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Stephen Crane's Metaphor of Decorum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

George W. Johnson
George W. Johnson*
Affiliation:
Temple University, Philadelphia 22, Penn.
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Extract

To the girl who wanted a “man of fashion” Stephen Crane proclaimed himself “a savage,” “docile … only under great social pressure,” “by inclination a wild shaggy barbarian.” At the same time, however, this rebel against middle class conventionality strove to remain a gentleman, gallant if only to streetwalkers, chivalric to the déclassé, ministerial to reckless youth, and grandly hospitable at Brede Place to friend and stranger alike. While his friends might grumble that he “had no sense of propriety,” Crane, self-conscious and self-deprecatory, tried to be both the isolated Bohemian and “Baron Brede.” Able to breathe only “in the slums or among aristocrats,” as a contemporary remembered him, he seems to have struggled all his life between the appeal of the “wild free son of nature” and the need to find a place in society and tradition. Like his Henry Fleming, he struggled to gain the respect of his fraternity without surrendering his life or his individuality to the “moving box” of tradition; he tried, like his Swede, to make a place for himself as a gentleman without impaling himself on his purchase. This apparent temperamental need for a role both docile and savage was transmuted into the impersonalities of his fiction, in which the fate of the hero—soldier, honey-mooner, outcast, or outlander—is the measure of his ability to establish the grounds for proper conduct. In that transmutation Crane defined himself as an artist; and to pursue a metaphor of decorum through his best stories is to discover anew his view of life and the courage of his response to it.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , June 1963 , pp. 250 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 Stephen Crane's Love Letters to Nellie Crouse, ed. Edwin H. Cady and Lester G. Wells (Syracuse, N. Y., 19S4), pp. 48, 46; reprinted in Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W. Stall-man and Lillian Gilkes (New York, 1960), pp. 114, 111.

2 See Introduction to Love Letters to Nellie Crouse, pp. 2022. Crane's neo-Romantic sensibility, his attitude toward the gentleman, and his celebration of sport were discussed by Edwin H. Cady in his 1960 MLA paper, “Stephen Crane and the ‘Strenuous Life’ ” (General Topics 6: Literature and Society).

3 Thomas Beer, Stephen Crane (New York, 1923), p. 96.

4 John Berryman, Stephen Crane (New York, 1950), p. 240; Lillian Gilkes, Cora Crane (Bloomington, Ind., I960), p. 198.

5 Berryman, p. 16; “Stephen Crane Says: Edwin Markham Is His First Choice for the American Academy,” New York Journal, 31 March 1900, p. 8, quoted by Thomas A. Gulla-son, “New Light on the Crane-Howells Relationship,” New England Quarterly, xxx (September 1957), 392; Gilkes, Cora Crane, p. 113.

6 Responsibilities of the Novelist (Garden City, ?. Y., 1928), p. 105.

7 See Herbert Brown, “The Great American Novel,” AL, vu (March 1935), 1–14; and George Johnson, “Frank Norris and Romance,” AL, xxxni (March 1961), 52–64.

8 The trope of the “game” and its significance to neo-Romanticism were discussed by Edwin Cady in his MLA paper; its use here and throughout my discussion is indebted to that paper.

9 Stephen Crane: Letters, pp. 78,31.

10 Norris, Responsibilities of the Novelist, pp. 207 ff.

11 Beer, p. 226.

12 Stephen Crane: an Omnibus, ed. R. W. Stallman (New York, 1952), pp. 360, 259; where possible and appropriate, subsequent citations of Crane's fiction will be made in parenthetical reference to the pagination of this readily available collection.

13 Beer, p. 46.

14 Ibid., pp. 153, 149; Wounds in the Rain (New York, 1900), pp. 178–189.

15 Beer, p. 197.

16 Omnibus, pp. 187–188.

17 Stephen Crane: Letters, p. 158.

18 See Beer, p. 154.

19 Beer, pp. 113–114.

20 Cf. Black Riders, XLV: “Tradition, thou art for suckling children / Thou art the enlivening milk for babes; / But no meat for men is in thee. / Then— / But, alas, we are all babes.”

21 The Red Badge of Courage and Other Writings, ed. Richard Chase (Boston, 1960), p. 377.

22 Ibid., pp. 329. 361.

23 Cf. the soldier in The Red Badge: “He blanched like one who has come to the edge of a cliff at midnight and is suddenly made aware. There was a revelation” {Omnibus, p. 268).

24 “Stephen Crane from an English Standpoint,” North American Review, CLXXI (August 1900), 242.

25 The Scarlet Letter and Other Tales of the Puritans, ed. Harry Levin (Boston, 1960), p. 154.

26 Beer, p. 195.

27 Berryman, p. 252.

28 Crane's contemporaries often remarked that he wrote his manuscripts without apparent need for revision, a legend which Crane did little to dispel; and Crane himself seems to have adopted a somewhat obsessive stance in refusing to revise published works in subsequent editions.

29 Beer, p. 232.

30 30 Ibid.