid, , p. 97. 42 ibid, , p, 77. 52
A man saw a b all of gold in the sky; He climbed for it. And eventual 1y.„he achieved it -- . It was clay.
Most of Crane's verses, lik e the above one, are simple, bare, and ironic; and not many of them make use of any p a rtic u la r imagery.
A man feared that he might find an assassin; Another that he might find a victim. One was more wise than the other.
The trouble with many of the poems seems to be a sort of enforced bitterness. They appear too harsh, too blunt.
They are spare, perhaps too much so, and in the bulk of them we find no particular support for any theories about Crane's color imagery. Whatever color symbolisms are to be found in the verses are so conventional or so scarce as to be worth less in an analysis; and, too, most of the poems, as Miss
Lowell observed, are (literally if not figuratively) color less.
This concludes the investigation of Crane's early period -- the Sketches, "Experiment in Misery," a few other similar early pieces, Maggie, and the poems. It is here that a major change in technique is to be found - - here with the publication of The Red Badge of Courage.
bid., p. 41.
^ I b i d . , p. 9 1. IV - - THE COLORS OF THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
With the exception of a few of Maggie1s passages.
Crane had up to now c a p ita lize d on a colorful eye and an ear for language, on a penchant for individuality and a rebellion against literary tradition, on a muckraking instinct and a burning desire to get published. But now, writing his war . ' ' '■ ■■ - ■ • ■ • 1 . novel, he worked with less haste and more care. Here every thing was to be of a piece; the book was not to have the cheap saving grace of a climax calculated to shock, or a slum sub ject-matter calculated to startle. Here he was dealing with a subject that had been treated many times by the journalists 1 and the romantics, and a few times by realists: war.
The Badge was first published in an abridged, eighteen- thousand word version, s e ria liz e d in newspapers by Irving
B achellor1s syndicate in early December, 1894, For i t . Crane received precisely ninety d o lla rs . In early f a l l , 1895, it
^For example, one work that preceded the Badge and may have influenced Crane is Wilbur F„ Hinman's Corporal Si Klegg and His "Pard" (published by the author, 1887).
53 54 first appeared fu ! 1 - length between hard c o v e r s . ^
Present-day critical reactions to the book vary*
Stallman sees it as a kind of Christian allegory, among other things*^ Cox sees it as the story of a boy^s initiation into awareness? and as expressing Crane's Tronic anger toward the L worthlessness of religion. Fox believes it is an illustration 5 of the theme pervading all of Crane’s work -- loneliness,
Hardld Frederic, Crane’s contemporary, saw the book as a vic tory for realisms "These renowned b a ttle descriptions of the big men [Tolstoy, Balzac, Hugo, Zola] are made to seem all wrong. The 'Red Badge 1 impels the feeling that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before," Nancy
Banks, another contemporary, had mixed reaction s;", , • Hr,
Crane's is no story at all," she wrote. It "may.perhaps be best described as a study in morbid emotions and distorted V: 7 • ■■: : : ■ external Impressions," Eric Solomon feels that the Badge is
^Louis Zara, Dark Riders A Nove 1 Based on the J-ife of Stephen Crane (Clevelahd, Obi 6;The World Publi shTng Co,719677, p,264. Page references to the Badge will be cited from the Norton Critical Edition, Bradley etal, editors,
3stalIm an, e d ,, Omnibus, pp, 191 f f ,
^James T, Cox, "The Imagery , , , ," pp,209 ff,
5Austin 'McCo Fox, p, x i,
6"Stephen Crane’ s Triumph," New York Times (January 26, 1896) , p, 22,
7Nancy H, Banks, "The Novel of a J o u rn a lis t," Book? man IS (November 1895)» 218, 8 "a study in irony," and that Crane measures courage in i t by the ability to face truth, as he does in other stories,^
And, of course, there is the inevitable critic who contends that a ll its readers have missed most of the book's s ig n ifi cance because i t exists on so many "levels" that no single 10 reader could possibly find a ll of them.
The list of criticisms grows longer by the month, with each publication of a new article or book Introduction,
One c r it ic of Crane's time whose comment s t i l l seems apt was
George Wyndham, who said that "when Hr. Crane deals with
• IV things felt he gives a truer report than Zola," Crane him self, in a letter to John Northern Hilliard (probably in 1897)» said, 1 intended it to be a psychological portrayal of f e a r , " * 2 and no doubt it certainly is that. John E. Hart sees the book's hero, Henry Fleming, as "transformed through a series of rites and revelations into a hero; "*3 Hart's Jungian view may, like Stallman's, require a certain stretching of our c re d u lity . Max Solomon says the book "is a study in the
8"The Structure of The Red Badge of Courage," Modern Fiction Studies V (Autumn 1959), 230. 9"A Gloss on The Red Badge of Courage, " Modern Language Notes LXXV (Summer 19601, 112=113. 10John W. Schroeder, "Stephen Crane Embattled," Univer sity of Kansas City Review XVII (Winter 1950), 124, ■1.1'“A Remarkable Book," London New Review XIV (January 1896), 37, 1^Stephen Crane: L e tte rs , p. 159* 13"The Red Badge of Courage as Myth and Symbol," Uni - vers i ty of Kansas C i ty Revi ew X1X TSummer 1953), 249, • 56 meaning of social responsibility and freedom,"
Probably there are large portions of truth in most of the statementso N aturally enough, proponents of most of these ideas have selected p a rtic u la r groups of imagery from the book and adapted these images to support their arguments*
Usually, as in Cox's article, the various images are shown to be reinforcements of the central theme of Nature's indifference and man's helplessness before the machine of war, the animal of war, and the red-black tyrannies of life. Doubtless there is something to all this; it certainly has much more merit on the face of i t than Stallm an's celebrated argument about the book's famous "red wafer" image, mention of which w ill be made presently. Now, though, in the process of steadily narrowing this inquiry's field of view, let us address ourselves briefly to the several approaches to the Badge's imagery.
Host adamant in its insistence on being the one true interpretation is the view taken by Hopdecai and Erin Marcus,
"Imagery presenting the actions of men as animal-like creates the dominant image pattern in the n o v e l,th e y argue. Their evidence is gathered carefully, but it might be better to
^"Stephen Crane: A Critical Study," Masses and Main stream IX (January 1956), 33» . ....
15"Animal Imagery in The Red Badge of Courage," Modern Language Notes LXXIV (February. T55F), 108, . 57 suggest» in view of the abundance of other kinds of imagery, th a t animal imagery in the Badge has an important place, though perhaps not the most important 0
Sox also notes the animal images, interpreting them as symbols of the struggle for survival that help emphasize the irony of Henry's discovery of courage through the experi- 16 ence of his own cowardice. The "chief philosophical impli cation [is] that man's relationship to his universe is para doxical. He becomes least an animal when most an animal o " ^
Closely associated with animal imagery is the less frequently used plant imagery. Cox observes that trees and brambles are involved in the struggle for survival shared by all living things; often the struggle is at cross-purposes, as when the brambles act as chains, obstructing Henry's pas- 18 sage through the woods. The tattered soldier's arm dangles
"like a broken bough,"^ and Jim Conklin falls down "in the manner of a falling tree.
16Cox, "Imagery of the Badge," p. 215=
17Ib id ., p. 210.
i Sgadge, pp. 43-44.
I9lbid., p. 46. -
2 0 1 b i d. s p. 50 , i : ; y/ \ \^'. -; ■■■ 58 Also drawing c r it ic a l atte n tio n is the book's machine
imagerysuggesting "both the deterministic inevitability
• 22 of [the] struggle [for survival] and its destructive power , 11
Comparisons to a circus and to floods, Cox asserts, servethe
same symbolic purpose; and Cox unearths s till another pattern
of imagerys
To suggest that mart is as helpless as a babe in the grinding machinery of the natural order and his fury against it as foolish as that of a c h ild , there are oyer tw enty-five comparisons , , , of the men to infants and children,^
There have,also been various Scriptural interpreta
tions, and alleged patterns of other kinds of symbolisms; but
the above summary should suffice for our purpose.
The colors that Crane used in the Badge have caused so much comment that it would be foolhardy to try to quote a ll
of it in the text of this paper, A few representative state ments should do, Mordecai Marcus observed the "colorful and oh imaginative description [that] permeates the novel0n
Another critic, referring to the literary technique of Impres
sionism, said that "Crane constructed the tale with devices
21 In this connection, one should note the carrying through of machine imagery to Crane's la te r works, lik e "The Blue Hotel," with its celebrated cash-register image,
22cox, "Imagery of the Badge," p, 216,
• 23 Ibid, .
2^Mordecai and Erin Marcus, p. 111, which were to become the badges of several schools of modern
fiction."^^ H0Go Wells concluded, "There is Whistler even
more than there is Tolstoy in The Red Badge of Courage."
Another nineteenth-century reviewer said the "facts of the
senses and the soul are the only colours in which the very
image of war can be painted. Hr. Crane has composed his
palette with these colors, and has painted a picture that
Challenges comparison with the most v iv id scenes of Tolstoy. ' ..27 ' 000 : - Robert E. Spiller, in the Literary History of the
United States, takes an unusual, hedging position on the
Badge"s imagery: f i r s t he commends Crane for his " a r tis tic
advance," and then he calls the imagery "overwrought," with
25Bernard Weisbafger, "The Red Badge of Courage: Crane, 1895," Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels ed. Charles Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1958), p. 107.
26"stephen Crane from an English Standpoint," North American Review CLXXI (A pril 1900), 241. ,
^George Wyndham, p. 33. See also similar statements in John W. Schroeder, "Stephen Crane Embattled," p. 243; the Preface to Richard Lettis, Robert F. McDonnell, and William E» M orris, editors, Stephen Crane, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage: Text and Cri ticism (New York: Harcourt Brace an d C o ., I960), p. xlj? Harold Frederic, p. 22; and Edward Garnett, Friday Nights, p. 212. Also note Crane's continuing partiaTTlEy to coTorfiil titles. Not only have we "The Black Dog" and The Red Badge and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,", but also "The Blue H otel," The Black Riders, "A Gray Sleeve," The Third Violet, "An Illusion, in Reel ancTWhite "Five White Mice," "A Dark Brown Dog," "Ye 1 low Undersized Dog," and others. . 60 a "repressed violence of conception and style. True restraint ■ Og was to come la te r ,"
Two articles in particular, both of them already mentioned, have examined in some d e ta il the Badge's color imageryo One is Hiss Wogan’ sj the other Cox's, Miss Wogan has done a nice b it of spadework in counting up the sp ecific color references in the novel (as did SchoberTin in the
Sketches) , and has suggested a number of general interpreta tions in support of the thesis that Crane was an impression istic (literarily) writer. Unfortunately, her article is all too brief. It can serve as impetus, but not as solution.
It seems wisest to provide a representative sampling of the book's color images before proceeding farther with analyses of them.
First, of course, there is the title, A wound is
Henry's red badge of courage; and his first wound, from a rifle butt, is a wound suffered not in honor but in flight;
Henry makes use of i t as an excuse fo r m alingering. Therein lies a good part of the story's irony. Afterward, Henry seems to regain his honor -- but the truth of that matter is critically debated, and lies outside the province of this paper.
28Pp, 1022-1023, ' f. - :'v v , 61
There are several proposed sources for the image of
a “ red badge of courage" enough of them to suggest strong
ly that the image was probably not original with Crane, One
possibility is Civil War General Philip Kearny’s celebrated, bold "red badge" d iv is io n , so known because of a d is tin c tiv e 29 patch worn by the member troopers, Another is Shakespeare’s 2Q "murder's crimson badge" in Henry Vi; Part III, No doubt others will turn up from time to time. Crane himself seemed
quite attached to the image; on March 8, 1895 (before the book’s hardcover publication), he wrote reluctantly from
Galveston, Texas to Ripley Hitchcock in New York, "As to the
name, I am unable to see what to do with it unless the word ■ ‘ 2 1 ’Red’ is cut out perhaps. That would shorten it," Fortun ately, no shortening was deemed necessary after a ll.
The book opens, as it closes, with a description of
daylight pushing its way through retreatin g fog or clouds.
Thus we have a number of super imposed images a t beginning and
ends the grayness of the fog Or clouds, the gold of the sun
shine, and the contrast between the two. The opening is
quite colorful, as are many of Crane’s: the landscape turns
"from brown to green;" the river, once "a sorrowful blackness,"
29Ceci1 D, Eby, J r , , "The Source of Crane’ s Metaphor, ’Red Badge of Courage,'" American Literature XXXIi (January I960), 204-207, , ......
SOAbraham Feldman, "Crane's T itle from Shakespeare," American Notes and Queries Vl.il. (March 1950), 185-186,
3“Stephen Cranes L e tte rs , p, 53, ■ 62 becomes "am ber-tinted H9 a fte r the "red, e y e -lik e gleam of hostile camp-fires" across the river has died away.^Z
The blue-clothed soldiers live and talk "between the rows of squat brown hutso" Jim Conklin, bringing a rumor that the regiment is moving into a campaign, adopts "the important air of herald in red and gold*" (P,5) Smoke rises from camp chimneys. Images of this sort persist; on the book's second page, for example, is this prophetic image:
The sunlight, withouts beating upon it [a canvas w a ll], made i t glow a lig h t yellow shade, A small window shot an oblique square of whiter light upon the cluttered floor. The smoke from the fire at times neglected the clay chimney and Wreathed into the room, and this flimsy chimney of clay and sticks made endless threats to set ablaze the whole establishment, (Pp,6-7)
The youth (Henry Fleming) has been thinking of war in terms of "crimson blotches". He "burned" to enlist; his
"busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid with breathless deeds," His mother’s discourag ing words have been to him a "yellow lig h t thrown upon the color of his ambitions," and he has rebelled against them be cause of "his own pioturings." (P,7) So he "donned blue" and became proud of his "blue and brass," (P,9) But now, a fte r a long period of d rill and inactivity and endless marching, he
^Badqe, p, 5, Subsequent page references w ill be incorporated in the text in parentheses, ; has come to think of himself as just "a part of a vast blue
" 33 demonstration," The enemy, for him, is only a vague, "gray, bewhiskered hordes ,11 (P, 10) and Henry imagines the aftermath of distant battles; "red, live bones sticking out through slits in the faded uniforms." Around him the recruits talk
"much of smoke, f i r e , and blood . 11 (P. 11) Time goes on, and still nothing stirs.
One morning, however, he found himself in the ranks of his prepared regiment. The men were whispering speculations and recounting the old rumors. In the gloom before the break of the day th e ir uniforms glowed a deep purple hue. From across the river the red eyes were s till peering. In the eastern sky there was a yellow patch like a rug la id for the feet of the coming sun; and against it, black and pattern1 ike, loomed the gigantic figure of the colonel on a gigantic horse. (P .15) While the "rushing yellow of the developing day went on behind their backs 5, [al dark regiment moved before them."
When the sunrays at last struck full and me41 ow ing ly upon the earth, the youth saw that the land scape was streaked with two long, th in , black columns which disappeared on the brow of a hi 11 in front and rearward vanished in a wood. They were 1i ke two serpents crawling from the cavern of the night. (P.16)
There is no smoke, yet. "A dun-colored cloud of dust floated away to the right. The sky overhead was of a fairy blue." (P.16)
33The same Image is repeated on pages 13 , 21, and 24. 64
The regiment goes past a "young g irl, with pink cheeks and shining eyes," and at nightfall, tents "sprang up lik e strange plants. Campfires, lik e red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the n ig h t." We see "the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays." (P.17) Henry stares
"at the redj shivering reflection of a fire on the white wall of his tent," and goes to sleep. (Pp.19-20)
They wait out the next day, and the regiment moves again by night. "A glaring fire wine-tinted the waters of the river. Its rays, shining upon the moving masses of troops [a t sundown], brought fo rth here and there sudden gleams of silver or gold." (P.20)
Then, "one gray dawn," while "the sun spread disclos ing rays, "Henry feels fear; "and from the water, shaded black, some white bubble eyes looked at the men." (Pp.21-22)
Henry then has his first view of battles "A dark battle line lay upon a sunstruck clearing that gleamed orange color. A flag fluttered." (P.22)
"He was aware that these battalions with their com motions were woven red and startling into the gentle fabric of softened greens and browns. I t looked to be a wrong place for a battle field."
The advancing regiment encounters the corpse of a dead soldier, ‘‘dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown," and possessing an "ashen face. The wind raised the tawny 65. beardo" (R»22) Henry goes on; "They were going to look at war, the red animal(P„23).
Then, "the brigade was halted in the cathedral light of a forest." Snipers 1 gunsmdke makes l i t t l e white b a lls .
(P.24} On the battlefield, clouds of smoke roll across the fields like "a long gray wall," and a pale soldier (the "loud s o ld ier") comes to Henry, and gives him "a l i t t l e packet done up in a yellow envelope" which he wants Henry to send to his family should he die. (P. 26) Not fa r away the b a ttle rages on. "They could see a flag that tossed in the smoke a n g rily .
Near it were the blurred and agitated forms o f troops." A shell "landed in the grove, and exploding redly flung the brown earth." (P.27)
The youth-s company presses the fight. "Wild yells came from behind the walls of smoke. A sketch in gray and red dissolved into a moblike body of men who galloped like wild horses." (P.28)
Red and gray images fill the following pages. The flashes of gun-meizzles and the gray obscurity of smoke are with the men constantly. The men are at once pale and red.
(P,29) The persistent images remain those of the flag -- which, for both sides, is predominantly red >= and of smoke. (Ppa29-37) There are red rages and black oaths; (Pp.31-32) there are blood, and blue men and gray men; and overhead, the youth is amazed to see "the blue, pure sky and the sun gleam ing on the trees and fields." (P.34) But the battle reclaims his attention. “The clouds were tinged an earthlike yellow
In the sunrays and in the shadow were a sorry blue. The fla g was . . . sun^touchedg resplendent." (Pp.35-36) A redness i>) inds Henry; fear overcomes him; he wheels and runs. (P .37)
There is probably no need to recall in detail all the co 1 dr 1 images f o l 1owing this scene, wherein begins the cycle of cowardice and courage that marks Henry's path through the story. There are many blues and grays, reds and yellows.
How and then the sun appears; Henry flees deeply into the woods. There is this scenes
At length he reached a place where the high, arching boughs made a chapel. He s o ftly pushed the green doors aside and entered. Pine needles were a gentle brown carpet. There was a religious half 1ight. Near the threshold he stopped, horror-stricken at the sight of a thing. He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth,
^^■Qn page 31, the army is “a mysterious fraternity born of the smoke and danger of death.11 No one seems to have marked the s im ila rity between th is passage and the conclusion of “The Open Boat" -- where the men feel that now they can be interpreters, and are all of a brotherhood. It would make an interesting subject for study. , :• . : 67
had changed to the dull hue tb be seen on the side of a dead fis h ? The mouth was open„ . Its red had changed to an appal l i ng yellow 0 Over the gray skin of the face ran 'Tittle .ants* One was trundling some soft of a bundle along the upper lip. (Pp.41-42)
Following this macabre scene there are many more crimsons and grays and references to the sun, blood, and f i r e . Henry jo in s a column of wounded stumbling in retreat from the battle.
There is a gray, "tattered man". (Pp.45=54) Henry views this man and the other wounded and wishes "that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage." (P .47)
Another soldier, among the walking wounded, with a shadowed and waxlike face, turns out to be Jim Conklin, the
"tall soldier", a friend of Henry's. Conklin "held out his gory hand. There was a curious red and black combination of new blbod and old blood upon it." (P.47) Conklin is dying and wants to be alone; he lurches away blindly through a field, stops, begins to strangle, performs a hideous dance, falls like a tre e , and seems "to bounce a l i t t l e way from the earth.P
Conklin's face is now pastelike; the lapel of his blue jacket fa lls away and his "side looked as i f i t had been chewed by wolves." (P.51)
The youth turned, with sudden, liv id rage, toward the battlefield. He shook his fist. He seemed about to deliver a philippic. " H e l l - - - - " The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer. (P.51) This last is the book's most celebrated single image.
Stallman, in his Introductions to the Omni bus and the Modern
Library edition of the Badqel^ and elsewhere, stirred up a sizable critical controversy by making such statements as this?
[The] wafer is , , , emblematic of the dying God, Red connotes the red wine of the sacrament the white wafer which was to have been the flesh has been saturated by the red of Christ's [that is, Conklin's] blood, , , , I do not think it can be doubted th a t Crane intended to suggest here the sacrificial death celebrated in the communion , , , [but] even if the statement about Crane's i ntention can never be veri f ied, one cannot deny 36 that the lin e in question functions in th is manner.
However, in spite of Stallman's f la t assertion, several c r itic s have denied the proposed function of the image.
The red sun in Chapter IX of Stephen Crane’ s Red Badge of Courage, whether because or in spite of its being the. most celebrated metaphor in Amer ican literature before the supine evening of T,S, E lio t's Prufrock, seems to have blinded c r itic s to the question of its relative importance, story- wise, , Certainly a close reading reveals that the wafer in question is merely the most striking mani festation of the sun in a story on which the sun almost literally never s e t s ,37 And what is more, therein lies an insight into both the artistry and the theme of the Red Badge, With regard to the sun, although by no means the sun alone. Crane's story is carefully scored for color. Rarely is the sun represented objectively in its function as light bearer, , , , Generally,
^^Respectively pp, x-xiv and xxxi-xxxv,
3&"Fiction and its Critics; A Reply to Mr, Rahv," Kenyon Review XIX (Spring 1957), 299?
37The sun is mentioned twenty-three times in the book. 6 9 when it appears or Crane calIs attention to it, he does so for dramatic and symbolic purposes„ , » [in ] each instance the color to which Crane invests the sun is related to, and thus underscores, the overall mood of the actors on whom it looks down* o « o 38
Such statements as the latter seemsto throw enough light on the image in question to allow us to safely dismiss ■Stallman’s argument*
To attempt an unbiased examination of the wafer image^ is probably to arrive at the conclusion that if the image has religious connotations, they are not primary, and add little or nothing to a meaningful reading of the book. It seems more likely that, like a waxen "wafer" or seal oh a letter, the image represents "the seal of Nature’s indifference to Jim’s
, 38Edward Stone, "The Many Suns of The Red Badge of Courage," American L ite ra tu re XXIX (November T957J$ 322.
39The source of the image has also been discussed by a number of critics. In Kipling’s The Light that Failed (Vol ume IX of The Wri t ings in :: Prose and Verse of Eudyard Kipl ing [New York, Frederick A. Stokes Co., T897], p=^3js there is mention that "the sun shone, a blood-red wafers on the water." In both James B. Colyert, "The Origins of Crane’s Literary Creed," Universi tv of Texas Studies in Engl Ish XXXIV (Spring 1955)» 179” 188, andrScott C. Osborn,- ^Stephen Crane’ s Imagery: 'Pasted Like a Wafer,’" Arnerican Literature XXII1 (November 1951); 362, K ip lin g ’s metaphor i s mentioned and suggested as the source for Crane’ s. No one has proved e ith e r that Crane did or did not know of the Kipling book. Stallman tentative ly agrees with Colvert and Osborn ("The Scholar’s Nets Liter ary Sources," Col lege English XVII [October 195519 20-22)$ but States that the sighificance.is in the use, not the source, of the image. . ' . 70 (and man's) fate,And its redness is probably of no more p a rtic u la r significance than the other reds in the book,
"More likely the wafer or seal -- both 'red' and 'pasted1 -- indicates the ironically enigmatic indifference of heaven to 41 the youth's blasphemy against war,"
in the Badge's next chapter^ after Conklin's death, the already mentioned tattered man approaches Henry again, seeking companionship, but Henry deserts him in a fie ld ,
This desertion is another source of Henry's increasing g u iIt,
Meanwhile, in the distance, the battle grows louder, Henry moves on through "brown clouds" and finds a road jammed with fleein g wagons and men, Henry sinks into a dismal mood; he wishes to "throw off himself and become a better. Swift pictures of himself, apart, yet in himself, came to him -- a blue desperate figure leading lurid charges with one knee for ward and a broken blade high," His visions make "him soar on the red wings of war," He is "a blue, determined figure stand ing before a crimson and steel assault," But common sense re minds'.him th at in "the b a ttle -b lu r his face would, in a way be hidden, ,,," (Pp,55-56)
^ S ta n le y B, G reenfield, "The Unmistakable Stephen Crane," PMUA LXXH l (December 1958), 568,
41Scott C, Osborn, p, 164, 71 He stumbles on, thirsty, filthy, hungry. Rational izing his f lig h t , he reminds himself that he is not the only one "to desert the colors and scurry like chickens," (P,57)
He hopes for his army's defeat, so that his desertion will go unnoticed; but his training convinces him that his army is an invincible, "mighty blue machine," (P,58) and fear again overcomes him. Then, abruptly, he sees "dark waves of
[re tre a tin g ] men come sweeping out o f the woods, , , , Be hind them blue smoke curled and clouded above the treetops, and through the thickets he could see sometimes a distant pink glare,'!
The fig h t, he believes, is lo s t, "The army, help less in the matted thickets and blinded by the overhanging night, was going to be swallowed. War, the red animal, war, the Meod-swolTen god, would have bloated fill," (P,59)
Soldiers rush past, their "blanched" faces shining
"in the dusk", Henry accosts one fleeing man and pleads with him, asking what has happened. The panicked sold ier swings his rifle against Henry's head, and runs on, Henry staggers out of the road and seeks a secluded haven. His wound bleeds, an iro nic red badge. Cavalrymen go b y .-- "the faded yellow of their facings shone bravely," The evening is all confusion,
"The blue haze of evening was upon the f ie ld . The lines of forest were long purple shadows, One cloud lay along the western sky partly smothering the red," (Pp,60-61) In the . 72 distance are black and brass and orange signals of warfare.
The darkness is blue and purple,
Wilson, the "loud soldier"; binds up Henry's head- wound a fte r Henry t e lls his companions* whom he finds in the night; that he has been shot, A large number of colors fill the scene Crane paints of this night — there are the fir e * with its "gleam of rose and orange light;" and the mud and dust and stains of war* and "pallid and ghostly" faces* and silver leaves edged with reflected red, (Pp,66-67)
In the morning* "Gray mists were slowly shifting be fore the f ir s t e ffo rts of the sun rays. An impending splendor could be seen in the eastern sky," The "quaint light at the dawning" dresses "the skin of the men in corpse!ike hues and made the tangled limbs [of sleeping men] appear pulseless and dead," (P,68) This illusion of pallid corpses grows stronger,
"He saw that this somber picture was, not a fact of the present* but a mere prophecy," The regiment awakens, "The corpse- hued faces were hidden behind fists that twisted slowly in the eye sockets," (P ,69) The regiment eats and forms up, Henry remembers "the little packet enwrapped in a faded yellow enve lope which the loud young soldier with lugubrious words had entrusted to him," (P,72) Possibly this faded yellow envelope is the seal of death; Wilson (the loud soldier) expected it; but instead it came to Conklin -- thus the indifference of fate. At any rate* Henry sees his possession of the envelope 73 as a weapon he can use against the loud s o ld ie r’ s seeming bravery; and Henry regains his puffed-up pride, "He had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man,"
Now, "a fa ith in himself had secretly blossomed. There was a little flower of confidence growing within him," (P,73)
This flower is perhaps akin to Maggie's flower — both may represent the innocent ignorance of the characters.
When Wilson asks Henry to return the yellow envelope,
Henry feels even more in fla te d , "He could see himself in a room of warm tints telling tales to listeners," and he "saw his gaping audience picturing him as the central figure in blazing scenes," (P,74)
The regiment forms up and marches. The a ir is
"fog-filled". They take up hillside positions, "The youth leaned his breast against the brown dirt and peered over at the woods," Muskets f ir e , skifmishing; rumors along the waiting trenches are "black creatures who flapped their wings drearily near to the ground, , , ," (P,75)
"Before the gray mists had been totally obliterated by the sun rays, the regiment was marching, , , ," Then, as the sun goes "serenely up the sky, throwing illuminating rays into the gloomy thickets," there is a massive attack by the enemy, (P,77) The regiment braces itself, awaiting "the moment when the gray shadows of the woods before them should be slashed by the lines of flam e," The sound of combat grows ■ . ' 74 hearer and the day turns "more white, until the sun shed his
full radiance upon the thronged forest,11 whereupon the
armies join, (P.78)
This time, amid the smoke and flames and the raging
b a ttle w hirling about him, Henry stands his ground, "The
blue smoke-swallowed line curled and writhed like a snake,"
Rifles shoot "beams of crimson" and the flames bite Henry;
the hot smoke sears his flesh. His regiment gains a small
victo ry; "he saw, under the lift e d smoke, a deserted ground,"
■/(.Pp.8 0 - 8 i): Farther off, musketry is sti 11 a steady rattle,
"A cloud of dark smoke, as from smoldering ruins, went up
toward the sun now bright and gay in the blue, enameled sky,"
(Po82)
The regiment shakes its e lf together and awaits the
resumption of battle. Now they can see more "than when
their visions had been blurred by the huffing smoke of the
line. They could see dark stretches winding along the land,
and on one cleared space there was a row of guns making gray
clouds, which were filled with large flashes of orange-
colored flam e," Some distance away is a house, "One window,
glowing a deep murder red, shone squarely through the leaves.
From the edifice a tall leaning tower of smoke went far into
the sky." (P.83) "The sunlight made twinkling points of the
bright steel" of musket barrels, (Pp.83-84) The regiment advanceso Henry$ "with his soiled and
disordered dress $ his red and inf Tamed features surmounted by
the dingy rag with its spot of blood, his wildly swinging
rifle and banging accouterments, 0 0 v looked to be an insane
soldier»" (P,86) Abruptly, then, "yellow flames" leap from
the enemy-held woods and shells whip through the trees, one
exploding "in crimson fury"* ( P„87) Henry fig h ts wiIdly;
suddenly, "each blade of the green grass was bold and clear"
to him,, "The brown or gray trunks of the trees showed each
roughness of th e ir surfaces." (P*87j
Smoke and flames fill the a ir; the b a ttle rages be
tween the blue lin e o f men and the gray. Ahead, the flag
fa lte rs , and Henry with his companion rushes forward to res
cue it. The flag to him is suddenly "a woman, red and white,
hating and loving," (Po90) And so, while men shout and die
and the charge becomes a "black journey," bullied forward by
a red-bearded officer, and while the gray smoke and red f 1ames
r o ll past, Henry recognizes in his mind "b its of color that in
the flu rry had stamped themselves unawares upon his engaged
senseso" During a lul1 he hears men te l l ing each other how
bravely he, Henry, carried the flag, (P096)
Again the enemy charges, "The round red discharges
from the guns made a crimson flare and a high* thick smoke, v y , In the rear of this row of guns stood a house, calm and white, amid bursting shells," (Pp»99>100) The clash is fierce. 76 Henry sees “a blue wave dash 0 * « against a gray obstruct!ono"
(P»100) The regiment bleeds but holds; and then comes the order to charge„
"It was a blind and despairing rush by the collection of men in dusty and tattered blue, over a green Sward and under a sapphire sky, toward a fence, dimly outlined in smoke, from behind which spluttered the fierce rifle s of enemies
Through all this, the "youth kept the bright colors to the front," (Po103)
Flags, blue and gray whirling bodies of men, r if le flashes, gray fogs and mists and smoke, and the red blood of wounded and dead men -- these are the colors of the battle, as
Crane paints i t. The enemy finally retreats, and while shells s t il l cut the a ir, the dusty but victorious troops in blue pass "within view of a stolid white house." (P.107)
Now Henry has time to re fle c t. "He had been where there was red of blood and black of passion, and he was ex- caped." He sees himself "in great and shining prominence," his deeds going before him "in wide purple and gold".
"He spent delightful minutes viewing the gilded images of memory." But then, abruptly, he remembers his former fear and flig h t, and blushes; "and the light of his soul flickered with shame." He recalls the tattered man, whom he deserted.
A friend asks what troubles Henry, and his reply is "an out burst of crimson oaths." (P.108) And so, when Henry marches away with the regiment, memories of his own cowardice and cruelty darken ,lhiw view of these deeds in purple and gold." (Pp.108-109)
As he 1 eaves the b a ttle fte ld , though, "sears faded as flowers," and a quickening rain seems to help cleanse his soul. The men march with effo rt "in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky," and Henry feels that he has
"rid himself of the red sickness of battle."
He turned now with a lover's th irst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks— an existence of soft and eternal peace. Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds. (P .110)
Thus the novel ends.
Even in the above incomplete and brief account of the
Badge's imagery, several things become immediately apparent.
For one, Crane relies heavily throughout the book on images associated directly or indirectly with the color gray. The enemy wears gray; the mists and fogs (of unknowing, perhaps) are gray, and so is the smoke of guns which obscures view, and is also an enemy. The word "smoke" appears f ifty -fiv e times in the Badge, or on an average of once every two pages. Alto gether we find one hundred and sixteen references to grayness, smoke, shadows, fog, clouds and the like.
^The count is mine. Stallman, on pp. 84-85 of his a rtic le in The Houses that James Bui I t , also feels that "dark mists and vapors represent the hazaoT Henry's unenlightened mind. . > . Darkness and smoke serve as.symbols of concealment and deception, vapors masking the light of truth." Many of the Badge's Images remain jcist about as con ventional as those in Maggie. Henry's visions of himseif in
"purple and gold"; the various reds and crimsons9 suggesting violence, anger, and death; the yellows, which always seem to have to do with the harsh unpleasantness of reality; purple and gold, signifying false heroics; gray (as indicated above), indicating probably both ignorance and death; the warmth of most of the book's browns and greens, which seem to represent
(sometimes with ironic reversal) calm and shelter; the occas sional white of the house and flag -- probably representing love and kindness, or at least peace (a ll of them elusive, and contrasted with the dirty whiteness of the faces of dying or dead men) -- a ll these and others can be found immediately, without probing and without having to search for obscure meanings, ^ The emphasis on opposite values for each given color - - "plus" and "minus" values -- can, as we shall see in ■ , ■ 1 a later chapter, be traced directly back to Goethe; the sym bolic values of the colors are, of course, debatable, and the various interpretations can be found summarized fa irly well
: --- Zi2 -’Cox suggests other meanings. White, he says, sym bol izes fear, while yellow is the death color, ("Imagery of the Badge!,1 pp0 211-212, Hart, p, 249, suggests others, To Stallman,. Ibid, , p, 82, yellow symbolizes both life and death. 79 in James Trammell Cox's a rtic le , in John E. Hart's, and in the several essays in which Stallman has proposed his some times unique and usually controversial views. Hiss Wogan has a few suggestions, but warns us that any particular symbolic color associations ''do not necessarily have a consistent one- to-one correspondence, and that in a ll probability they were ll not consciously deliberate on Crane's part."
Despite Miss Wogan's opinion, it seems hard to believe that the tight organization of imagery in the Bad^e was acci dental . Many factors go to contradict her view; those that follow are only a few examples. F irs t, it seems not only fitting but necessary to the novel's pattern of color images that, in the end, Henry become the color bearer. Second, the references to the opposite armies are invariably in terms of
^This last phase shows a return to the continuing school of thought that asserts that Crane was a primitive, or unschooled, genius, who neither bothered to make a rtis tic uni ties out of his works nor knew enough to establish a consistent pattern of symbol ism and action that would effectively l ink together the separate episodes. This school of thought assumes Crane's art somehow sprang into be! ng not because of the artist^ but in spite of him. The current emphasis on Freudian explana tions makes these assumptions easy to make, and leaves a world of latitude for interpretation; but the validity of an argument based on unconscious a rtis try and accidental symbolism is at least open to debate. A reasonable point of view would seem to be that it is easier to argue that Crane was a conscious artist, and that everything he did by way of effect and symbol and imagery was calculated. Eric Solomon's a rtic le presents the latter case well (pp. 220-234), as do Stallman's state ments such as this: "Crane's metaphors are employed purpose fully -- for theme or for structural pattern." (Houses, p. 8.9.) ' ' 80 color, blue and gray I the word "rebel" appears just- once).
Third, the final lyric description of the golden sun ray
breaking through the gray clouds, as Stallman points out,
"epitomizes the double-mood pattern dominating every tableau ■ ' ' 4.5 ' ; :' ' in the whole sequence. . » That is, the book is a rapid
succession of ironic opposites, and of color contrasts and
1ight-dark balances= "Crane," StalIman feels, "is master of
the contradictory effect,"^ and there seems little doubt of
it. References to ghostly pallors are likely, in the book, to
be paired with references to blackness --•.■so that both images
produce the idea of death.
But certainly the colors in the Badge account for more than balance and contrast. Miss Wogan, in her analysis,
points out that those scenes in which color truly predominates
in the novel are usually panoramic scenes --v ie w s of "the
scene as a whole and, as i t were, from a distance. ..."
it is perhaps noteworthy that the scenes which are visually presented as paintings, with color predom inating, occur either in the early morning or eacly evening, in the time when Ihght is passing to dark- . ness or vice versa. . . . [In several such scenes]
^ lh his Introduction to the Modern Library edi ti on of the Badge, p. xxiv. Whether, as he continues. Crane's system of contrasts "is a symbol of Henry Fleming's moral triumph and is an ironic commentary upon it," ( Ibid.) is a more questionable assurMption. 461 bi d. ■ the impression given is that of a painted landscape, a panorama in which the figures of men are small and unimportant, This use of color to create the impression of a large painted canvas contributes significantly to one of the underlying themes of the book.'-- the indifference of,the world of Nature to the affairs of men, 7 .
Miss Wogan has also noticed, as most readers doubtless w ill, that "Henry himself tends to view the world largely in terms of color." War, to Henry, is crimson blotches. Henry's mind draws for him pictures that are colorful and lurid.
Four times he thinks of himself as part of a vast, blue dem onstration, and in his memories, it is "a thousand detai1s of color and form" that he notices.
Before d?ving too djsep into a pool of image-ahalys5 s we should remember that in most cases in the Badge, colors are used reali stic a 11y. The sky and the Union uni forms are blue«
Muzzle-flashes are red or orange. The enemy is gray; fires, blood, and the sun are red; night is black. Only occasionally
as in "crimson oaths" Or "war, the red animal" - - does
Crane use a color in a purely metaphorical sense. To assume
(as Cox, Hart, and Stallman sometimes do) that Crane*s use of color was primarily symbolic and intended to affect us in a
^Twogan, pp. 169-170. wholly metaphorical wayj is in valid ,—- After a ll, no matter
what an investigation's bias is, it has to concede that color
imagery is not the Badge' s main subject matter. The book's
structure obviously has to depend on more than the strength
of its imagery. If colors help unify the story, s t ill the
fundamental unity is the development of Henry's character
within the picture of war Crane presents. No discussion of
technical elements should be allowed to obscure that fact.
What, then, can the role of painting be said to be in
the Badge?
First, the use of color is easily as strong and as
prevalent here as it was in the earlier works, Sdcond, it
Is handled with more restraint, and apparently more Integral
significance, than in Maggie. What this means is simply that
Maggi® could conceivably be rewritten without its colors; it
wouId s t i 11 make its poInt, To rewrite the Badge without
color images, though, would be to have it suffer a considerable
loss of effectiveness, The central, t it l e image would be
^The purposeful combinlng of the real Ist i c with the symbolic can be taken as one #ore evidence of the care with which Crane Constructed the work. It has been argued that the book is episodic and not well linked together (Berryman, p0291) but I t 'could' as easi ly be argued that there may be a parallel , here between the Impressionist painters8 bel ief (that light and color were more important than form) and the contrast be tween the Badge’s loose surface structure of plot, and the cons is tent I y promiheht; and se 1 f - as sur ed use of color images, animal images, ahd the like. For other reasons, though, it : seems generally agreed today that the Badge has hardly as loOse a structure as a cursory reading, might imply. ' ' ■ 83 gone$ and so wou1d the striking nature of many of Crane's descriptions and ironic metaphors. And description, as many 50 c ritic s have agreed, was Crane's forte. Without it, most of his work would be likely to die of neglect.
Third, We can see at this stage in Crane's career a continuing but s t ill relatively conventional emphasis on colors. Many facts help to construct an indication that the visual arts (in general, though perhaps not Impressionist painting) had by this time worked several of their tenets into his w riting. For example, most of the panoramic scenic descriptions are presented in just the terms of detail that a landscape painter would be likely to emphasize. On page fifte e n , for instance, with the regiment ready to advance.
Crane paints a stark, static portrait of the colonel on his big horse, silhouetted against the yellow dawn. There are, tod, the sketch of the dead soldier that the column veers 51 . . ■ around; the descriptions of motionless armies drawn up for
^Berryman, p, 283» Amy Lowell, who said that Crane's "forte was description," p, xv; and many others, including a contemporary reviewer who, on the occasion of Crane's death, said that "he Teft some of the most drastic and picturesque prose that has been penned within the last decade," [Anon,] "Style of Stephen Crane," Chaqtauqqan XXXI (July 1900), 323, 5^Badge, p, 61, battle; the scene on page eighty-three where Crane pictures a distant house* its window glowing, a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney; and many others. There is nothing in these images that could be pointed to as having been caused unques tionably by knowledge of Impressionist painting -- indeed, the only marked parallel is the "purple shadows,11 unless we choose to include the various "blurred" scenes but it seems more than probable that some kind of painting must have had an in fluence On the colors, simplybbecause there are so many of therm Probably the most important thing about the Badge8s color images , though (aside from their various possible sym bolic connotations), is that they seem clearly to represent an advance in technique* In other words, at f ir s t (as in the
Sketches) Crane used the primary colors in straightforward attempts to shock, to a le rt, to set a Gothic tone; then, in
Maggie, we can see the beginnings of attempts at shading, s till basic and unessential for the most part as imagery; as attempts to reinforce the theme many of them seem forced*
Now, in the Badge, we find an expanded and far more essential use of these images.
What suggests that one cannot establish an influence by the Impressionist painters on these images is this; fir s t, the colors are still of an ordinary kind.-- red, black, blue, gray, yellow -- and are shown to use for the most part as " : . , , - , 85 pigments rather than as light (with the obvious rea lis tic exceptions of such things as sunlight and muzzle flashes)$ and seconds there is nothing of consequence in the presence of these images that We cannot explains as we w ill see two chapters hences on the basis of Crane's having read Goethe and having seen a number of paintings that were probably not
Impress ion isto
The impressionism of the Badge, then, remains purely of a literary kindo To find adequate interior evidence of real graphic Impressionism in Crane“s work, we must continue to look farthero in a short story called "The Veterans" written later than the Badge (in 1896)9 Henry Fleming is reintroduced to us as an aging farmer, recalling his battle experiences and admitting that in war he was afraid. The story concludes with this sentence:
"The smoke was tinted rdse^hue from the flames, and perhaps the unutterable midnights of the universe will have
' ' ■ ' ' 52 . „ ' . no power to daunt the colour of this soul."
52In The L i t t le Regiment ( Londoni J.H. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1900), p. ISO- V -= AFTER THE RED BADGE
“ The short story In America," wrote H0Lo Mencken,
'' - . ■ : . .] "owes more to [Crane] than he has got credit for*"
After the Badge, and with the exception of three in
ferior novels and the poetry. Crane‘ s work consisted entire
ly of newspaper sketches and short stories0 Of these’stories
the best known and most studied have been "The Open Boat,"
"The Blue Hotel," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," and
^The Monsters"; the latter being a novelette roughly as long
as Magqie. Also of interest in the present study are "A
Mystery of Heroism," "An Illusion in Red and White,11 "The
Clan of No^Name," "Horses =•« One Dash," "The Sergeant's Pri
vate Madhouse," and one or two otherso These stories were
a ll written between 1895 and Crane's death in 1900; they were
published in three volumes of collected short stories. The
L ittle Regiment (1896, 1900K The Open Boat (1899)$ and
%/hi lomvi lie Stories ( 1900) 0 In addi tion to the above-men
tioned tales. Crane of course published many others, some,
■ ^Mencken, Introduction ; . ' . ■ A to Major------— Conflicts,------!--- * Work — X, * „ ' Pa XI lie V • 87 li ke "The Price of the Harness911 being quite good. Most if
not all of them include typical Crane imagery. But to study
all of them in any detail would be to make a multi-volume
work of this paper; a representative selection has to be made.
For that reason several stories will be left out of the dis
cussion, stories 1 ike "George8s Mother" (a somewhat inferior : . ' V . ‘ ' ’. • - . ■ p sequel to Maggie, written in 1894 and published in 1896 ),
"Death and the Child," "The Upturned Face,I- "A Man and --
Some Others," and several others which are probably of an
excellence almost equal to the best of his work.
On August 1st arid 2nd, 1895$ "A Mystery of Heroism"
appeared in the New York Press. Its color is similar to
that of the Badge, and that, seems natural since the two works were written close together in time. It will perhaps suffice merely to recall the story's opening paragraph;
The dark uniforms of the men were so coated with dust from the incessant wrestling of the two armies that the regiment almost seemed a part of the clay bank which shielded them from the shells. On the top of the h ill a battery was arguing in tremendous roars with some other guns, and to the eye of the infantry the artillerymen, the guns, the caissons, the horses, were distinctly outlined upon the blue sky. When a piece was fired, a red streak as round as a log flashed low in the heavens, like a monstrous bolt of lightning. The men of the battery wore white duck trousers, which somehow
^Stephen Cranes Letters, p. 36. 88 emphasized their legs; and when they ran and crowded in l i t t l e groups at the bidding of the shouting officers, it was more impressive than usual to the infantry.A
In I 896 appeared “The Veteran,“ the significance of which has already been mentioned. That was the year of Crane's
trip to the Southwest and Mexico, and from that trip came, in
1897, the publication of “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,"
"The Open Boat," and others. These two, along with "The Blue
Hotel" and "The Monster" of 1898, are thought of today as the
best of his shorter work.
But before any of these appeared. Crane wrote his
second novel. The Third Violet was begun in 1895 and finished
the following year, and first appeared as a serial in early I ■■ November, 1 896, in the New York Evening WorId.
It is With this book that we find a dramatic change
in Crane's use of color images.
The novel is generally reputed to be at beast a poor 5 piece of work. It is lighthearted, now and then faintly - : '■ - ■■■■ " \ j
3Tales of Two Wars, 11 of the Work, 95*
A it fir s t appeared in book form in 1897« Stephen Crane; Letters, p. 65.
5 It is no doubt safe to state this despite Ford Madox Ford's feeling that the book was one of Crane's best. "Tech niques," Southern Review I (July 1935), 32. .. ' 89 ironic, and definitely cheapened for us by one of Crane's un fortunate, romantic "pretty little patent-1 eatherirfinishes0
Essentially, it is a formula love story -- poor young Bohem
ian painter fa lls in love with daughter of wealthy family.
It differs from the formula of the day in that the protago nist is a painter, in the long sketch of Bohemian life in the painters' studios of New York, and in the imagery -- unmistakably Crane's imagery.
The story shifts scene, at about the middle, from
Sullivan County to New York City. From the various indica tions it would seem that William Hawker, the painter-hero, is either an Impressionist painter or under the influence of
Impressionism. This point is obviously important, for i f we take it at face value we must conclude that in fact Crane knew something about the Impressionist school.
. In the beginning of the book, the imagery seems typically Crane. The opening paragraph is a sketch in black- and-whi ter
The engine be1 lowed its way7up the slanting, winding valley. Grey [s ic j7 crags, and trees with roots fastened cleverly to the steeps ft looked down at the struggles of the black monster.
^Sherwood Anderson, p. xv.
7 It interests the curious mind that, for no apparent reason, the spelling changes to "gray" about halfway through the book. .
%he Thi rd Violet (New Yorks D= Appleton & Co., 1897), Po 1= . - ' 90 We can see the white smoke, the s ilv e r ra ils , the gray crags and black engine.
Hawker, getting off the tfroin and climbing into a stagecoach, sits "crooked forward so that his eyes should see the fir s t coming of the g irl into the frame of light at the other end of the stage."9 This silhouette idea is what we have come to expect of Crane — a contrast -- and such
images continue on the following pages; but soon the scene grows more colorful.
In the morning Hawker took his painting equipment, b . . [He] encamped in front of some fields of vivid yellow stubble on which trees made olive shadows, and which was overhung by a. • china-blue sky and sundry little white clouds. *°
Olive shadows, as was mentioned e a rlie r, would seem to be the picture of no mind but an impressionist’s. And there is more of what seems to be evidence of a point?11is tic method of presenting colors: "Through the trees they could see the cataract, a great shimmering whitething. . . . At the foot of the fa lls , . . . the mist arose in silver clouds and the . ■ , 1 • green water swept into the pool."
Later on, the book's main supporting player, a young w riter, claims that Hawker wears "a fixed scowl from trying to see uproarious pinks, yellows,and blues."V Now, ordinary
9|b id., P'o 3 . 10ib id .. p. 13 o Ibid ., p. 25. l 2Ibid,, p. 75o painters of the established academic schools did not paint in
uproarious colors; but Impressionists did0 Again, notice the
following image, in which the emphasis is laid not on the colors of the landscape, but on the colors of the light that
illuminates its “Later in the day he made a sketch, choosing
an hour when the atmosphere was of a dark blue, like powder
smoke in the shade of trees, and the western sky was burning in strips of red.“13
Note also a.dialogue between the writer and the
painter. The writer begins;
“. . . does that shadow look pure purple to you?" “Certainly it does, or I wouldn't paint it .SO. “Well, if that shadow is purple my eyes are liars. It looks a kind of slate colour to me. Lord! if what you fellows say in your pictures is true, the whole earth must be blazing and burning and glowing and Hawker went into a rage, “Ohj you don't know anything about colour. Hoi l ie. For Heaven's.sake, shut up, or I'll smash you with the e a s e l. “ '4
Other small evidences are supplied by passages such as
this one;, - . ■ '■
“There was [in Hawker's studio] an unfinished 'Girl T 5 in Apple Orchard' upon the ta ll Dutch easel, « Girls
13 Ibid,, p. 108. i N b id ., p. 110. 92 in Apple Orchards or other outdoor settings were favorite
(though not exclusive) subjects of the Impressionists.
Elsewhereg Hawker observes that in China, 111 there is no perspective.111 This seems to indicate Crane's awareness of the Oriental painting style, and thus by implication his familiarity with current thought in painting circles. There is also a scene in which one of the young painters points to blank spaces on his studio wall and parodies the painters of the new schools;
"Here is a little thing I did In Brittany. Peasant woman in sabots. This brown spot here is the peasant woman, and those two white things are the sabots. . . . This long streak here is the pipe. . . . We are so hideously modern over here; and besides, nobody has painted us much. How the devil can I paint America when nobody has done it before me? My dear s ir, are you aware that that would be originality? . Good heavens!,_we are not aesthetic, you understand, 9 0 0 ii 17 The scene clearly indicates Crane's awareness of and interest in the then-modern painting styles.
It is, then, in this particular volume of Crane's work that we find direct evidence that Crane knew of, and used. Impressionistic painting techniques. But at best the use of them was limited. It remains -- apart from the direct descriptions of the act of painting -- a nonsymbolic book, except for a few images which are curiously, almost primitively
^ Ib id . , p. 166.
17Ibid., pp. 185-186. ' , :■ :: : ^ v : > ; " ' - ■ .. ' 93 18 simple. And most of this color images in the book, in
spite of the painting descriptions, seem no d?fferent from
Crane's earlier imagery:
. the blue glow of dawn shed its ghostly lights 19 upon the valley."
"The blue night of the lake was embroidered with black tree forms. Silver drops sprinkled from the lifte d oars,"2®
"In a wood the light sifted through the foliage and burned with a peculiar reddish lustre on the masses of dead
1 eaves,"2*
The latter image may or may not have to do with
Impressionism; the others are colorful enough, but not noticeably different because of any supposed influence of the
Impressionist painters.
It becomes more and more apparent, then, as we move
forward chronological1y through Crane1s work, that i f there are Impressionistic influences present in his writing, they
V^For example, when Hawker escorts to her home the young a rtis t's model who is (unrequitedly) in love with him, we see "a l i t t l e red lamp hanging on a pile of stones to warn people that the street was being repaired." Ibid. 9 p. 156.
^Ibidp, p. 64.
20Ibid, , p. 43,
2 ■Ibid, , p, 66. ' - ■- ■ 94 are nebulous and practically impossible to fin de We can only conclude that in spite of his knowledge of the work of the Impressionists„ Crane's style up to this time was not basically influenced or reformed by it. Only when he is describing his painter-hero in the act of painting, or when he sees a scene through the painter's eye of Hawker, does
Crane show us any images that are unquestionably Impressionist in light values and composition.
Soon after The Third Violet appeared. Crane used his experience of shipwreck as background for his celebrated story, "The Open Boat"„ The well known opening sentence of the story is this one; "None of them knew the color of the sky," And the same paragraph goes on to say thi si* "[The] waves were of the hue of state. Save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and a ll of them knew the colors of the sea/ -
Whites and grays are the tones that strike us throughout the length of the. t a le ... In a ll, there are fifty -s ix color ad jectives in "The Open Boat," and of them, thirty-seven are white, black, gray, or slate.
We can find a number of passages like the following in their imagery;
09 Maggie, Austin McC. Fox, ed„, p. 213...... ss The sun swung steadily up the sky, and they knew it was broad day because the color of the sea changed from slate to emerald green streaked with amber 1ights, and the foam was like tumbling snow. The process of the breaking day was unknown to them. They were aware only of this effect upon., the color of the waves that rolled toward them.23
The color red appears only once, td describe the color of the
04 - clouds that bring a threatening squal 1»' Another day passes; the next morning; like the one noted immediately above, is described in terms of its colors:
When the correspondent again opened his eyes, the sea and the sky were each of the gray hue of the dawning0 Later, carmine and gold was |sic] painted upon the waters0 The morning appeared finally, in its splendor. With a sky of pure blue, and the sunlight flamed on the tips of the waves, 25
And the story ends with this paragraphs "When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea8s voice to the men on the shore, and they fe lt that they could then be inter- prelei-s."2^ ^ ^ ^ ^ \ ^ ' ... ; ' _ • '
In 1900, HeGo Wells made this judgment of the story:
"The Open Boat" is to #y mipd, beyond a ll ques tion, the crown of al t his work. I t has al 1, the stark power of the earlier stories, with a new element of restraint; the color is as fu ll and strong as ever, fu lle r and stronger, indeed; but
23ibid,, p, 215,
24|b id,, p, 223,
25 lbjdo, p, 234,
2b|bid,, p, 239, 96
those chromatic splashes that at times deafen and confuse in The Red Badge, those images that astonish rather than enTighten, are disciplined and control led,27
And Peter Buitenhuis, in his study of the story, has this to say about i t;
From the outset the attention of the men is riveted on the colors of the threatening sea, which are grey and white. Grey is the sign of desolation and despaif, and is often reflected on their faces. White is used to signify the destructive power of the sea. Like hell itself. It seems capable of torment by both fire and ice. Water swarms 11 like white flames" into the boat. At the same time it feels icy and looks like "tumblihg snow, , , ," Black and red are also used as omens of disaster to the men. Yet their hopes are sustained during the night by someone lighting a watchfire on the beach, it makes a "roseate reflection" against the black, , , * This is conventional color symbolism. Yet the duality of the experience.is insisted on by the ambiguity of the colors,28
Others too have made interpretations of the meaning fulness of the story1s colors,29 but no one has made any statements about Impressionism or the influences of painting in it; and the mere fact of a preponderance of blacks, grays, and whites can no more indicate such an influence than it can prove a dependence on black-and-white etchings.
^ ‘‘Stephen Crane from an English Standpoint," op, c i t , , p, 234, 28nJhe Essentials of Life; 'The Open Boat1 as Existen t ia lis t Fiction," Modern Fiction Studies V (Autumn 1959)» 247,
29Robert E, Spiller in Literary History of the United States, for one, on p, 1024, 97 At about the same times Crane wrote "The Bride Comes to Ye 1 low Sky,11 which (as everyone points out) is a story consisting of a series of ironic reversals. As usual with
Crane, it opens with a colorful landscape: "Vast flats of green grass, dull-hued spaces of mesquite and cactus" are 30 what we firs t see. The story continues with such color- modified sceness though not in such heavy concentration as we find in other Crane stories. The color uses in the story are no more complicated than in earlier works« Scratchy's red- topped, gilded boots are indicative both of Scratch's child ishness and of the bullet Marshal Potter once put in his leg.
We can examine the story in d etail, but there seems to be no particular significance to the story's colors. Of far more interest is "The Blue Hotel," written about a year later, in which we find perhaps the closest or strongest structural use of color yet. The "tone of the action is set by the light blue of the hotel, 'always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem ' ' ' 2 1 . ■ ■ . ' . only a grey sWampish hush,'"5
30Maqqies Austin McC. Fox, ed., p, 155,
31 Hugh Maclean, "The Two Worlds of ‘The Blue Hotel1," Modern Fiction Studies V (Autumn 1959), 267, , ; ' 98 The "premonition of the Swede that he w ill be murdered is but the inner reflection of this screaming blue, the mani- 32 festation of Crane's own tense fear." Whether or not Crane owned a tense fear, the story expresses one, through the quaking Swede, and the hotel's coldest of blues certainly contributes mightily to it. The blue "overcomes" the passen gers and sets the whole tone of death and conflict that is the story's theme. This conflict is emphasized again and again by color contrasts a n d by a progression of color images, "from a calmness permeated by an undertone of potential violence (a
'gray swampish hush' and the 'screaming and howling' blueness of the hotel) to a full-blown violence (the [white] blizzard) to a return to quiet."99
The Eastern travelers are horrified; they laugh -~ they are people accustomed to "the brown-reds and the sub divisions of the dark greens of the East," Inside the blue hotel, the stove is humming, "luminous and [glowing] yellow from the heat," The correspondent's name happens to be
Blanc. Outside the blue hotel is "a turmoiling sea of snow.
The huge arms of the wind were making attempts — mighty,
32spi1ler, in the Literary History of the U.S., p.1024.
33Robert F. Gleckner, "Stephen Crane and the Wonder of Man's Conceit," Modern Fiction Studies V (Autumn 1959)s 272-273- 3^Maior Conflicts, X of the Work, 94. • - ■ " : : * ■ 99 circular, fu tile -- to embrace the flakes as they sped, A
gatepost like a still man with a blanched face stood 25 aghast, » , ,"
Here, unlike what we find in "The Bride", Crane
makes fullest use of the effects to be gained from using
color,
"Upon the Swede's deathly pale cheeks were two spots
brightly crimson and sharply edged, as if they had been care- 36 fu lly painted," When the men troop outside for the fis t-
fig ht, the snow has stopped fa llin g , but the wind s t ill car
ries flakes, "The covered land was blue with the sheen of an
' unearthly satin, and there was no other hue save where, at the
low, black railway station -- which seemed incredibly distant
-- one light gleamed like a tiny jewelFrom such scenes
as these any number of symbolic connotations can be drawn.
The scene is set in a "stibtly luminous gloom," and the two
men have at each other, "Occasionally a face, as if illumin
ated by a flash of light, would shine out, ghastly and marked
with pink spots, A moment later, the men might have been
known as shadows, if it were not for the involuntary utter- 38 ance of oaths that came from them in whispers."
35tbid.» p. 96,
36 ibid., p. 103.
3^1 bid,, p. 115.
38} bi d ., pp. 116-117 , Afterwards the Swede goes down to the saloon to meet
his death; and the whole frame of dominant coloration changes.
From the blue hotels we go to the saloon in front of which "an
indomitable red light was burnings" and from the blue-white
storm we go into the area of the saloon where "the snowflakes were made blood-color as they flew through the circumscribed
territory of the lamp's shining."^9 Inside, "the Swede's bloody face looks over the 'radiant b a r '." ^ Here, Crane
indicates, is a hell more real than Scully's hotel.
This story, then, is told much more than several others
in terms of color. Without the blueness of the hotel, and the colors of the storrp, the story would lose a great deal. S till, though the scenes are colorful, they are hardly identifiable with any particular school of painting.
Other stories "The Monster," with its colors mixed together according to Goethe's formula;^ "An Illusion in Red and White," in which the murder suspect is identified only by the coloration of his hair, teeth and hands; "The Clan of
No-Name," in which the colors are very similar to those of the Badge; "Horses -- One Dash," which is about 5,000 words
long and includes no fewer than one hundred and twenty-seven
39Tbid., p. 124.
^Hugh Maclean, "The Two Worlds of ‘The Blue Hotel'," Modern Fiction Studies V.(Autumn 1559), 267.
^ Infra, p. 109. ' ' ' . ■ 101 color images and pictorial contrasts roughly ten per page; and the Whilomville Stories, his last tales, in which "he could s t i l l write sharply and vividly of the fears within the human soul and their reflections in the primary colors of l i f e " ^ - - all these are stories in which the technique of color imagery differs l i t t l e from what has already been illustrated herein* No doubt Crane was a master of pictorial impressions; but if this can be said to have made him an
Impressionist, in the sense of the word that is applied to painting, then the whole of the foregoing study is of no aval 1o Me must, therefore, look elsewhere to see if there is perhaps exterior or biographic information that can settle the quest ionc
^Spi1ler, in Literary History of the U.S., p= 1025. VI --TH E SOURCES OF CRANE'S IMAGERY
As we have seen. Crane had a colorful eye; he was,
in fact, to some degree obsessed by colors* "Life came to him in its primary colors, blue, red, and yellow, and he asked its meaningo"^
There are several theories supplying provisional answers to the question of the source of this obsession; a few were mentioned b rie fly earlier in this paper0
The Li terary History of the Uni ted States says Crane was acquainted with the Impressionist painters, including
Monet and o t h e r s . ^ Claudia C, Wogan suggests that he made use of the techniques of contemporary painters.^ Others make similar claims; for example, one c ritic writes that "Crane1 e x p lic itly compared his own general literary intentions with the technical and philosophical implications of what the
^Spiller, in the Literary History of the U.S., p. 1023»
.21 bid., pp. 1021-1022,
3 P. 168,
' : 102 ' ' ■ 103 French Impressionists, as he conceived them* were attempting in color.And Stallman has this to say;
Two recent c ritic s contend that Crane borrowed nothing of his technique from paintings, but i do not think the influence of the studio on Crane can be denied* Corwin Knapp Linson, the a rtis t who did illustrations for some of Crane's stories ("The Re luctant Voyagers," for one), wrote reminiscences of their bohemian days when Crane used to spend his time in Linson's studio (winter 1892-1893) "rummag ing through old periodicals, poring over the Civil War artic le s ," His reminiscences, covering four important years -- 1893-1897 — in Crane's brief life , appeared in expanded form as My Stephen Crane (1958)* It was the painter's touch in Crane's prose-style that most impressed Linson, "The painter's color sense is born -- so was his." Himself a painter, Linson confirms the fact that "Steve reveled in the use of words as a painter loves his color," and that Crane was a consciously symbolic artists "As to col or, it always stood in his mind for a symbol, and so apt was his use of color-words that ever after they would image the thing they defined."5
There is a suggestion near the end of that passage -- about
Crane's innate color sense -- that we shall soon return to.
Meanwhile, Stallman continues to say that Crane "knew not only Ryder's paintings but also some of Monet's, Winslow
Homer's, and the apprenticeship paintings of Corwin Linson . , and of his fellow lodgers at the Art Students' League... , ."
Stallman's Statement is particularly intriguing in that none
^Joseph J. Kwiat, p. 331=
^Houses that James Bui11, pp. 82-83. The quotes from Linson are from ? L ittle Stories of ' Steve? Crane," Saturday Evening Post (Apri1 TIo 1903)» 19-20.
6Houses that James B u ilt, p. 83. 104 of Crane's biographers have said Crane knew Monet's or
Homer's paintings, nor did Linson say so; Stallman, in fact, is the only scholar to make the statement. But even supposing he has ample evidence on which to base his statement, there is no proof that just because Crane knew certain paintings, he was influenced by them, 7 S t ill, Stallman implies that much by saying that Crane composed "the impressionistic painting of Magg1e" while he was lodging at the Art Students' League at New York, where he knew "the Monet paintings , , , and the apprenticeship paintings of his fellow lodgers,"^
It is true that Crane in 1899 wrote this:
The flash of the impression was like Tight, and for this instant it illuminated a ll the dark re cesses of one's remotest idea of sacrilege, ghastly and wanton, I bring this to you merely as an effect, an effect of mental light and shade, if you like; something done in thought similar to that which the French impressionists do in color; something meaningless and at the same time over whelming, crushing, monstrous,9
He also wrote that a novel "should be a succession of , , o clear, strong, sharply-outlined pictures, which pass before the reader like a panorama, leaving each its
7liihnson in fact says, "To the oft repeated query as to Crane's use of color: 'Did he not get it from his studio associates?' my answer is 'No,' , , , The painter's color sense is born — so was his. The Impressionism of that day was to him an affectation, , , ," My Stephen Crane (Syra cuse, N,Y,; Syracuse University Press,“TsFBTs PP, 46-47,
^In his Introduction to the Modem Library edition of the Badge, pp, xv i -xvi i ,
9"A London Sketch," Wounds in the Rain, Vol, I I of the Work, pp, 245-246, . 105 10 definite impression." But this is a return to the matter of selectivity which defines not graphic but literary impres sionism. S t ill, we find abundant comments such as this one by Eric Solomon; Crane "shows the influence of the impres sionists in his dependence on color, the contrasts of light 11 and shade." Indeed, Stallman claims to have made "a colla tion Of those principles of contrast employed by the French 10 impressionists and Crane’s prose pointillism,"- but either
Stallman has an unduly high opinion of the few scattered re marks he has published, or he is deliberately withholding from publication information of vital importance to studies such as this one.
The truth is, as we have seen, that Crane "had used color imagery „ . . in his early Sullivan County Sketches, and his very manner of speech was quite as colorful as his prose or poetry."^ Ironically, this is Stallman’s Own ob servation.
For him [Crane], color was but a primary advance into le symbolisme. Although in 1892 he was ig norant of DOtlTTmpressi on i sm and Symbolism in art and literature, four years later, nevertheless, he was the most important proponent of these two movements in American lite ra tu re .!?
iOQuoted in Kwlat, p. 337«
"The Structure of the Badge, " p . 222.
12"The Question of Influences," Norton Critical Edi- t ?on of the Badge, p6 163. , 13 In the Introduction to the Modern Library Edition of the Badge, pp. xv i-xv i i .
WSchoberl in, p. ' \ ,'.x ; 106
It is statements 1 ike the latter that make it necessary to define Crane’s Impressionism; Schoberlin seems to have confused the movements in art and in literatu re.
Crane observed color in nature through an artist’s eyes. It was a faculty innate, an adverb of his genius. But in the absence of a patent explanation for this faculty, one apparently logical and easily acceptable has been coined. He, it has been said, learned to use color through his association, during the middle nineties, with the struggling artists who inherited the old studios of the Art Students League on 23rd Street, Here, it is true, the new French movements in art and literatu re, although understood only vaguely if at a ll, were violently debated; it is not unlikely that Crane whetted his perception and understanding of color on this stone. But from this-group he borrowed nothing of his technique,
This last, on the other hand, seems as astute a commentary on Crane's colors as has yet been published, Schoberlin has taken all the facts into consideration -- something neither
Stallman nor very many others have done -- and made his
ISlbid, 107 judgment accordingly. A few have agreed with him .^ John
Berryman is one; indeed, Berryman goes even f a r t h e r — he says fla t ly that Crane "owes nothing whatever, apparently, 17 to painting." It is with this statement that Stallman has 18 disagreed -- perhaps, as Rosenfeld suggested, in the effort to pick a fight.
^Marcus Cunliffe believes that Crane's development of literary and graphic Impressionism was parallel to, not a result of, European trends in art and fiction ("Stephen Crane and the American Background of Maggie," American Quarterly VI I [Spring 19551» 31-44), Wi1 la Gather wrote that "Crane was one of the f ir s t post-Impressionists; . . . he be gan it before the French painters began it, or at least as early as the fir s t of them." From "Stephen Crane's ‘Wounds in the Rain'," p. 69, John Berryman said fla tly , "Crane was an impressionist. "His color [Berryman continues] tells us so at once. This famous color of his plays a part in his work that has been exaggerated, but it is important. Gifted plainly with a powerful and probably very odd sense of color, fo rtifie d then by Goethe, he did not refuse to use it; sometimes he abused it , and he increasingly abandoned it. . . ." ( Stephen Crane, p, 289.) The abandonment and exaggeration that Berryman suggests are, of course, s tric tly his own opinions, and these -- along with a good deal of his biography - - a r e thrown open to suspicion because he does not document the study and because he mysteriously mentions "three extensive,,, important sources which I am not permitted to c ite ." ( Ibid., 108
But It is Berryman who points the way, in saying
that "Crane was interested in what Goethe called the 'moral- sensual effect of color' ^ Making use of the biographical material unearthed by Berryman, Thomas Beer,and others,
Joseph Kwiat has come to this conclusion (one apparently missed by other scholars)s
One of Crane"s sisters, Mary Helen, was an a rtis t and taught art classes at Asbury Park in the late eighties and early nineties. While attending Claverack Academy from 1888 to 1890, Stephen fe ll in love with Phebe English, an art , student, who gave him some of her paintings, , , , Crane scholars generally mention his "in nate sensitivity to color" and even his reading in Goethe's theories on color while at Syracuse University,21
This crucial bit of information admittedly does not prove beyond question that Crane was a connoisseur of paint
ing at an early age, nor does i t by its e lf disprove the notion that Crane was influenced by impressionist painters.
But it does offer an acceptable alternative to that notion, and is especially acceptable when we remember again that
Crane began to write so colorfully long before he could have possibly become intimately acquainted With talk of or paint
ings of Impressionists,
iSBerryman, p, 289,
20stephen Crane, k Study in American Letters (New York; Alfred A, Knopf, 1923%,
; : V ■■'■■■ ■■■ r.;- 109 That Crane knew of Goethe1s theories is further attested to by this passage, from a letter written by
Frank M» Noxons
incidentally, the use of the word "Red" in this t i t l e [The Badge] was part of a program. After the book appeared he [Crane] and I had somewhere a talk about color in literature. He told me that a passage in Goethe analyzed the effect which the several colors have made upon the human mind. Upon Crane this had made a profound impression, and he had u tilize d the idea to produce his effects. Do you remember the colors of the burning chemicals, in "The Monster11?22 There you had them a ll at once,23
We Can probably assume, then, that even if Crane never heard of an Impressionist (and he did ), he was prob ably well acquainted with the popular painting schools of the day, and moreover (since his father and his mother's father were ministers) he may have had some knowledge of
1iturgical a r t, Crane1s own statements, in The Thi rd Vio&et and in Wounds in the Rain, make it necessary to refute
Berryman8s assertion that Crane owed nothing at a ll to paint ing, On the other hand, the survey of imagery that was under taken in the body of this paper would certainly indicate that while there may have been some stylistic polishing of color use, and an increasing structural usefulness of colors, Cranels works by and large show no particu1ar increase in the kind of
22The colors are vio le t, crimson, green, blue, orange, and purple. The Monster, III of the Work, 45.
^ Stephen Crane; Letterss Append>x #24, Letter to Max J. Herzberg, December 7$ 1926; p. 335. no imagery that might be attributed to an impressionist influence
(except for those few indications that describe painting
itself in The Third Violet), it may be that this fact is due to the impossibility of comparing a graphic technique
(spatial) with a literary technique (temporal); but that, we can see, is not altogether true, since in The Third Violet we have seen how Crane might have used his colors impression is tic a lly if he had chosen to do so. He did not choose to do so; and that is the main point of this paper.
We are now able to define Crane's Impressionism -- or at least to limit the definition of it. Crane was, in John
Berryman's words, "one of the great stylists of the language,
He was a pioneer and an a rtis t in the selective technique of literary Impressionism -- that is, he presented scenes not as documented but as impressed on the consciousness of an ob server, so that the prominent characteristics of a scene would serve to stand for the whole scene. He was, unquestion ably, an Impressionist in the literary sense of the word.
Just as unquestionably, though, he was not an Impressionist in the graphic sense of the word, except insofar as the two uses! of the term must necessarily overlap because of their common origin. The fact that colors predominate in Crane's
24p. 283 , I l l writings is no proof at a l1 that Impressionist painting (or any other school9 for that matter) had the effect of an
"influence" upon his writing. If such an influence exists, to prove it w ill require much more evidence than is available today. APPENDIX
On the following page appears a chart which gives the following information: the number of times each of several predominant colors was noted to appear in each of thirteen volumes or stories by Stephen Crane0
in order to make meaningful the numbers that appear in the chart, it is necessary to know the relative lengths of the works considered0 They are? The Sul 1ivan County
Sketches about 5,000 words; Maqgie about 22,000; the Badge =.•=■ about 45,000; The Third Violet about 50,000;
"The Pace of Youth" --= about 4,000; "The Men in the Storm"
about 2,500; "The Angel Chi ld" -*= about 2,500; "The Open
Boat" about 10,000; "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" ■ about 4,500; "The Blue Hotel" about 11,000; "The Monster"
about 20,000; "Horses One Dash" about 5,000. ’ c E >. C 3 V) o 0
BLACK 22 14 26 25 7 12 3 12 GRAY 39 6 22 22 9 8 4 1
WHITE >7 5 11 11 7 14 1 2 4
YELLOW 15 11 16 16 5 1 15 3 4
BLUE 4 7 54 54 8 4 2 7 6
SILVER 2 2 2 3 4 2
CRIMSON 3 9 9 1 3
BROWN 11 2 13 12 2 3 1
GREEN 6 4 8 8 7 1 1
ORANGE 1 4 4 3 3
PURPLE 1 1 7 7 3 2
GOLD 4 8 8 2 1
BRASS 5 1
BRONZE 2 1
MAROON
PINK
OTHERS 10 10 12 11
SUBTOTAL: 139 88 245 235 75 23 IT 10 56 42 35 62 COLOR-SUGGESTIVE IMAGES: 162 201 481 _94 33_ 21 64 39 60 63 ! £ TOTAL: 301 289 726 169 56 49 31 120 81 95 125 113 LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED
Ahnebrinkj Lars. The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction, A Stuely of the Works of Hamlin GariancT, Stephen Crane, anT~Frank Norris, With Special Ref erence to Some "European InTluehces, 1891 -1903, IX in the series Essays and Studies on American Language and Literature, S.B. LiIjegren et alii, eds. CambrTdge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950.
Archibald, Elizabeth. "A Study of the Imagery in Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat'," Exercise Exchange, II (Summer 1952), 3-5.
Banks, Nancy H. "The Novel of a Journalist," Bookman, II (November 1895), 217-220. . '
Bates, H.E. "Stephen Crane: A Neglected Genius," Bookman, . LXXXI (October 1931), 10-11. .
Beebe, Maurice and Thomas A. Gullason^ "Criticism of Stephen Crane: A Selected Checklist with,an Index to Studies of Separate Works," Modern Fiction Studies, V ( Autumn 1959) s 282?29"TT" . ~
Beer, Thomas. "Fire Feathers," Saturday Review of Litera- ture, II (December 19, 1925), 425-%27,
______Stephen Crane, A Study j n Amer ican Letters . ntroduction by Joseph"™Conrad. New York: Alfred ~A. Knopf Co., 1923 i. Benet, William Rose, ed. The Reader8s Encyclopedja; An Encyclopedia of World Literature and the Arts. New York: Thomas Y. CroweT1 Co., 1948.
Berryman, John. Stephen Crane. New York: William Sloane As sociates, Inc., 1950.
Birren, Faber. Color Psychology and Color Therapy. New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, Inc., 1961.
l ife ■ 115
Bohnenberger, Carl„ "Stephen Crane and Robert B arr/' Satur day Rev Iew of Literature, X (December 16, 1933T9 352„
and Hi 1T, N,M, "The Letters of Joseph Conrad to Stephen and Cora Crane," Bookman, LX1X (May-June 1929)s 225-235, 367-374, ' ”
Braqdon, CSaude0 "The Purple Cow Period," Bookman, LXlX (duly 1929), > 75-4780
Buitenhuis, Peter, "The Essentials of Life: "The Open Boat8 as Existentialist Fiction," Modern Fiction Studies, V (Autumn 1959), 243-250» .
Bushman, John C, "The Fiction of Stephen Crane and Its Critics," Unpublished Ph,D. dissertation. University of Illinois, 1944 , Copy in New York Public Library,
Cady, Edwin H ,, and Lester G, Wells, eds. Love Letters to Nellie CrouSe, Syracuse, N,Y,; Syracuse University - Press, 19547”
Gather, W illa S[ibert ], "Stephen Crane's 'Wounds in the Rain"," pp, 67-74 in On W riting, New York; Alfred A, Knopf Go,, Inc,, 1949o .
Clough, Wilson C, "The Use of Color Words by Edgar Allan Poe," PMLA, XLV (April 1930), 598-613,
Colvert, James Bo "The Origins of Crane's Literary Creed," University of Texas Studies in English, XXXIV (1955), T79-"lW7 — — ------.
, "Structure and Theme in Stephen Crane's Fiction," Modern Fiction Studies, V (Autumn 1959), 204r208,
Conrad, Joseph, Last Essays, Garden City, N,J„; Doubleday, Page, & Co,, 19261
, "Stephen Crane A Note Without Dages," Bookman, L (February 1920), 529-531, .
Cowley, Malcolm, "A Natural History of American Naturalism," pp, 370^387 in John Watson Aldridge, ed„, Critiques . and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920-1951, New York; The Ronald Press Co, ,“ 1952®
Cox, James Trammel 1, "The imagery of The Red Badge of Courage," Modern Fiction Studies, V (Autumn 79597$ 209-219, , ' , ■ ; ; - " 6 ______0 "Stephen Crane as Symbolic Naturalist; An Analy sis of 'The Blue Hotel's" Modern Fiction Studies, 111 (Summer 1957), 1>7” 158, " ~ ~ ~ ~
Crane, Stephen. "The Angel Chi ld," pp, 17-30 in Whi1omvI lie Stories, Introduction by William Lyon Phelps, Vol, V of Wi Ison FolVett, ed,. The Work of Stephen Crane, New York; Alfred A, Knopf Co,, ISTS.T" “
; ^ ■ "The Black Dog," pp, 43-49 in TheSul 1 ivanCounty Sketches of Stephen Crane, Edited, With an Introduc- tion by, Me 1 vln Scho’ber 1 in, Syracuse, New York; Syracuse University Press, 1949,2
, "The Blue Hotel," Co11ie r ' s Week1y, XXII (November. 26 and December 3, 18987, 14-16 and 14-16,
' -, "The Blue Hotel," pp, 93-134 in Major Conflicts, Introduction by H,L, Mencken. Vol, X of the Work, New York; Alfred. A. Kno|5f Co., 1926,
. "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," pp,155-166 in Maggie and Other Stories. Selected, with an Intro duction by, Austin McC. Fox. New York; Washington Square Press, I960,
______The Collected Poems of Stephen Crane. Wilson F o lle tt, ed. New York; ATFred A. Knopf Co., 1930. (Fourth printing 1945),
■ . "The Cry of a Huckleberry Pudding," in the Sketches, pp. 65-71. ■
. "Four Men in a Cave," in the Sketches, pp. 25-31.
' : .. , "A Ghoul's Accountant," in the Sketches, pp. 39-42.
. "Horses --O n e Dash," pp. 134-143 in "An Illusion in Red and White" and Ten Other Stories Not Avai Table in Any Other Book in P rin t. Edited, with an Intro duction by, Don Honig. New York; Avon Book Division, The Hearst Corp., 1962.
1 Hereafter this series w ill be cited simply as the Work. ^Hereafter this volume w ill be cited simply as the Sketches. o "An 111 usti on in Red and White" and Ten Other StorTes Not AvailaBle in Any Other Book In P rinto Ed I teds, wTTh an Introduction Fy9 Don Hon i g» New York; Avon Book Division, The Hearst Corp., 1962.
. "Killing His Bear," In the Sketches, pp. 51-54.
. The L ittle Regiment. London; J.M. Dent 6- Sons, L td ., 1900. . "A London Sketch," ppa 240-251 in Wounds in the Rai n. Vol. IX of the Work. New York; "A If red A. Knopf Co., 19260
. Haggle; A Girl of the Streets. Introduction by Henry H a z litt. New York: A1fred A. Knopf Co., 1931.
» Major Conflicts. Introduction by H.L. Mencken. Vol. X of the Work. New York; Alfred A. Knopf Co., 1926. a Midnight Sketches and Other Impressions. Intro- duction by Sherwood Anderson. Vol. XI of the Work. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Co., 1926.
. The Monster. Introduction b^ Wilson F o lle tt. Vol. Ill of the Work. New York; Alfred A. Knopf Co.„ 1926. — "
. "A Mystery of Heroism,11 pp. 95-110 in Tales of Two Wars. Introduction by Robert H. Davis. Vol. Tl of the Work. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Col, 1925.
. "The Octopush," in the Sketches, pp. 33-37.
. "The Open Boat j" pp. 213-238. in Maggie, and Other Stories. Selected, with an Introduction, by Austin McC, Fox. New York; Washington Square Press, I960.
. "The Pace of Youth," pp. 59-73 in Midhigh-t Sketches and Other Impressions. Introduction by Sherwood Anderson, Vol. XI of the Work. New York: Alfred A, Knopf Co., 1926. *
. The Red Badge of Courage. Introduction by Carl Van Doren. New York: The Heritage Press, 1944,
o The Red Badge of Courage. Introduction by Robert Wooster Stallman. New York: The Modern Library (Random House), 1951. 118
The Red Badge of Courage0 ScuMey Bradley, Rich mond Croom Beatty, and E, Hudson Long, edse The Norton C ritical Edition, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., !nCo, 1962,
_« The Red Badge of Courage and Four Great Stories. Edi ted,"~wTth an Introduction By, Ralph El 1 ison. New York: De11 Pub1 i s h i ng Co., I 960 . :
The Red Badge of Courage: Text and Critic!sm. RicharcTLettis, RoEert F. McDonnell, aHd William E. Morris, eds. New York: - Harbourt Brace & Co., i960.
Selected Prose and Poetry. Edi ted, wi th an intre duction by, WTTTTam M. Gibson. . New York: Rinehart, 1950. - v : ,:V :. 'v.: ■
_. "The Sergeant's Private Madhouse," pp.79-87 in "An 111 us ion i n Red and Whi te " and Ten Other Stories Not Avai Table i n Any Other BookTiT Tpf'i- nt ° Edi ted, with an introduction Fy, Don HonTg. New York: Avon Book Division, The Hearst Corp., 1962.
, Stephen Cranes An Omnibus. Edited, with an Intro- duct ion by, Robert- Woos ter Stallman. New York:. Alfred A. Knopf Co,, 1 nc,, 1952«
Stephen Cranes Stories and Tales, Edited, with an Introduction by, Robert Wooster Stallman. New York: Vintage Books Inc., 1955.
_. The Sul 1ivan County Sketches of Stephen Crane. Edited, with an Ihtroduct i oh by,~ReTvi n Schbber i i n. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1949.
_. Tales of Two Wars. Introduction by Robert H. Davis. Vol. I I of the Work! New York: Alfrea A. Knopf Co., 1925,
_. "A Tent in Agony," the Sketches, pp. 61-64,
The Third V io le t. New York: D, Appleton & Co., 1897.
Twenty Stories. Introduction by Carl Van Doren. New York: Alfred A, Knopf Co., Inc., 1940.
War Is Kind. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co.,1899.
Wh11omvi11e Stories. introduction by William Lyon Phelps. Vol. V of the Work. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Co., 1926. ; — 119 C unliffe9 Marcuso "Stephen Crane and the American Background of Maggie," American Quarterly, VII (Spring 1955 ) 9 31-% .
Eby, Cecil Dos Jr. "The Source of Crane's Metaphor, ‘Red Badge of Courage)," American Literature^ XXXII (June I960), 204-207.
Feldman, Abraham. "Crane's T itle from Shakespeare," American Notes and Queries, VI 81 (March 1950), 185-186.
Fisher, Richard J » "Stephen Crane's Natural ism." Unpubl ished Master's Thesis, University of Arizona English Dep't., 1951. Follett, Wilson. "Second Twenty-eight Years," Bookman, LXVIII (January 1929), 537. ■ " —
Ford, Ford Madox. Portraits from Life. Boston: Houghton M ifflin Co., 1937.
„ "Techniques," Southern Review, 8 (July 1935), 20-35. . : .
Frederic, Harold. "Stephen Crane's Triumph," New York Times (January 26, 1896), p. 22.
Garnett, Edward. Friday Nights. New York: Alfred A, Knopf Co., 1922.
Geismar, Maxwell. "Stephen Crane: Halfway House," pp. 69-136 in Rebels and Ancestors: The Amerjcan Novel, 1890-1915; Boston: Houghton"Miff1 Tn Co., 1953.
Gelfant, Blanche Housman. The American City Nove1. Norman, Oklahoma: University ofO k 1 ahoma Press, 1954.
G1eckner$ Robert F. "Stephen Crane and the Wonder of Man's Conceit," Modern Fiction Studies, V (Autumn 1959)s 271 - 281 .
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. A Theory of Colour, Translated and edited by Eleanor C. Merry; pp. 69-87 in Maria Schindler and Eleanor C. Merry, Pure Colour. London: New Culture Publications, 1946. 120
Greenf ieldj, Stanley B. "The Unmi stakeable Stephen Crane," jPMLA, LXX1 II ( December 1958), 562-572.
Grosser, MaurIce. The Painter's Eye. New York: Holt, Rine hart & Winston, Inc., 1951. Reprinted by Mentor Books (The New American Library) 1956; fourth print- . 'ng, 1961. ■ / ;
Gullason, Thomas A. "The Significance of 'Wounds in the Rain'," Modern Fiction Studies, V (Autumn 1959), 235-242 o™- — ™ ; .. :
. "Symbolic Unity of 1 The Monster'," Modern Language Notes, LXXV (December I960), 663-668.
Rackett, Francis. "Another War; Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage," New Republic, XI (June 30, 1917),
■2^0-251, - — "
Hart, John E. "The Red Badge of Courage as Myth and Symbol," University of Kansas CTty Review, XIX (Summer 1953), ' 2?9^25C-' — L------
Hartwick, Harry. The Foreground of American Fiction. New Yorks American Book Co., 133^-.
Hatcher, Harlan H. Creating _the Modern American Novel. New Yorks Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1935.
Hertzberg, Max J. "Stephen Cranes A Pioneer Novelist," World Review, I (October 19, 1925), 74. ,
Hinman, Wilbur F. Corporal Si Klegg and His "Pard. 11 New York; Published by the author, T88T.
Hoffman, Daniel G. The Poetry of Stephen Crane. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957/
"Stephen Crane's New Jersey Ghosts; Two Newly Recovered Sketches," Proceedings of the,New Jersey Historical Society, LXXI (October 1953), 239-253,
Hoffman, Frederick John. The Modern Novel in America, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1951»
Howells, William Dean, "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's Mag azine, CXXX (April 1915), 797. 121
o " T h e Red Badge of "Courage," Harper's Weekly, , XXXlTT0ctobeF25's”T895)j 1013o
Josephs on. Matt hew«, "The Voyage of Stephen Crane," pp.232- 264 in Portrai t of the Art Ist as American. New Yorks Harcourt9 Brace & Co., 1930.
Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds. New Yorks Reyna1 Co., • 1942, — — — — -
Kipling, Rudyard. The Light that Failed. Vol. IX of The Writinqs j_n.£rose and Verse of Rudyard Kiplinq. New York: FreieFrck A. Stokes Co.,1 8 9 7 .
Kwiat, Joseph J. "Stephen Crane and Painting," American Quarterly, IV (Winter 1952), 331-338. .
Labor, Earle. "Crane and Hemingway: Anatomy of Trauma," Renascence, XI (June 1949)9 189-196.
Linson, Corwin Knapp. " L ittle Stories of 8Steve1 Crane," Saturday Evening Post (April 11, 1903)» 19-20.
• • . My Stephen Crane, Edited, with an Introduction by, Edwfn H, Cady7' Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1958,
L it t e ll, Robert. "Notes on Stephen Crane," New Republic, LIV (May 16, 1928), 39i“392.
Lynskey, Winifred. "Crane's The Red Badge of Courage," Explicator, VIII (December 1949), itern 18. .
Maclean, Hugh, "The Two Worlds of 'The Blue H otel'," Modern Fiction Studies, V (Autumn 1959), 260:-270. .
Mankiewicz, H.J. -"The Literary Craft of Stephen Crane," New York Times Book Review (January 10, 1926), p. 7.
Marcus, Mordecai = "The Unity of The Red Badge of Courage," pp. 189-195 in Stephen Crane, The Rea"Badge of uourage Text and Criticism , ed. by Richard Lettis, R ^ ert F. McDonnell, and William E, Morris. New York: Harcourt Brace S- Co., I960.
o and Erln Marcus. "Animal Imagery in The Red Badge of ^Courage, ‘^ Modern Language Notes, LXXIV (February 122
•Monroe,' Harriet* ■ "Stephen Cranes" Poetry, XIV (June 1919K 148-152. : ,
Muller, Herbert J. Modern Fiction, A Study of Values. New York: Funk and WagnatTs Co., 1937,
Munson, Gorham Bert. "Prose for Fictions Stephen Crane," pp. 159^170 in Style and Form in American Prose. New York: Alfred A. Knop-fCo. S~T929.
O'Donnell, Thomas F. "Charles Dudley Warner on The Red Badge of Courage,"American Literature, XXV (NovemEer 19541, 3E3”36'B. . ----- :— - ......
Osborn, Scott C. "Stephen Crane's Imagerys ' Pasted Like a Wafer' s" American Literature, XXI11 (November 1951), 362= . ■
Owen, Guy, Jr. "Crane's 'The Open Boat' and Conrad's 'Youth'," Modern Language Notes, LXX1I I (February 1958), ldd-102“ ' '
Parri ngton, Vernon Lou is . "The Deye1opment of Realism," pp^, I39 -I 59 in Norman FdeFster, The Reinterpretation of American Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., T92137— ~—:------: ; .
Pizer, Dona 1 d. ''Romantic Individualism, in Garland, Norris, and Crane," American Quarterly, X (Winter 1958), 463-475 o ■ — “ “ Pratt, Lyndon Upson. "A Possible Source for The Red Badge of Courage," American Literatu re, XI (March 1939)7 T-T(T.
Pritchett, Victor Sawdon. The Living Novel. New Yorks Rey na 1 and Hitchcock, In c., 1947..
Rahv, Philip. "Fiction and the Criticism of Fiction," Kenyon Review, XVI18 (Spring 1956), 276-291.
Rosenfeld, Isaac. "Stephen Crane as Symbolist," Kenyon Review, XV (Spring 1953), 311-314.
Roth, Russell. "A free in Fictions The Short Fiction of Stephen Crane," New Mexico Quarterly, XXI1 I (Summer 1953), 188-196. — "— ------. Satterwhi te s Joseph Nc "Stephen Crane's ‘The Blue Hotel11; The Failure of Understandings" Modern Fiction Studies, It (Winter 1956-57), 238-241, ™
Schindler, Maria, and Eleanor C, Merry, Pure Colour, London: New Culture Pub1ications, 1946.
Schroeder, John W, "Stephen Crane Embattled," University of Kansas City Review, XVI! (Winter 1950), 123-129,
[Sedwicks AoC,3 ["The Red Badge of Courage"], Nation, LXI11 (July 2, 1B9^)7” T57 „
Sewal1, R„B, "Crane's The Red Badge of Courage," Explicator, II I (May 1945),"55. ' ' . Skard, Sigmund, ; The Use of Color in Li terature; A Survey of Research, PhiTiHeTphia (Lancaster, Pa,: Lancaster Press, Inc,): Proceedings of the American Philosophi cal Society, XC, 1946,
Snell, George, "Naturalism Nascent: Crane and Norris," pp, 223-233 in The Shapers of American Fiction, 1798- 1947 o New York: E, P, Dutton & Co,, I nc,7~T9W7
Solomon, Eric, "A Gloss on The Red Badge of Courage," r Modern Language Notes, LXXV (February 196d}~ 111-113°
, "Another Analogue for the Red Badge of Courage, " Nineteenth-Century Fleti on, XU 1 (June 1958), 63-67„
______, "The Structure of The Red Badge of Courage," Modern Fiction Studies, V tAutumn 1959), 220-234,
Solomon, Max, "Stephen Crane: A C ritical Study," Masses and Mainstream, IX (January 1956 and March 1 9 5 6 ),2 5 -% and 31-47, .
S p iller, Robert E, "Toward Naturalism in Fiction," pp, 1016- 1038 in Spiller et alii, eds,. Literary History of the United States, Vol, I I , New York: The Macmillan Co,,
TmT— , ......
Stallman, Robert Wooster, "Crane1s Maggie: A Reassessment," Modern Fiction Studies, V (Autumn 1959), 251-259° ■ .. 124
Stallmans Robert Woos ter <, "Fiction and its Critics: A Reply to Mr * Rahvs" Kenyon Rev i ews XIX (Spring 1957), 290-299= —
______= "The Question of Influences," pp» 162-163 in Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, Sculley Bradley, Richmond Groom Beatty, and El Hudson Long, edSo The Norton C ritical Edition, New York: W,W, Norton S- Co,, Inc,, 1962,
. = "The Red Badge of Courage," pp, 81-103 in The Houses that James B u ilt, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1961,
"The Scholar’s Net: Literary Sources," College English, XVII (October 1955), 20-22,
______, "Stephen Crane: A Revaluation," pp, 244-269 in John Watson Aldridge, ed,, Critiques and Essays on Modern Flet?on, 1920-1951= New York: The Ronald Press Co,, 1952,
______, "Stephen Crane’ s Revision of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets'," American Literature, XXVI (January 195577 . ------. v.
, and Lillian Giikes, eds, Stephen Crane: Letters, New York: New York University Press, I960,
Starrett, Vincent, "An Estimate of Stephen Crane," Sewanee Review, XXVII I (July 1920), 405-413, ,
Stein, William Bysshe, "New Testament Inversions in Crane’s Maggie," Modern Language Notes, LXXIII (April 1958), 268-172, \ ■“
"Stephen Crane; Pioneer in Technique," Nauren Sprachen, VII (July 1959), 297-303= "
Stevenson, John W? "Literary Reputation of Stephen Crane," South Atlantic Quarterly, LI (April 1952), 286-300,
Stolper, Benjamin John Reeman, Stephen Crane: A List of his Writings and Articles About Him. NewarR: Published for the Stephen Crane Association by the Public Li brary of Newark, New Jersey, 1930. 125
StoneV Edward„ "The Many Suns of The Red Badge of Courage,11 American Literatures XX8X (November 1957T7 322-326,,
"Style of Stephen Crane," Chautauquan, XXXI (July 1900), 323=
Sutton, Walter, "Pity and Fear in 'The Blue H otel'," American Quarterly, IV (Spring 195,2),, 73-78,
Taylor, Walter Fuller^ The Economic Novel in America, Chapel H ill, North Car61ina: University of North Carolina Press, 1942,
, A History of American Letters, Boston; American Boole Company9"T9JEo
Van Doren, Carl, The American Novel, 1789-1939* New York; The Macmi llan CoTj 1940,
. "Stephen Crane," American Mercury, I (1924), 11-14,
, and Mark Van Doren, American and B ritish Literature Since 1890, New York; The Century Co,,1 9 2 5 *
Wagenknecht, Edward C, Cava1cade of the Ameri can Novel, New York; Holt, Rinehart anB Winston, 1952,
Walcutt, Charles Child, American L?terary Natura1ism; A Divided Stream, Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1956.
Warner, Charles Dudley, "The Editor's Study; Color in Literal ture," Harper's Magazine, XCII (May 1896), 962,
Webster, H,T, "WiIbur F, H?nman' s Corpora1 Si Klegg and Stephen.Crane's The Red Badge of Courage," American Li terature, XI (November. T939) s 285-293« ;
Weisbarger, Bernard, "The Red Badge of Courage: Crane, 1895/' pp. 96-123 in Charles Shapiro, ed., Twelve Original Essays oh Great American Novels. Detroit: Wayne State University Press', 1958,
Wells, H.G. "Stephen Crane from an English Standpoint," North American Review, CLXXI (1900), 233-242, .
Werner, William L, "Stephen Crane and The Red Badge of Courage,11 New York Times Book Review (September 30, T # T ; P* 4. 126 Wogans Claudia C„ "Crane1s Use of Color in The Red Badge of Courage," Modern Fiction Studies^ V lAutumn TS59T,
Wyndham, George. "A Remarkable Book9" The London New Review, XIV (January 1896), 30-40. ~ " "
Zara, Louis. Dark Riders A Novel Based on the Life of Stephen Crane. Cleveland, OhTo: The WorlT'Pub'Vi shrng Co., 1961.