FREE ESSAY ON STEVEN CRANE'S THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE - CIVIL WAR

STEVEN CRANE'S THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE - CIVIL WAR

STEVEN CRANE'S THE RED BADGE OF
COURAGE AFFECTED PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF THE CIVIL WAR?
Stephen Crane, (1871-1900), was an American novelist and poet, one of the first American
writers of the naturalistic style of writing, Crane is known for his pessimistic and
often brutal portrayals of the human condition, but his stark realism is relieved by
poetic charm and a sympathetic understanding of character. Born in Newark New Jersey, and
the son of a Methodist minister, Crane began work in 1891, in New York City, as a
freelance reporter in the slums. The job provided him with material for his first novel,
Maggie, a Girl of the Streets written in 1893, a work that won praise from American
writers Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells-also naturalistic writers--but weren't as
popular or successful as Crane. Crane's next novel, The Red Badge of Courage, written in
1895, and gained international recognition as a penetrating and realistic psychological
study of a young soldier in the American Civil War. In addition to being a novelist,
journalist, and short-story writer, Crane was also an innovator in free verse techniques
(irregular verse). 
Crane died at the age of twenty-eight and a half of tuberculosis. Although he died at
such a young age his literature had a profound affect on the world. Thomas Beer points
out The Red Badge of Courage as illustrating better than any of Crane's works that his
search for "aesthetic was governed by terror and no one since Poe has evoked that
emotion"(Haycraft and Kunitz 189). When Crane signed a contract with D. Appleton and Co.
to publish The Red Badge of Courage, he was not well-known enough to command an advance,
and agreed to a flat 10 per cent royalty on the retail price of all copies sold
(McPherson, 5). Published in the autumn of 1895, the book went through two editions
before the end of the year. By March of 1896 the novel was in eighth place on the
international booksellers' list and had gone through fourteen printings; remarkably
enough, it has never been out of print (6). Unfortunately, contracts with publishers and
a general lack of good business sense kept Crane poor for much of his life. But with the
publication of The Red Badge of Courage, Crane achieved almost overnight celebrity.
Although Crane did run into criticism, one of the biggest was the Dial controversy (Angel
98).
The Dial was a publication run by a former Brigadier General in the Union army, George
McClurg, who spearheaded accusations about The Red Badge of Courage portraying the Union
soldier as being a coward. However, Dial editor William Payne had already made evident
the magazine's disapproval of the book, McClurg maintained that Payne's opinion had not
been unfavorable enough. Criticizing those English and American reviewers who had praised
The Red Badge of Courage, McClurg fumed at what he saw as another installment in the
habitual English ridicule of American soldiers. Mistakenly assuming that Crane's novel
had been first published in England, McClurg denounced it as a vicious satire upon
American soldiers and American armies, as part of a plot to undermine confidence in the
nation's armed forces (Mitchell 15). McClurg exclaimed that books of this nature should
not be published or allowed in the United States (Mitchell 10-15). 
The first response to General McClurg's accusations came in a letter from J.L. Onderdonk,
who, concurred his agreement with McClurg's position and ridiculed the book as a literary
absurdity. In the same issue of the Dial, Ripley Hitchcock writes to the editors on
behalf of the publishers of the novel, D. Appleton & Co. In an underlying tone which
contrasted with McClurg's condemning article, Hitchcock points out and corrects some of
the General's mistakes while reminding readers of the numerous favorable points brought
out by the novel. English critic Sydney Brooks, who had earlier praised The Red Badge of
Courage in the Saturday Review, wrote to the Dial in defense of Crane's novel. Brooks
dismissed McClurg's speculating condemnations about English opinion of the novel as
misjudged patriotism and bad criticism, Brooks then points out that McClurg's notion of
literary standards constituted a form of censorship which would only allow the most
celebratory accounts of American life to be published (16). The good sense of Brooks'
letter ended the Dial controversy and left The Red Badge of Courage intact. However,
Stephen Crane and his book would encounter many more controversies from the patriotic
finger pointers in America (Mitchell 15-20).
Early reviews raised three issues that remained a central issue surrounding the book.
First, there is Crane's concern with authenticity. "Written in a post-photographic age,
The Red Badge of Courage discards contemporaneous conventions of battlefield prose for a
discontinuous succession of flashing images that yield photographic revelations (Sweet
52)." "Crane limits the novel's point of view and fragments its narrative in order to
focus the impact of each of his battle pictures and make us see the truth of his
description (53)." Second, although much of General McClurg's commentary about The Red
Badge of Courage's lack of patriotism, for example, is overheated and irrelevant, he was
not entirely wrong to suggest that Crane's novel raised potentially uneasy questions
about the state of American society at the turn of the century (62). And finally, while
Crane's early critics did not realize the book is set at the Civil War battle of
Chancellorsville, scholarly inquiry has revealed this to be the case. The Battle,
Chancellorsville, suggests that Crane drew on literary and pictorial sources in order to
establish the factual framework of Chancellorsville as the setting for The Red Badge of
Courage (63). 
The Red Badge of Courage's affect on the American people was one of naturalism of life,
what can happen to someone inside during a pivotal moment or section of their life. This
book shows how each one of us can fear and that war is not all-big banners and tickertape
parades (Nagal 81). This book shows the average American as he was, and tells the story
from the working class's perspective. During the turn of the century wealth was in uneven
distribution, essentially leaving the poorer class to idolize the aristocratic populous
of the country. The Red Badge of Courage depicted a young recruit under fire and told of
his journey along the bloodied Civil War trail, which was uncharacteristic of previous
literature and excepted by the masses (Bailey and Kennedy 586). Bettina Liebowitz Knapp
in his books Stephen Crane: Criticism and Interpretation best describes Crane:
He was a rebel and a precursor of the creative spirits of the Lost Generation, the Best
Generation, and the Absurdists. As Joseph Conrad wrote: "his passage on this earth was
like that of a horseman riding swiftly into the dawn of a day fated to be short and
without sunshine." (Knapp 4)
One would have to conclude that Stephen Crane was ahead of his time to be able to write
such moving material at such a young age. It was as if he had experienced life in another
time and wrote about it in his. 
Work Cited
Angle, Paul. A Pictorial History of the Civil War Years. New York:
Doubleday, 1967. 
Baily, Thomas A. and David M. Kennedy. The American Pageant.
tenth edition, volume I & 2, Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1994.
Bloom, Harold. ed. Modern Critical Views of Stephan Crane. New York:
Chelsea House Publisher. 1987.
Haycraft, Howard., Stanily J. Kunitz. American Authors 1600-1900: A 
Biographical Dictionary of American Literature. New York: 1938.
Knapp, Bettina Lobowitz. Stephen Crane: Criticism and Interpretation. 
New York: The Ungar Publishing Company, 1987.
Mitchell, Lee Clark, ed. The New Essays on Red Badge of Courage. New
York: Cambridge U P, 1986. 
McPherson, James M., The Atlas of the Civil War. New York:
Macmillan, 1994.
Sweet, Timothy. Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of 
Union. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1990. 
Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore Studies in the Literature of the American 
CivilWar,www.Commonreader.com, 1998.
Bibliography
In paper