Red Badge of Courage Stephen

¶ … Red Badge of Courage

Stephen Crane's novel the Red Badge of Courage is an example of literary naturalism, a movement in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century that went beyond realism to delve into the darker side of society and to the problems facing the individual in society. This novel is set in the Civil War and has in fact become the representative novel of that war. The nature of that war set it apart from other wars in that it involved Americans fighting against Americans, brother against brother, and that element is apparent in this novel. The novel goes more deeply into the very idea of war and what it means to be fighting on the front lines. It also develops the question of what people expect of themselves and how they may be disappointed by what they can actually do. To a degree, the author makes the characters into types, though they are seen as individuals at the same time.

While the novel is set in the Civil War, it does not try to be a historical novel in the usual sense but instead seeks to be a definitive novel of war. Crane's approach leaves much to be decided by historians, as Claudia Durst Johnson notes when she writes,

Nowhere in the Red Badge of Courage, as one critic has pointed out, does Stephen Crane make particular reference to the meaning, tactics, politics, or outcome of the war in which Henry Fleming is engaged or the causes that have set the armies against one another. The absence of such particulars tends to universalize the story and make an "Everyman" of Henry: he is any young man of any era facing a trial by fire in any battle. But given Crane's time and place, the mention of the rebels, and descriptions of the countryside and course of the skirmishes, any reader knows that Crane's classic battle takes place in the American Civil War. Scholars have even identified the battle described in the novel: there is little doubt that Henry is engaged in the Battle of Chancellorsville in northern Virginia, one of the pivotal battles of the war. (Johnson 25)

The soldier who is the hero of the Red Badge of Courage first has certain illusions about the meaning of war and about his own ability to face war. Because of the strength of his illusions, reality causes him to doubt himself. Henry and his fellow soldiers are primarily mae up of enlisted men, and they are known to us while the officers tend to pass through anonymously. The officers have no ability to control the situation or to do more than encourage others to follow their lead. The situation is tense for Henry, but his primary tension is internal, for his experience is completely at odds with his vision of himself and of war. When officers are mentioned, they are as much on their own as everyone else:

mounted officer displayed the furious anger of a spoiled child. He raged with his head, his arms, and his legs.

Another, the commander of the brigade, was galloping about bawling. His hat was gone and his clothes were awry. He resembled a man who has come from bed to go to a fire (Crane 40).

Crane captures the anarchy of the battlefield and the varied nature of the reaction of the soldiers. The enlisted men include a number of veterans who take this more in stride than does Henry. In truth, all they want to do is survive, and Henry wants to be a hero. They are more realistic than he is.

At the Battle of Chancellorsville, Henry at first runs away and is ashamed of what he has done. He manages to return and fights bravely, thus learning a lesson about the meaning of war and the meaning of courage. Henry is a young man who becomes more of a man as he learns more about life, and he knows realizes he has grown and that he has learned about himself.

Crane was born after the Civil War, but the subject always interested him. He read widely about the war and talked about it with Civil War veterans. The Red Badge of Courage would be the first book about the war to tell not just what a soldier did but how he felt. The book was first published in installment form in the Philadelphia Press, and it was not published in book form until 1895. The book was part of what is called the Gilded Age, the name given to the period around 1870 when considerable cynicism set in about politics and other aspects of society. Mark Twain used the term as the title for a book, offering an attack on the materialism, speculation, and corruption seen in the era after the Civil War (Howard 200). In literary terms, the period was marked by a growing sense of realism, and the beginnings of Naturalism as a literary movement came in the 1890s and extended realism with a new emphasis. The realists had insisted on detailing the world in a realistic fashion and to do so by creating reality: "Art's task was not to record but to make life; reality was a constructed, not a recorded, thing" (Bradbury 8). Naturalism took a different view in its origins, seeing the job of the novelist as being to undertake a scientific study by recording facts, living conditions, and behavior:

Naturalism was thus realism scientized, systematized, taken finally beyond realist principles of fidelity to common experience or of humanistic exploring of individual lives within the social and moral web to an experiment in the laws of social and biological existence. (Bradbury 9)

Naturalism infused the work of such late nineteenth century in authors as Stephen Crane, and the psychological realism of later nineteenth-century American fiction like Stephen Crane's the Red Badge of Courage or Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is apparent as these American novels are naturalistic in a way that makes the psychology of characters stark against the realistically drawn background. The shift from realism to naturalism is not a jarring one, for naturalism is only an extended and more scientific approach to realism, one that delves more deeply into the commonplace and that addresses elements in society (such as the bowery people in Maggie) that earlier would have been ignored.

For Henry, war is defined in terms of glory and the glory he can achieve. This vision of war is not peculiar to the Civil War by any means, and indeed it is the pervasive idea of war as a road to glory that has developed over the centuries that affects the young man and his expectations. He sees the war as an opportunity and is envious of those he believes have achieved the glory he wants:

At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage. (Crane 40)

Of course, this statement identifies the source of the title and the state of mind of the hero at this point in his war career. An older solider, Jim, expresses a view of the green soldiers like Henry that is not based on a vision of glory at all but on a realistic perception of what war is really like: "Oh, they'll fight all right, I guess, after they get into it" (Crane 7). This comment suggests the untried nature of these troops and the hope that they will do well when the time comes. It also suggests that Jim is a veteran who has seen all this before.

Henry soon sees what war is really like and begins to express this fact in animalistic imagery:

The fight was lost. The dragons were coming with invincible strides. The army, helpless in the matted thickets and blinded by the overhanging night, was going to be swallowed. War, the red animal, the blood-swollen god, would have bloated fill. (Crane 52)

Crane here compares war to a ravening beast, and Henry uses this metaphor several times in the course of the story. Crane thus deals with the nature of war and its effects on those who experience it, not leading to glory at all but bringing out their animal instinct for survival. Crane writes at one point, "Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions" (Crane 3)

Crane repeats this sentence word-for-word in the same chapter (Crane 5), emphasizing in this way the nature of these young soldiers before they are tested in the heat of battle. Any instinct for violence and war has been taken out of them by education and religion in civilization, yet they will need their animal instincts before the battle is over. At the same time, though, the men who fight have some ties to the cause for which they are fighting and for the country asking them to do so:

Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him... It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture to him. (Conrad 81)

Crane thus suggests how the heat of battle becomes focused on a symbol, in this case the flag, and soldiers emerge from battle with this new symbol clearly in mind. The imagery used makes an association between the flag and a goddess, thus indicating a sexual appeal at the same time.

Henry changes in the course of his experience, moving from the group of unseasoned soldiers toward the group that has been in battle and now knows the reaity of war:

He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. (Conrad 100)

Again, Crane here recalls the idea of war as an animal activity, though the dedication of the soldiers to the flag shows that there is more to it for the human animal than there would be for any other animal. Crane shows this as he describes the young man after the battle, noting how he has met the beast and been changed by it, his primal instincts brought to the fore. This brings an even deeper change in the young man: "He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He became not a man but a member" (Conrad 25). Henry's individuality is lost in the mass of soldiers with whom he battles the enemy. Crane shows here how the individual becomes part of a group and begins to think of himself as part of something outside his own person. This can also link to the flag cited above, the symbol of that something greater with which the individual identifies.