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Individual and Crowd in Stephen Crane's New York

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Individual and Crowd in Stephen Crane's New York Individual and Crowd in Stephen Crane’s New York Peter J. Bellis Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 72, Number 3, Autumn 2016, pp. 75-98 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2016.0015 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/634118 Access provided by your subscribing institution. (2 Nov 2018 15:20 GMT) Peter J. Bellis Individual and Crowd in Stephen Crane’s New York n the archetypal American success story, social I mobility often depends on physical mobility. From Benjamin Frank- lin through Horatio Alger and beyond, young men rise in the world as they move through city space. Franklin builds his public identity with a display of industry on the streets of Philadelphia, and Alger’s Ragged Dick gathers customers and patrons by navigating Manhattan’s side- walks. But the careers of both printer and bootblack are grounded in a particular physical and economic setting—the commercial, largely pre- industrial walking city—one already anachronistic by the 1860s, when Alger’s career began. Texts like Franklin’s Autobiography and Alger’s novels attempted to at once reflect and control the shape of urban life. But such linear narra- tives of individual progress became much harder to sustain amid the con- gestion and economic division of the nineteenth-century city. Increasing industrialization and poverty brought physical immobility and con- straint, elements at odds with the forward movement of temporal narra- tive: characters unable to move through physical space could not move upward in the social order, either. As the city grew toward modernity, urban experience called forth different modes of representation—syn- chronic, collective, spatially defined—forms beginning to emerge in the newspaper sketch and other forms of immersive journalism. Both these changes in city life and the textual crisis they engendered are reflected in the work of Stephen Crane, whose New York fictions and sketches offer two very different versions of urban experience. In Postmetropolis, Edward Soja describes urban capitalism in terms of fifty-year “long cycles” of development, punctuated by crises and restructurings. He sees the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Arizona Quarterly Volume 72, Number 3, Autumn 2016 • issn 0004-1610 Copyright © 2016 by Arizona Board of Regents 76 Peter J. Bellis as the era of the “Mercantile City,” which was displaced by the emerging industrial city of the mid-1800s, and then by the early twentieth-centu- ry’s corporate monopoly city (112, 114). Historian David Gordon offers a more specific contrast between an American urban model based on commercial accumulation and, beginning in the 1850s, a city structure based on industrial accumulation (34, 37). By the end of the century, he argues, the concentration and isolation of factories and working-class residential districts had begun to reveal the internal frictions and con- tradictions of the process (44–45). New York was no longer “a place of encounters” between classes but “a fragmented terrain held down and together under all manner of forces of class, racial, and sexual domination” (Harvey 14). The city’s population grew by 25% during the 1880s, to over 1.5 million, more than 40% of them foreign born (Leviatin 17). Improvements in public transportation also led to increasing residential segregation, with fac- tories and working-class housing concentrated in a dense and immis- erated urban core. With the intrusion of sweatshops and saloons into residential buildings, work, living, and recreational spaces were harshly compressed—into what Henri Lefebvre calls a “dominated” space, one whose inhabitants experienced it only passively as limitation or con- straint (Production 39). Individual agency was being swallowed up by mass society, and indi- vidual movement absorbed into the ever-shifting dynamic of the urban crowd (Kasson 82). This tension appears as early as the 1840s—in the contrast, for example, between the detached observation of Baudelaire’s flâneur and the compulsive absorption of Poe’s “Man of the Crowd.” And it is highlighted fifty years later in the split between Crane’s fiction and journalism. Crane’s novels and fictional tales, built on linear narrative and authorial detachment, track individual economic failure in a city increasingly divided by class privilege and exploitation. In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and George’s Mother (1896), Manhattan is a place of overcrowding, enclosure, and violence. Traffic is at a standstill, and space is brutally contested. For individuals, such physical blockage limits both individual agency and narrative possibility—moving for- ward in time can only mean a fall downward in class. New York remains “an impenetrable mystery” to them; however much they long to “com- prehend it,” they will only be “buried” under its “complexities.”1 Individual and Crowd in Stephen Crane’s New York 77 If Crane’s fiction offers a naturalist critique of capitalist tales of individual success, his newspaper sketches of 1892–94 suggest a differ- ent vision: here too the city often grinds to a halt, but this New York comes alive when things stop moving. The sketches are not built around individuals or temporal progression, but instead constructed in spatial terms: they focus on crowds, which gather and then disperse, occupy- ing space rather than moving through it. Such impromptu groupings seem to coalesce and disappear alongside or beyond the divisions of the economic order. Potential conflict is diffused, the latent energy of the crowd reshaped into a kind of community. For a moment at least, their collective force reappropriates and reshapes both city and text, yield- ing what Lefebvre terms a “representational space,” a “lived” space that may generate a new kind of mass culture (Production 39). Space and environment do not completely determine the lives of Crane’s characters.2 Even in his famous comment to Hamlin Gar- land—“environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless”—Crane offers only a qualified claim (“a tre- mendous thing,” “frequently”), and never distinguishes between his characters’ physical and moral or cultural environment.3 But changes in the nineteenth-century urban landscape did establish a crucial framework for both individual and collective experience; just as city dwellers struggled to define themselves as socio-economic agents, they were also constrained and shaped by the spaces they sought to master or escape.4 For Crane, these changes in city life exposed the limits of conven- tional representation: traditional linear narratives built around single protagonists were no longer adequate to the complexity of urban expe- rience. The contrast between his fiction and journalism highlights both the shifts in Crane’s view of New York City and the changes in form that follow from them—as he moves from detached and ironic nar- ration, to self-conscious experiment, and then to a nearly anonymous immersion in the urban mass. 1. In Maggie, conflict is a “condition,” as David Halliburton puts it (38), and it is a condition in many ways endemic to the physical envi- ronment. Crane depicts the Rum Alley tenements as a static and frag- mented tableau, “a dark region” where 78 Peter J. Bellis a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. In all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, rags and bottles. In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. A thousand odors of cook- ing food came forth to the street. The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels (I: 11). Crane’s short, disconnected sentences might well be described as impressionistic, but they do not cohere or coalesce to produce either a single impression or set of impressions. Their visual focus drifts, moving upward from the street with the wind, only to be deflected downward again toward a series of disordered items. The apartment building itself “careens” outward, but people and objects remain in “unhandy,” hap- hazard positions, obstructing rather than enabling movement. Things appear displaced and individuals either stagnant or directionless—char- acters do not move through space so much as they are swallowed up in it, the way men are “engulfed” by the “smiling lips” of a saloon in George’s Mother (I: 116). Inanimate objects (doorways, garments, odors, the building) seem to have as much life as the people. As Stanley Wertheim has noted, “there is no single urban milieu for Maggie or George’s Mother,” but Crane’s references to Blackwell’s Island and to the Peter Doelger Brewery (E. 55th Street) place Rum Alley near E. 57th Street (407–33), where Crane was living in 1892 (11, 3, 4). Unlike the older neighborhoods of the Lower East side, this area was not fully developed until after the Civil War; it was shaped by the terms of the 1811 Commissioners’ planning grid, whose aim had been to create uniform spaces for land development and spec- ulation. A 1900 map shows solid blocks of four- to five-story build- ings, eight to ten per block, with alleys behind them (Pincus). On the large-scale level of the map, this is abstract and commodified space, divided and redivided to produce the fragmented and disordered scene that Crane describes.5 Whether located in midtown or near the Bowery, Rum Alley is anonymous rental housing, whose occupants have little sense of actively Individual and Crowd in Stephen Crane’s New York 79 experienced “place” or vicarious ownership.6 Tenement interiors are only compressed versions of the disorder outside.
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