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... ver been guessed before" (Weatherford, 116). Like Wyndham before him, who had compared the novel to a monodrama presented in the "theatre" of war, Frederic emphasized the novel's visual aspects and its radical reduction in point of view and narrative scope. "We do not know, or seek to know... anything...
except what, staring through the eyes of Henry Fleming, we are permitted to see" (117). Red Badge was a "tremendously effective battle painting; " the trial of a soldier in war, he maintained, "seems never to have been painted as well before" (118). Henry's actions seemed the actions of the readers' own minds. But later in his review Frederic made a more suggestive assessment. Acknowledging that battle painters have always depicted horses in motion "not as they actually move, but as it has been agreed by numberless generations of draughts men to say that they move, " Frederic held that Crane's novel shatters such conventions. "At last, along comes a Muy bridge [American photographer who specialised in pictures of animals in motion], with his instantaneous camera, and shows that the real motion is entirely different. " Red Badge is remarkable for its abandonment of painterly conventions and conveyance of a "photographic revelation. " Frederic concludes that the authenticity of Crane's vision is a "novel force" which may do other "remarkable things" (119). This intelligently enthusiastic review of the novel did much to focus international attention on the relatively unknown Crane.
The two men became friends but remained literary rivals: Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware outsold Red Badge in 1896. THE DIAL CONTROVERSY One of the most notable features of Red Badge's reception in America is the controversy about Crane's patriotism that raged in the pages of the Dial, a magazine owned by the conservative General Alexander C. McClurg < mcclurg. html> . The outspoken McClurg, who had risen to the rank of Brigadier-General in the Northern Army, attacked Red Badge for portraying a Union soldier as a coward. Although Dial editor William Morton Payne < dial.
html> had already made evident the magazine's disapproval of Red Badge, McClurg maintained that Payne's assessment had not been unfavorable enough. Criticizing those English and American reviewers who had praised Red Badge, 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 (15). Such books, McClurg finished, should never be allowed to be published in America. The first response to General McClurg's broadside came in a letter from J. L.
Onderdonk < do. html> , who, expressing his agreement with McClurg's position, ridiculed Red Badge as a "literary absurdity. " In the same issue of the Dial, Ripley Hitchcock < appleton. html> writes to the editors on behalf of the publishers of the novel, D. Appleton & Co.
In an understated tone which contrasts pointedly with McClurg's heated prose, Hitchcock points out and corrects some of the General's mistakes while reminding readers of the numerous favorable notices garnered by the novel. English critic Sydney Brooks < brooks 2. html> , who had earlier praised Red Badge in the Saturday Review < brooks. html> , wrote to the Dial in defense of Crane's novel.
Dismissing McClurg's incendiary speculations about English opinion of the novel as "misjudged patriotism and bad criticism, " Brooks rightly points out that McClurg's notion of literary standards constituted a form of censorship which would allow only the most celebratory accounts of American life to be published (16). The good-natured good sense of Brooks' letter ended the Dial controversy. JOSEPH CONRAD REMEMBERS A quarter-century after Crane's death, Joseph Conrad < conrad. html> remembered in Last Essays (1926) that the appearance of Red Badge had been "one of the most enduring memories of my literary life. " Calling Crane "non-comparable" as an artist, Conrad notes sorrowfully that Crane's life bore a marked parallel with that of Red Badge's "tattered soldier": "it was his fate, too, to fall early in the fray. " Today, Crane's critical reputation remains strong, and a resurgence of attention to literary realism -- New Essays on the Red Badge of Courage (1986), Amy Kaplan's The Social Construction of American Realism (1988), Giorgio Mariani's Spectacular Narratives: Representations of Class and War in the American 1890 s (1992) -- demonstrates the continued centrality of many of the questions expressed by the early reviewers of Red Badge. Much of this recent criticism grapples with issues first raised in Wyndham and Frederic -- the photographic and theatrical aspects of Crane's prose; his abandonment of narrative conventions in pursuit of a more "authentic" reality. Mariani, for example, reads Red Badge as a novel of spectacular descriptions -- vivid scenes which would satisfy the embryonic consumer society of the 1890 s' desire for thrilling spectacle (Mariani, 4).
For Amy Kaplan, realism is a "representation of reality struggling against other forms of representation" (Kaplan, 1986, 13). This definition restores to realism its "dynamic literary qualities" by integrating it with the social context out of which it developed: Red Badge struggles with other representations of late 19 th century reality -- popular war novels, chivalric romances, jingoistic journalism. Thus although much of the early critical scrutiny of Red Badge boiled down to biographical speculation and nationalistic cheerleading, we can be grateful to those few reviewers who realized Red Badge was doing important cultural work. Their analyses suggest some of the reasons why Red Badge became the standard against which all of Crane's subsequent work was measured. CONCLUSION Early reviews of Red Badge raised three issues that will remain of central interest to the remainder of this project. First, there is Crane's concern with authenticity.
Written in a post-photographic age, Red Badge discards contemporaneous conventions of battlefield prose for a discontinuous succession of "flashing images" that yield "photographic revelations. " 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 descriptions. Second, although much of General McClurg's commentary about Red Badge's lack of patriotism, for example, is overheated and irrelevant, he was not entirely wrong to suggest that Crane's novel raised potentially disquieting questions about the state of turn-of-the-century American society. The next two sections of this project confront some of those questions. And finally, while Crane's early critics did not realize that Red Badge is set at the Civil War battle of Chancellorsville, subsequent scholarly inquiry has revealed this to be the case. The next section of this project, "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 Red Badge. ~ ~ ~ Critical Reception: Early Reviews | The Battle: Chancellorsville < /~HYPER/CRANE/chancellorsville / section 2. html&g t; Imaging the Civil War: Authenticity in Painting, Photography, and The Red Badge of Courage < /~HYPER/CRANE/images / section 3.
html> | Bibliography < /~HYPER/CRANE/ bibliography /biblio. html>
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Research essay sample on Review Of Red Badge Courage By Stephen Crane
