1 INTRODUCTION
2 THE HISTORICAL CONFIGURATION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: FROM INDEPENDENCE TO THE CIVIL WAR
2.1 Early colonial period to the War of Independence (1607- 1776)
2.2 The declaration of Independence (1776)
2.3 The birth of a nation
2.4 American imperialism and the Monroe doctrine
2.5 Expansion westwards
2.6 Slavery and the Civil War
3 NOVELS OF REFERENCE: THE SCARLET LETTER; THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
3.1 Literature of the period
3.2 The Scarlet letter
A Biography and works of Nathaniel Hawthorne
B The Scarlet Letter
3.3 The Red Badge of Courage
A Biography and works of Stephen Crane
B The Red Badge of Courage
4 STUDY GUIDE
5 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 INTRODUCTION
The British tried to colonize America twice in the 16th century, but they only succeeded in 1607, when they founded Jamestown. However by general agreement, the Pilgrim Fathers who travelled on the Mayflower were to be the first settlers; they founded Plymouth in 1620.
Two were the main motives to cross the Atlantic: on the one hand, the religious ones which led a group of people, who desired to find a virginal place escaping from the corruption of the Old Continent, to start a new life under the principles of Puritanism. On the other hand, economic reasons influenced a group of people to find new territories to trade.
Thus, from the very beginning, the United States were conformed with two different concepts of life. Those ones who saw America as the holy land, settled in New England, and the ones who saw the New Continent as a land of opportunities and prosperity, settled in Virginia.
During the 18th century, a lot of tensions had emerged between the British government and the American colonies, meanly for the prohibition of trading with other countries in Europe except Britain, limitations to the expansion to the west and an increase of taxes. The punitive response of the British government to this crisis, made the colonies join against the repressor. On 4th July, 1776 a declaration of Independence was signed by Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia. Seven years after the Declaration of Independence, the War of Independence ended with the Treaty of Paris (1783) that recognised the existence of the Federal Republic of the United States.
The outbreak of the Civil War was the result of the different development of North and South. The Southern States based their economy on tobacco and cotton plantations using slaves as labor force. On the other hand, southern society was in good relations with Great Britain from which they bought manufactured products. However, the Northern States based their economy on industry and were reluctant to have commercial relations with Great Britain.
The election of Abraham Lincoln as president was taken as a provocation for the Southern States, and it was the first step to the war. The superiority of the North was decisive to win the war and the reconstruction of the South, which was devastated, was hard.
With regards to literature, two periods may be distinguished: the first one, from the birth of the nation to the Civil War (1860).The second one, from the Civil War onwards.
In the following topic we will study the historical configuration of the United States of America, from the declaration of Independence to the Civil War. Then, we will analyze the birth of the truly American literature and its first exponents, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Stephen Crane.
2 THE HISTORICAL CONFIGURATION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: FROM INDEPENDENCE TO THE CIVIL WAR
2.1 Early colonial period to the War of Independence (1607-1776)
The United States of America was originally inhabited by Indians, but with the coming of Europeans (particularly the Spanish, French, and British) and the Africans they introduced as slaves, the continent underwent a profound transformation. The United States of America is a federal republic composed of 50 states. The first colonists from Britain settled on the East coast of America and formed the thirteen original states of the United States. The Southern states (Virginia, Maryland) were dominated by the large plantation owners who supported slavery and were opposed to the Northern states of New England that were mainly colonised by Puritan merchants.
Puritanism is a religious reform movement of the late 16th and 17th centuries which sought to “purify” the Church of England from remnants of Roman Catholic “popery” in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Puritanism may be defined primarily by the intensity of the religious experience that it fostered. Puritans believed in the doctrine of predestination inherited from Calvinism to produce a sense of themselves as elect spirits chosen by God, that conversion was necessary to redeem one from one’s sinful condition, and that the Holy Spirit rather than reason was the energising instrument of salvation. They sought through church reform to make their lifestyle the pattern for the whole nation. Their efforts to transform the nation led to civil war in England. After Cromwell’s death in 1658, English Puritanism entered a period known as the Great Persecution and to the founding of Puritan colonies in America, particularly in New England with the Massachusetts Bay colony.
2.2 The declaration of the Independence (1776)
On July 4th 1776 the original 13 colonies of North America declared themselves independent of the British Crown due to economic, political and legal reasons. The British had given the monopoly of the trade of certain products to British companies (Navigation Act), making it likely that the American merchants would face bankruptcy. Moreover, several Acts of Parliament imposed heavy taxes (Stamp Act and Tea Act) on the colonies, without the right to representation. This infuriated the colonists and caused rebellion for they felt they were being treated as second class citizens who, in spite of heavy taxes to the British Crown, did not enjoy equal rights of representation in Parliament.
The colonists refused to pay the taxes and they dumped into the water of a whole cargo of tea that had arrived to Boston harbour. This event known as the Boston Tea Party marked the beginning of the American War of Independence. George III decided to suppress the rebellion by force and Parliament passed the “Intolerable Act”. The result was a closer tie between the thirteen original colonies, and on July 4th 1776 congress proclaimed the independence of the United States from the British Crown. Seven years after the Declaration of Independence, the War of Independence ended with the Treaty of Paris (1783) that recognised the existence of the Federal Republic of the United States.
2.3 The birth of a nation
Once the colonies declared themselves independent, it became necessary to bring the 13 states together to form a country with a common identity and policy. The first attempt to unite them was in 1777 with the Articles of Confederation. Failure to link the states to form a country led to the elaboration of the Constitution of 1787 that guaranteed the people’s rights against any tyrannical power. Thomas Jefferson was primarily responsible for this document influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. The application of the Constitution was going to be source of conflict and to bring about the formation of two political tendencies: the Federalists, favouring strong central federal government, and the Republicans, who wanted to preserve strong local government. 1789 George Washington was elected the first President of the United States of America.
2.4 American imperialism and the Monroe doctrine
The Republican Monroe was elected in 1816. His calm and prosperous administration was known as the Era of Good Feelings. The Monroe doctrine defended American neutrality, the United States would not interfere in the internal affairs of or the wars between European countries and in turn opposed European intervention in the American continent. This marked the beginning of American imperialism by establishing an American sphere of influence that was to be termed America’s backyard.
2.5 Expansion westwards
Throughout the 19th century, eastern settlers kept spilling over into the Mississippi valley and beyond, pushing the frontier farther westward. The move westwards played a decisive influence on American civilisation and values. Louisiana was purchased from the French and Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California were obtained from war.
2.6 Slavery and the Civil War
The underlying problem facing America was the fact that in the early 19th century it was a country, not a nation. The major functions of government, those relating to education, transportation, health, public order, etc., were performed on the state or local level. There was little more than a loose allegiance to the government in Washington, a few national institutions such as churches and political parties, and a shared memory of the Founding Fathers of the republic that tied the country together. Within this loosely structured society every section, every state, every locality, every group could pretty much go its own way.
A further issue that divided American society was slavery. Though Jefferson had abolished foreign slave trade in 1808 he did not interfere with internal trade. The growing conflict between North and South was heightened by the condemnation of slavery by the newly elected Republican president Abraham Lincoln in 1860, rejected by the Southern states. The abolition of slavery and the hostility towards the nationalising tendencies in American life led to strong feelings of sectional loyalty and the polarisation of American society.
On December 20th of that year South Carolina was the first state to withdraw from the Union, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. In February 1861, the seven seceding states declared secession and constituted the Confederate States of America, later Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina joined the Confederation. The next four years (1861-1865) the Civil War confronted the forces of the North commanded by General Grant and of the South by General Lee. In 1863, Lincoln abolished slavery and in April 1865 the Southern forces surrendered. Over 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in a war that devastated the economy of the South: plantations were destroyed and fortunes were lost, and deep bitterness and hatred was to last for many years to come. On the other hand, the Union was preserved, the slaves were freed, and Northern prosperity suffered no severe injury. A unified nation with political and religious freedom as well as economic opportunities attracted millions of emigrants from all over Europe and led to a period of prosperity.
3 NOVELS OF REFERENCE: THE SCARLET LETTER; THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
3.1 Literature of the period
The USA solidified as a nation during a period of major cultural changes characterised by the shift from Classicism to Romanticism.
Classicism rested first upon the belief that reason is the dominating characteristic both of nature and of human nature, and that both are governed by fixed, unchanging laws.
Romanticism in contrast, placed central importance upon the emotions and upon the individual. For Romantic writers reason, though important, was not the only inner perception of truth, which is independent of reason. The emphasis of Romanticism upon the emotions, upon intuition and upon the individual encouraged the exploration and the expression of the writers most private inner being. It soon became apparent that this interior world of intense feelings is not ruled by reason, and an interest in the irrational depths of human nature became characteristic of Romanticism. The greatest achievements in psychological literature were reserved for later writers: the Transcendentalists.
Transcendentalism was already a genuinely American movement which took many of its ideas from Romanticism. Armed with their perception of the universal soul transcendentalist writers such as Thoreau and Emerson brought new intensity to the Romantic views of nature and self. Since nature shares with humanity in the universal soul that permeates all being, no part of the natural world could be trivial or insignificant. The study of nature was important as a means of self-knowledge. Transcendentalist writers delved deep into the mysteries of human personality, especially its irrational elements.
But the mid 19th century was the period known as the American Renaissance. This was the period of the first generation of great American writers, such as Poe, Hawthorne and Melville in narrative and Walt Whitman in poetry. Each of them developed distinctive styles that made them sometimes unpopular at the time, but very much regarded by later literary critics.
In the later part of the century new movements arose such as Realism and Naturalism. Naturalism stands partly from the Enlightenment in its denial of the supernatural and its preoccupation with science, but unlike the Enlightenment it negates the belief in man’s salvation through reason. Naturalism has been defined as an extreme kind of realism, one that does not simply pursue truth wherever the search may lead, but that begins with a view of the universe and our place in it and imposes it on literary works. The naturalist writer sees human beings as creatures that are acted upon by nature, the result of the forces of heredity and environment. Two factors helped the creation of Naturalism: the growth of Darwinism and the scientific attitude towards society. Its origin can be found in France with Balzac and Flaubert. Human beings, like animals, are the product of their environment and they develop individual characteristics according to the life around them. Its transplanting to the USA took place in the last decade of the 19th century. The European writer who influenced the American naturalists most was the French novelist Emile Zola, who wrote a series of novels showing how heredity traits influenced the lives of the members of one family. The most highly regarded American naturalistic writers are Dreiser, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane. The reasons for the turning into Naturalism were Calvinism and the despair towards industrialisation, that had workers living in terrible conditions which created pessimism and despair. The general characteristics of Naturalism were objectivity, frankness, determinism, pessimism, strong characters of marked animal or neurotic character and reaction against constricting morality.
Authors such as Mark Twain, Hawthorne, Henry James, Poe, Crane, etc. will open new ways for the American literature of the next century. Hawthorne will contribute with his sense of building a novel and the complexity of psychology of characters; on the other hand Crane will inaugurate the so-called laconic school of post-first world war writers such as Hemingway or Farrell and their loss of romantic spirit of war novels.
3.2 The Scarlet Letter
A Biography and works of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Novelist and short story writer, a central figure in the American Renaissance. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts. His father, Nathaniel Hathorne, was a sea captain and descendent of John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. He died when the young Nathaniel was four year old. Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne, his mother, withdrew to a life of seclusion, which she maintained till her death. From Salem the family moved to Maine, where Hawthorne was educated at the Bowdoin College (1821-24). In the school among his friends were Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, who became the 14th president of the U.S.
Between the years 1825 and 1836, Hawthorne worked as a writer and contributor to periodicals. Among Hawthorne’s friends was John L. O’Sullivan, whose magazine the Democratic Review published two dozen stories by him. According to an anecdote, Hawthorne burned his first short-story collection, Seven Tales of My Native Land, after publishers rejected it. Hawthorne’s first novel, Fanshawe (1828), appeared anonymously at his own expense. The work was based on his college life. It did not receive much attention and the author burned the unsold copies. However, the book initiated a friendship between Hawthorne and the publisher Samuel Goodrich. He edited in 1836 the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in Boston, and compiled in 1837 Peter Parley´s Universal History for children. In was followed by a series of books for children, Grandfather´s Chair (1841), Famous Old People (1841), Liberty Tree (1841), and Biographical Stories for Children (1842).
Hawthorne’s second, expanded edition of Twice-Told Tales (1837), was praised by Edgar Allan Poe in Graham’s Magazine. Among Hawthorne’s most widely anthologized stories are Young Goodman Brown (1835), originally published in the New-England Magazine, The Birthmark (1843), published in Pioneer, and Rappacini’s Daughter (1844), which first appeared in Democratic Review, and was collected in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). Young Goodman Brown, also included in this collection, is an allegorical tale, in which Hawthorne touches many of his favourite themes, such as hypocrisy, witchcraft, the Puritan guilt, and the sins of fathers. The protagonist, a young man, is from Salem. Against the wishes of his wife, named Faith, he sets off on a journey through the dark woods, and returns home a changed man, disillusioned after nightmarish experiences.
In 1842 Hawthorne became friends with the Transcendentalists in Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who also drew on the Puritan legacy. However, generally he did not have much confidence in intellectuals and artists, and eventually he had to admit, that “the treasure of intellectual gold” did not provide food for his family. In 1842 Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody, an active participant in the Transcendentalist movement. Only the bride’s family attended the wedding. Hawthorne settled with Sophia first in Concord, but a growing family and mounting debts compelled their return to Salem. Hawthorne was unable to earn a living as a writer and in 1846 he was appointed surveyor of the Port of Salem. The influence of this cultural movement was very important in the literary career of Hawthorne. One of the most important results of Transcendentalism was to stimulate the creative imagination of those who most profoundly opposed its doctrines. Hawthorne and Melville, the two greatest writers of the American Renaissance, recognised the revolutionary power of transcendentalist ideas and both responded, not just by criticising them, but by finding in their dissent a means of defining their own perceptions of life. Hawthorne found both in nature and in human nature radical contradictions not accounted for in Transcendentalist philosophy that humanity was godlike and evil non-existence. He saw life in its tragic dimension: the unbridgeable gap between human motives. To Hawthorne evil was very real. The doctrine of original sin, so important to his Puritan ancestors, was never very far from his view of life. He saw evil as a force that leaves its mark on generation after generation, and in his stories he traces the effects of its corrupting presence. The mysteries of the human heart and the question of human evil are the true subjects of Hawthorn’s art. He found in humanity a strange mixture of will and desire, an “uneven balance” opposed to transcendentalist optimism. In exploring the human spirit, they sought a clear sense of the American actuality and as America approached the terrible catastrophe of civil war the truth seemed closer to the sombre spirit of Hawthorn than to the first hopefulness of the Transcendentalists.
The Scarlet Letter was a critical and popular success. The illicit love affair of Hester Prynne with the Reverend Arhur Dimmesdale and the birth of their child Pearl, takes place before the book opens. In Puritan New England, Hester, the mother of an illegitimate child, wears the scarlet A (for adulteress, named in the book by this initial) for years rather than reveal that her lover was the saintly young village minister. Her husband, Roger Chillingworth, proceeds to torment the guiltstricken man, who confesses his adultery before dying in Hester’s arms. Hester plans to take her daughter Pearl to Europe to begin a new life. Hester Prynne has been seen as a pioneer feminist in the line from Anne Hutchinson to Margaret Fuller, a classic nurturer, a sexually autonomous woman, and an American equivalent of Anna Karenina. The influence of the novel is apparent in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), and in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930).
Hawthorne was one of the first American writers to explore the hidden motivations of his characters. Among his allegorical stories is The Artist of the Beautiful (1844) in which his protagonist creates an insect, perhaps a steam-driven butterfly.
The Custom-House sketch, prefatory to The Scarlet Letter, was based partly on his experiences in Salem. The novel, which appeared in 1850, told a story of the earliest victims of Puritan obsession and spiritual intolerance. Again the central theme is the effects of guilt and anxiety. Hawthorne’s picture of the sin-obsessed Puritans has subsequently been criticized-they were less extreme than presented in the works of Hawthorne, Arthur Miller, Steven King, and many others. The House of the Seven Gables was published the following year. The story is based on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne’s own family by a woman, who was condemned to death during the Salem witchcraft trials. The curse is mirrored in the decay of the Pyncheons’ seven-gabled mansion. Finally the descendant of the killed woman marries a young niece of the family, and the hereditary sin ends.
The Blithedale Romance (1852), set in a utopian New England community, examines the flaws inherent in practical utopianism. Hawthorne had earlier invested and lived in the Brook Farm Commune, West Roxbury. This led to speculations, that the doomed heroine was a portrait of the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. During this productive period Hawthorne also established a warm friendship with Herman Melville, who dedicated Moby-Dick to him.
In 1853 Franklin Pierce became President. Hawthorne, who had written a campaign biography for him, was appointed as consul in Liverpool, England. He lived there for four years, and then spent a year and half in Italy writing The Marble Faun (1860), a story about the conflict between innocence and guilt. It was his last completed novel. In his Concord home, The Wayside, he wrote the essays contained in Our Old Home (1863). Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, N.H. on a trip to the mountains with his friend Franklin Pierce. After his death, Sophia Hawthorne edited and published his notebooks. Modern editions of these works include many of the sections which she cut out or altered. The author’s son Julian was convicted in 1912 of defrauding the public.
B The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter (published in 1850) was Hawthorne’s first novel. For some years prior to its composition he had been primarily a writer of short stories. In every thing but in length, it still bears more resemblance to his short stories than to most other novels of his day. Certainly in its unity and concentration it shows the effect of his work in shorter fiction. It is a sombre romance of conscience and the tragic consequences of concealed guilt set in the Puritan Boston during the mid-17th century.
An introductory essay describes the author’s experiences as an official of the Salem Customs House, and his discovery of a scarlet cloth letter and documents relating the story of Hester, regarded by some to be the first female protagonist of American literature. The novel tells how an aged English scholar sends his young wife, Hester Prynne, to establish their home in Boston. When he arrives two years later, he finds her in the scaffold with her illegitimate child in her arms. She refuses to name her lover and is sentenced by the Puritan society of the time to wear a scarlet letter “A”, signifying “Adulteress”, as a token of her sin. The husband conceals his identity, with the false name of Roger Chillingworth (indicative of his character) and he seeks to discover Hester’s lover disguised as a doctor. Hester, a woman of strong, independent nature, in her ostracism becomes sympathetic with other unfortunates, and her works of mercy gradually win her the respect of her neighbours. Chilingworth discovers that the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, a revered, seemingly saintly young minister, is the father of Hester’s beautiful, mischievous child, Pearl. Dimmesdale, has struggled for years with his burden of hidden guilt, in spite of his penance his pride prevents him from publicly confessing his guilt, and is therefore tortured by his conscience. Chillingworth’s obsession with his cruel search, ruins his life and he becomes a morally degraded maniac, finally he hangs himself. Hester wishes her lover to flee with her to Europe, but he refuses the plan as a temptation from the Devil, and eventually he confesses publicly his sin on the same scaffold Hester had once been placed. He dies in her arms, a man broken by his concealed guilt, but Hester lives on, triumphant over her sin because she openly confessed it, to devote herself to assuring a happy life in Europe for Pearl, and helping others in misfortune.
There are only four characters in the book and the reader is introduced to all four within the first ten pages of the novel, and he is never allowed to lose sight of any one of them from that point on to the concluding chapter, where Hawthorne indicates their eventual fate. Not only are the characters few, but they are also very closely related, through the sin which affects the lives of all four. Hawthorne’s method of considering all four in relation to that sin and developing them according to the effects of the sin gives the novel an even tighter unity.
Hawthorne’s vocabulary was wide and controlled. Writing always novel at the formal level, he chose his words with sharp sense of precise meaning and a keen ear for euphony or pleasant sound. The language is clean, precise and effective, and it seldom overly ornate.
Hawthorne’s style is also noteworthy for his frequent use of images. Metaphors and similes abound in the book, most of them from the red rose in the opening chapter to the red and black shield of his final sentence. It is in his use of symbols that Hawthorne has made one of his most distinctive and significant contributions to the growth of American fiction. Indeed, this book is regarded as the first symbolic novel to be written in the USA.
Several of his most obvious symbols are of the more obvious and superficial type. In the first chapter, for example, he describes the prison so as to make it properly represent “the black flower of civilised society”. He is there using the prison building to represent the crime and the punishment which are aspects of civilised life.
More impressive are the symbols which he sustains through the novel, allowing them to grow and to take on various appearances and meanings as the book progresses.
Among such symbols is the letter A itself.
In its initial form, as a red cloth letter standing for the sin of adultery, but Hawthorne makes much more of it before the book ends. The letter appears in a variety of forms and places. It is the elaborately gold-embroidered weight on Hester’s heart at which Pearl throws wild flowers in chapter VI. As magnified in the armour breastplate of Governor Bellingham it is seen “in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance”.
Nevertheless, not only does the A appear in various forms, it also acquires a variety of meanings. Even as the original mark of adultery, the scarlet letter has different personal meanings to the various characters: to the Puritan community it is a mark of just punishment; to Hester, a device of unjust humiliation; do Dimmesdale, a piercing reminder of his own guilt; to Chillingworth, a spur to the quest for revenge; to Pearl, a bright and mysterious curiosity.
But the letter is also taken to stand for things other than adultery: “Angel” when it appears in the sky in the night of Governor Winthorp’s death, “Able” when, years after her humiliation on the scaffold, Hester has won some respect from the Puritans.
Many other sustained symbols in the novel lie either in the setting or in the characters.
The scaffold not only is a symbol of the stern Puritan code but also becomes a symbol for open acknowledgement of personal sin. It is the place to which Dimmesdale knows he must go for atonement, the only place where he can escape the grasp of Chillingworth, or of the devil.
Night is used as a symbol of concealment, and day for exposure.
The sun is also used as a symbol of untroubled, guiltless happiness, or the approval of God and nature. The sun shines on Pearl, even in the forest, and she seems to absorb and retain it, but the sun flees from Hester and from the mark of sin on her breast.
The forest itself is symbolic in a variety of ways. As a place where the witches gather, where souls are signed away to the devil, it is symbolic of the world of darkness and evil. As a place where Pearl can run and play freely, a friend of the animals and the wild flowers, and where even Hester can throw away her letter, let down her hair and become a woman, it is symbolic of a natural world governed by natural laws as opposed to the artificial community with its man made Puritan laws.
Perhaps the most revealing display of symbolism lies in the use of characters.
The minor characters are almost purely symbolic. The Puritan worlds of church, state and witchcraft are personified in the figures of the Reverend Mr. Wilson, Governor Bellingham and Mistress Hibbins. It is interesting to note that Hawthorne mentions all three in connection with each of the scaffold scenes. The groups of unnamed sombre and self-righteous Puritans in the market place are representative of Puritanism generally, even down to the detail of the gentle and young wife who saves Hawthorne’s condemnation of the Puritans from being a complete one.
It is, however, in the four major characters that Hawthorne’s powers as a symbolist are brought into fullest play. Each of them is employed to convey a certain view of sin in its effects on the human heart. And one of them, Pearl, is almost pure symbol, perhaps the most striking symbol that Hawthorne ever created.
3.3 The Red Badge of Courage
A Biography and works of Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, as the 14th child of a Methodist minister Jonathan Townley Crane and his wife Mary Helen Peck Crane. Crane started to write stories at the age of eight; at 16 he was writing articles for the New York Tribune. Both of his parents did some writing and two of his brothers became newspapermen. His mother was active in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and published fiction. His first article, on the explorer Henry M. Stanley, appeared in 1890 in Villette. Crane studied at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. After his mother’s death in 1890- his father had died earlier-Crane moved to New York. He worked as a free-lance writer and journalist for the Bachellor-Johnson newspaper syndicate. While supporting himself by his writings, he lived among the poor in the Bowery slums to research his first novel, Maggie: a Girl of the Streets. It was a milestone in the development of literary naturalism. At its appearance in 1893 Crane was just twenty-one. His manuscript was turned down by the publishers, who considered its realism too “ugly”. Crane had to print the book at his own expense, borrowing the money from his brother. In its inscription Crane warned that “it is inevitable that you be greatly shocked by this book but continue, please, with all possible courage to the end.” The story of the descent of a slum girl in turn-of-the-century New York into prostitution was first published under a pseudonym. Maggie was generally ignored by readers but it won the admiration of other realist writers.
Crane’s faithfulness to accuracy of details led him once to dress up as a tramp and spend the night in a flophouse. This produced the sketch Experiment in Misery in 1894. Crane’s work also inspired other writers, such as Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1944), to examine the Lower East Side.
Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. It has been called the first modern war novel. Henry Fleming enrolls as a soldier in the Union army. He has dreamed of battles and glory all his life, but his expectations are shattered in his encounter with the enemy when he witnesses the chaos on the battle field and starts to fear that the regiment was leaving him behind. He flees from the battle. However he returns to the lines and a deserter hits him with a gun. Henry gets a head wound. Marked by the “red badge” in the evening he falls asleep with his comrades. Next day he feels sore and stiff from his experiences, but in his hatred starts to shoot blindly at the enemy. Henry wants to die in the battle to prove the officer is wrong. He tries to seize the enemy flag, but his friend is faster and wrenches it free from the hands of the dying colour bearer. He is filled with guilt when he remembers the tattered soldier whom he had deserted. Henry has matured after the final battle and he understands better his strengths and weaknesses.
Crane’s collection of poems, The Black Ride, which appeared also in 1895, has much in common with Emily Dickinson’s simple, stripped style. Crane’s rising fame brought him better reporting assignments and he sought experiences as a war correspondent in combat areas. Crane travelled to Greece, Cuba, Texas and Mexico, reporting mostly on war events. His short story, The Open Boat, is based on a true experience, when his ship, a coal-burning tug heavy with ammunition and machetes, sank on the journey to Cuba in 1896. With a small party of other passengers, Crane spent several days drifting in a dinghy off the coast of Florida before being rescued. This experience impaired his health permanently. In the story, originally published in Scribner’s Magazine in June 1897, Crane focused on four men, who eventually decide to swim for shore.
When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.
In Greece Crane wrote about the Greco-Turkish War, settling in 1898 in Sussex, England, where he lived with the author Cora Taylor, who was the owner of the Hotel de Dream, a well-known Jacksonville sporting house. In England Crane became friends with Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and Henry James. The Blue Hotel (1898), Crane’s much anthologized short story, was first published serially in Collier’s Weekly. Swede, a nervous New Yorker, fascinated by tales of the Wild West, enters Pat Scully’s hotel in Fort Romper, Nebraska; the hotel is a haven of rest in a blizzard. Swede meets Mr. Blanc from the East, and a reserved cowboy. He drinks heavily and beats Scully’s son, Johnnie, after accusing him of cheating at cards. When the Swede attacks another hotel customer, he is stabbed and killed. Several months later Mr. Blanc, feeling responsible for the death, confesses that Johnnie indeed cheated. Like Emile Zola (1840-1902) in France, Crane used realism – or naturalism – as a method of exposing social ills, as in George´s Mother (1896), which explored life in the Bowery. Crane himself did not much like Zola. In 1899 Active Service appeared, which was based on the Greco-Turkish War.
In 1899 Crane returned to Cuba, to cover the Spanish-American War. Due to poor health he was obliged to return to England. There he rented with Cora a cold and wet 14th-century Sussex estate, called Brede Place. Crane died on June 5, 1900 at Badenweiler in Germany of tuberculosis, that was worsened by malarial fever he had caught in Cuba. He was 28-his career has lasted only eight years. Crane’s posthumous publications include the sketches and stories from his life as a correspondent in Wounds in the Rain (1900) and Whilomville Stories (1900), depicting a childhood in a small state. After Crane’s death his work was neglected for many years until such writers as Amy Lowell and Willa Cather brought it again to public attention. Although Crane introduced realism into American literature, his use of symbolism also gave his work a romantic quality.
B The Red Badge of Courage
The Red Badge of Courage has been described ‘a psychological portrait of fear’. The Battle of Chancellorsville is the scene for the story of Crane’s hero, Henry Fleming, an ordinary inexperienced soldier who undergoes a baptism of fire surviving fear, cowardice and vainglory, to discover courage, humility and even wisdom in the confusion of the battle.
He begins with the state of mind of a raw recruit anxious to go into battle to show his patriotism and prove himself a hero. In the first day of battle he is suddenly thrust into the slaughter of battle. Overcome by unthinking fear he drops his rifle and runs from the battlefield. He is ashamed at the cowardice of his desertion when he joins the wounded. More dazzled and helpless than the day before, Henry suddenly has a revelation: he discovers a new source of immunity from the mounting terrors of death: the flag. He fights frantically and then seizes the regiment’s colours in the charge that re-establishes its reputation. Towards the end of the book, Henry has constructed his own mental defences against fear and so has learned how to control and master it. In the final chapter the enemy has departed, and the battle is over, and he emerges steady, quiet, and truly courageous.
Crane is not only concerned with personal reaction to fear, but also interested in the spectacle of war, that he describes with the impressionistic responsiveness of a painter or a poet: a wound is a ‘red badge’, fear is a ‘red and green monster’. Crane acknowledged that he was attempting in words what impressionists were doing with paint: to capture discrete moments in sudden flashes of illumination to record life’s impact on the senses. In this book Crane affirms his view that it is a war without romance, nobody wins, all is confusion.
The Red Badge of Courage has been identified as an expression of naturalism. The protagonist is finally relieved of being part of a “blue demonstration” and thrown into the “furnace” of battle and his responses are alarmingly brought to scale. There is a crescendo of “effects”. He is hammered by blows that seem never to cease, and the key to this madness between men of the same country, of the same race, probably of the same opinions, is that everything seems specifically aimed at the protagonist. Understandably feeling himself guiltless, he cannot understand why the universe onto which he projects all his sensations seems indifferent to him.
Crane’s passion as an artist is to set up a “situation”, seemingly any situation that can show people responding to it. It is the intensity of the response that fascinates Crane, life is an explosion of movement rapidly consumed, their response to the “environment”. He submitted the youth, as the main character is usually named, to war as if war was another example of the scientific psychology just coming in during the 90’s.
The youth is neither better nor worse than any other green soldier exposed to the boredom, the uncertainty, and suddenly the extreme peril of war. Henry Fleming enlists as hundreds of thousands of other farm boys enlisted, in order to see the war; he is wept over and prayed over by a mother of standard piety who would like to think that her son is an exception (a standard mistake). Until he is caught up in hard fighting, the youth sees nothing and says nothing that is outside the general wisdom of the group. He is silly, boastful, ignorant like his mates, knows nothing except what is passed along by them. In his greenness and youthful ignorance he exists as mockery of the hopes and delusions common to soldiers before battle.
The youth is also accompanied by a “certain tall soldier”. Crane robs the characters of personality, they come at the reader as a sequence of dissociated traits. The style is vaguely unsettling. The youth has no personality, no history, no career outside his reflex responses. He is not only the subject of Crane’s mocking enquiry, he is all too much what Crane had come to think of as the average man caught up in a situation.
What goes on in The Red Badge of Courage is a classic end of the century behaviourism. Crane is generally objective, persistent in his irony. The youth is put through every possible test. In actual fighting he is shown, like his fellows, to have no control over his actions, and runs away. But he is finally able to rejoin his outfit, to have the minor head wound he receives in a scuffle with a retreating soldier of his own comrades and seizes the enemy’s flag in the final charge. His most significant experiences are of seeing other men dead or dying. His friend the “tall soldier” becomes “the spectral soldier” when, fatally wounded, he staggers in a spasmodic dance before he falls. Men in battle do transfer their emotions to the guns, the weather, the surrounding landscape. Power has passed from men to their instruments. Crane’s knowingly style dominates the novel, and there are only a few snatches of folksy dialogue in which the soldiers speak for themselves. Once the fighting breaks out and the youth realises to this horror that he is entirely on his own, the sense of fear and the entrapment is so graphic, mounts so cruelly, that the youth in his sensation clearly speaks for Crane as much as Crane does for him. Fear not only maddens Henry Fleming, it occupies him. Everything else is blotted out as “bullets began to whistle among the branches and nip at the trees … It was as if a thousand axes, wee and invisible, were being wielded”.
Crane’s grip on his hero does not relent in the famous passage in which the regiment’s charge has re-established its reputation and the youth finds that he has survived to triumph over his great fear. His coolness about the youth, not unsympathetic but hardly respectful, persists to the end. We can see why Crane thought of his novel as an experiment, since the seeming trivialisation of death can only be provisional, a shock effect in Crane’s bantering style. As a novelist he did not have to say, as Crane the poet did, that war is man’s fate, that war is the great negative of freedom and hope. To Crane, any self at war, its possibilities mocked by war, must be a clinical experience, an ordeal, a subject for enquiry. War, the red animal, the blood-swollen god, is in the exact nature of things, and just now, man’s definitive experience.
This novel is specially reputed for the use of imagery. This imagery often brings in an ironic element.
The careful descriptions of scenery and climate are intended to create a tone matching that of the hero’s mind at any given moment. In this kind of environmental symbolism, the ideas will be implicit in the action and the setting.
Crane uses colours almost compulsively. In the very first paragraph the sun rises and turns the landscape from brawn to green. At night hostile campfires gleam like red eyes, the army is a blue demonstration, the uniform of the dead soldier has faded to a sick-green. Towards the end of the book, when Henry is exhilarated and bold in the final fighting, pieces of the battleground are fought over as if they were “gold thrones or pearl bedsteads” (colours again taken from the popular impression of the heavenly city) and the battle flags fly “like crimson foam”, setting the triumphant tone of the final salvation.
Some of the most graphic images in The Red Badge are images of war as an athletic contest, such as “the two bodies of troops exchanged blows in the manner of a pair of boxers”. Crane’s heart was touched by war as “a peculiar exciting kind of sport”.
Crane’s similes likening the enraged contestants to reptiles and dragons mock the youth’s fear as much as Crane’s many clinical details pin him down.
The individual caught up in the melee is credited with “the acute exasperation of a pestered animal, a well-meaning cow worried by dogs”. Crane’s driving style alone lifts, in the unnerving crescendo of battle, the totally isolated and fear maddened youth into primitive connection with his surroundings. And Crane’s language in the ecstasy of his genius takes over completely when, exactly halfway through the book, the battle goes mad.
A final hallmark of the book is its realism, which Crane achieved by recording his soldiers’ talk in what he considered a reproduction of Eastern natural speech. And in order to deglamourise war, he has the generals in their occasional appearances talk in the same rural speech as the soldiers, which is historically correct, as well as artistically satisfying.
4 STUDY GUIDE
The first successful English colony was established in 1607, on the James River at Jamestown. It languished for decades until a new wave of settlers arrived in the late 17th century and set up commercial agriculture based on tobacco.
The thirteen colonies that began a rebellion against British rule in 1775 and proclaimed their independence in 1776 did so without having attained the legal status of statehood. Upon completing this process in 1777, they subsequently constituted the first thirteen states of the United States of America, which became a nation-state in 1781 with the ratification of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.
The United States defeated Great Britain with help from France and Spain in the American Revolutionary War. The new nation was dedicated to principles of republicanism, which emphasized civic duty and a fear of corruption and hereditary aristocracy. The structure of the national government was profoundly changed on March 4, 1789, when the people replaced the Articles with the United States Constitution. The new government reflected a radical break from the normative governmental structures of the time, favoring representative, elective government with a weak executive, rather than the existing monarchical structures common within the western traditions of the time. The system of republicanism borrowed heavily from Enlightenment Age ideas and classical western philosophy in that a primacy was placed upon individual liberty and upon constraining the power of government through division of powers and a system of checks and balances.
The underlying problem facing America was the fact that in the early 19th century it was a country, not a nation. The major functions of government, those relating to education, transportation, health, public order, etc., were performed on the state or local level. There was little more than a loose allegiance to the government in Washington, a few national institutions such as churches and political parties, and a shared memory of the Founding Fathers of the republic that tied the country together. Within this loosely structured society every section, every state, every locality, every group could pretty much go its own way.
A further issue that divided American society was slavery. Though Jefferson had abolished foreign slave trade in 1808 he did not interfere with internal trade. The growing conflict between North and South was heightened by the condemnation of slavery by the newly elected Republican president Abraham Lincoln in 1860, rejected by the Southern states. The abolition of slavery and the hostility towards the nationalising tendencies in American life led to strong feelings of sectional loyalty and the polarisation of American society.
On December 20th of that year South Carolina was the first state to withdraw from the Union, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. In February 1861, the seven seceding states declared secession and constituted the Confederate States of America, later Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina joined the Confederation. The next four years (1861-1865) the Civil War confronted the forces of the North commanded by General Grant and of the South by General Lee. In 1863, Lincoln abolished slavery and in April 1865 the Southern forces surrendered.
America is said to be find itself after the two tragic events analysed, that is, the Independence war and the Civil war. The same also happened with regards to culture and especially to literature, where the new country split up with the simple imitation of models of the old continent and created its own ones.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born at the beginning of the 19th century (1804-64) in Salem, Massachusetts, the scene of the famous witchcraft trials of 1692. Hawthorne belonged to a prominent Puritan family, and his great-great grandfather was one of the judges at the trials. This was going to bring about Hawthorne’s deep sense of guilt and sin, recurring themes in his works. Although Hawthorne wrote several tales which brought him recognition such as Fanshawe, Blithedale Romance or Twice Told Tales, he is perhaps best known for The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
The Scarlet Letter was a critical and popular success. The illicit love affair of Hester Prynne with the Reverend Arhur Dimmesdale and the birth of their child Pearl, takes place before the book opens. In Puritan New England, Hester, the mother of an illegitimate child, wears the scarlet A (for adulteress, named in the book by this initial) for years rather than reveal that her lover was the saintly young village minister. Her husband, Roger Chillingworth, proceeds to torment the guiltstricken man, who confesses his adultery before dying in Hester’s arms. Hester plans to take her daughter Pearl to Europe to begin a new life. Hawthorne’s style is also noteworthy for his frequent use of images. Metaphors and similes abound in the book, most of them from the red rose in the opening chapter to the red and black shield of his final sentence. It is in his use of symbols that Hawthorne has made one of his most distinctive and significant contributions to the growth of American fiction. Indeed, this book is regarded as the first symbolic novel to be written in the USA.
Several of his most obvious symbols are of the more obvious and superficial type. In the first chapter, for example, he describes the prison so as to make it properly represent “the black flower of civilised society”. He is there using the prison building to represent the crime and the punishment which are aspects of civilised life.
More impressive are the symbols which he sustains through the novel, allowing them to grow and to take on various appearances and meanings as the book progresses. Among such symbols is the letter A itself, which stands for the duality “America” / “Adultery”.
Stephen Crane was born in Newark, NJ. After graduating at Syracuse he went to live in New York where explored the slums, which gave him the material for his novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), so shocking that he published it under a pseudonym and at his own expense. It would not be until The Red Badge of Courage in 1895 that he acquired fame. It has been suggested that Crane acquired his fascination for the adventures of war at the Clavelack military academy, where he heard the reminiscences of his history teacher. Though Crane had not lived through any war, his work was highly praised by many war veterans, who were amazed at his capacity to imagine and reproduce the sense of actual combat. The Red Badge of Courage brought him reputation as a war writer and the urge to see for himself whether he had guessed right when he wrote about it. This fascination with death and danger took him to Greece and Cuba as a war correspondent. He then married and settled in London, where he was to meet his compatriot Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
He also wrote short stories such as The Blue Hotel, Whilomville Stories and using the structure of a novel with the war theme The Open Boat and The Little Regiment.
His brief poetic production, Wounds in the Rain, was very well considered by the literary criticism, and nowadays he is regarded as one of the first steps after Emily Dickinson toward modern poetry.
The Red Badge of Courage has been described ‘a psychological portrait of fear’. The Battle of Chancellorsville is the scene for the story of Crane’s hero, Henry Fleming, an ordinary inexperienced soldier who undergoes a baptism of fire surviving fear, cowardice and vainglory, to discover courage, humility and even wisdom in the confusion of the battle.
Crane’s unromanticized war novel The Red Badge of Courage depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. It has been called the first modern war novel. In England readers believed that the book was written by a veteran soldier-the text was so believable. Crane dismissed this theory by saying that he got his ideas from the football field. The story is set during the American Civil War. Henry Fleming enrolls as a soldier in the Union army. He has dreamed of battles and glory all his life, but his expectations are shattered in his encounter with the enemy when he witnesses the chaos on the battle field and starts to fear that the regiment was leaving him behind. He flees from the battle.
Henry wanders into a thick wood, and meets a group of wounded men. He tries to help a tall soldier, who dies, and leaves a tattered soldier on a field. He returns to the lines and a deserter hits him with a gun. Henry gets a head wound. Marked by the “red badge” in the evening he falls asleep with his comrades. Next day he feels sore and stiff from his experiences, but in his hatred starts to shoot blindly at the enemy. In the heat of the battle, he picks up the regiment’s flag with his friend when it falls from the colour sergeant’s hands. Henry wants to die in the battle to prove the officer is wrong. He tries to seize the enemy flag, but his friend is faster and wrenches it free from the hands of the dying colour bearer. He is filled with guilt when he remembers the tattered soldier whom he had deserted. Following the conventions of a bildungsroman, Henry has matured after the final battle and he understands better his strengths and weaknesses.
5 BIBLIOGRAPHY
New Essays on “The Scarlet Letter,” ed. by Michael J. Colacurcio (1985);
Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. by Harold Bloom (1986);
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Man, His Tales and Romances by Edward Wagenknecht (1989);
Nathaniel Hawthorne by Charles Swann (1991);
Hawthorne‘s Narrative Strategies by Michael Dunne (1995);
Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple (2003
Stephen Crane by Edwin Harrison Cady (1980);
Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane by Michael Fried (1988);
Red Badge of Courage: Redefining the Hero by Donald B. Gibson (1988);
The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane 1871-1900 by Stanley Wertheim, Paul Sorrentino (1994);
The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane by Patrick K. Dooley (1994);
Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature by Michael Robertson (1997);
Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane by Linda H. Davis (1998);
Readings on Stephen Crane, ed. by Bonnie Szumski (1998);
Understanding The Red Badge of Courage by Claudia D. Johnson (1998) .