The Red Badge of Courage (Criticism)

Criticism

Sharon Cumberland

In the following essay, Cumberland, an assistant professor at Seattle University, provides a general overview of the novel and notes how Crane broke with Romantic traditions of the time by refusing to idealize war.

Stephen Crane's Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, is remarkable in two ways: it is a quintessential coming-of-age story, and it is written in a style so original that many consider it to be the first modern American novel. Though written thirty years after the Civil War, in 1895, by a young man who had never seen warfare, Crane captured not only the disorientation and chaos of the battlefield, but found completely original ways to describe a foot soldier's experience. And though The Red Badge of Courage is part of a long tradition of war narratives, which extends from Homer's The Iliad to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Crane departed from that tradition by presenting war from the point of view of a single ignorant private. No effort is made to characterize war as noble, death as glorious, or soldiers as particularly brave or admirable. Instead, The Red Badge of Courage is a study of the interior life of a young man, Henry Fleming, who is in turn confused, terrified, humiliated, and, ultimately, matured by his exposure to pitched battle.

Crane's strategy in The Red Badge of Courage is to create a sense of chaos and helplessness by withholding from the reader information that the common soldier would not have known. Henry Fleming does not know where he is at any time. It seems to the characters, as to the reader, that Fleming and his fellow soldiers are being arbitrarily moved around in mysterious patterns that suit the generals but mean nothing to the soldiers in the ranks. Scholars have determined from intemal evidence, however, that Crane set his story during the Battle of Chancellorsville which took place from May 2 to May 6,1863, near the little town of Chancellorsville, Virginia, and not far from Fredricksburg. Understanding something of that battle offers a useful perspective on Henry Fleming's odyssey to manhood, and on the settings in which each of his adventures takes place.

The Battle of Chancellorsville was fought between the Army of the Potomac, led by the Union general Joseph Hooker, and the Confederate army led by Robert E. Lee. The town was near the Rappahannock River and surrounded by a pine scrub forest called "The Wilderness." A great deal of the fighting took place in this forest, which accounts for the setting of Henry Fleming's period of desertion, and for the cathedral-like clearing in the woods where he encounters the dead soldier. Many of the skirmishes and encounters between the two armies also took place on the fields between Fredricksburg and the Wilderness. This accounts for the battle scenes in which Henry finds himself running wildly at the enemy over an open plain.

Lee's army was outnumbered by two to one, but his clever maneuvering gave the Rebel army the early advantage. Using his brilliant cavalry division, led by Stonewall Jackson, Lee forced the superior Federal troops into a desperate retreat on the first day of the battle. Henry Fleming sees these retreating soldiers as he approaches the front and fantasizes that the generals are leading them into a trap. He was not far from the truth.

Unfortunately for Lee, Stonewall Jackson received the wound that killed him in this battle, and on the second day the Federals pushed the Rebels back in one of the few bayonet charges of the war. Instead of pressing his advantage, however, General Hooker ordered the Union Army to fall back, allowing Lee to reform his line and continue the fight for another two days. The dismay and distrust that Crane represents among the Federal foot soldiers was felt in real life by the officers who served under Hooker. According to James M. McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, upon receiving orders to retreat instead of advance, one of Hooker's officers reported that he believed his commanding officer to be "a whipped man." By the end of the encounter, Lee had triumphed over the Union Army and scored one of the most resounding triumphs of the war. President Lincoln, when told of Hooker's defeat despite his tremendous advantage, exclaimed, "My God! My God! What will the country say?"

Henry Fleming, as a Union soldier being ordered here and there during one of the great fiascoes of the Civil War, is neither irrational nor cowardly for his perception of the battle as insane chaos. Nor can he be blamed for his decision to leave the front, since everything he is asked to do seems pointless. The Red Badge of Courage is a study in what a rational person can do in an irrational situation. Ultimately Fleming realizes that he must face his fear and reservations for the sake of his reputation and for the sake of his comrades.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was writing in the last decade of the century, a period that has a distinctive quality in all aspects of the arts. Romanticism had dominated literary and visual arts for the first half of the nineteenth century, and the time was ripe for new ideas as the twentieth century approached.

The Romantic movement was represented in England by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Shelley, and in America by the Transcendentalists (Emerson,Thoreau, and Fuller, among others) and by Walt Whitman. It was a movement characterized by three attributes: 1) free and natural expression, rather than the artificial formality of the eighteenth century; 2) the elevation of the common man as a subject of literature; and 3) the use of the natural landscape to reflect human passion and expressiveness. Two schools of thought emerged in mid-century as literature developed beyond Romanticism and then reacted against these trends in writing: Realism and Impressionism.

Realism is related to Romanticism in that it draws upon the life of the common man and woman for material and inspiration. But instead of idealizing the lives of common folk, the Realists focus on the brutal and ugly aspects of lower class people and their difficult and often sordid lives. Clearly Stephen Crane is writing in the Realistic manner, since his subjects are common men presented with all their problems and flaws. A romantic telling of this story would have emphasized courage, heroism, and glorious death rather than cowardice, fear, and rotten corpses. A romantic telling of this story might also have implied that the soldiers were dying in a glorious cause of which God approved, and that their souls were going straight to heaven. Crane's realistic version of war offers the soldier no such comfort. In the realistic universe there is no God to make human folly seem sane. Henry Fleming is forced to confront the fact of death and the inevitability of his own death.

Another way in which Realism is related to but goes beyond Romanticism is in the use of nature. The Romantics projected their own imaginations onto the natural landscape, giving it magical powers. Realists, responding to Darwin's discovery of natural selection, saw nature in terms of the survival of the fittest. Part of Henry Fleming's maturing process requires that he accept the fact that predators — the enemy — are determined to kill him. He decides that it is better to be the predator and to kill his enemy than to allow the enemy to kill him.

Crane's writing style has also been described as Impressionism, a phenomenon in the literary world that responded to a corresponding impulse in the art world. French Impressionism was a school of painting that rejected Romanticism in the visual arts for the detached observation of nature. Impressionists tried to paint what they saw without adding content from their own emotions or imagination. Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, and Manet attempted to paint nature by breaking their observations down into pieces of light and showing each part independently from every other part. The same principle can be observed in The Red Badge of Courage because Crane describes Fleming's experiences almost as a collection of snapshots, without a coherent time sequence to give them meaning. Henry observes many things, but none of them hang together; no picture emerges that makes sense to him. Just as art critics had to learn how to understand Impressionism, Henry learns to find order in his apparently meaningless universe.

The Red Badge of Courage is a favorite text for intermediate and high school students because it is one of the great coming-of-age novels. How does a young person assume his or her place in the world of adult responsibilities? Every young person must confront the fear associated with being expected to take charge rather than to be taken care of. Sometimes the moment comes in a decision, as when Huckleberry Finn decides to help his friend Jim, even if he gets in trouble for supporting an escaped slave. Sometimes it comes in acceptance of the inevitable, as when Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind recognizes that many people depend upon her resourcefulness for their survival. The Red Badge of Courage offers a powerful text on the internal struggle of one young person to accept the great — even unreasonable — responsibilities placed upon him that will transform him from a child to an adult. This is the primary thematic approach for younger students.

For older students, the historical and stylistic themes described in the sections above give a rich context to The Red Badge of Courage. In addition, one can also examine Crane's text for his rich use of symbolism. Even as the "red badge" in the title represents courage, or the courage it takes to suffer a bleeding wound, so Crane uses the landscape, the other soldiers, and an array of colors and images to represent Henry Fleming's inner state. One of the most fruitful methods to use in reading The Red Badge of Courage is to trace Crane's descriptions of the weather, the countryside, animals, colors, sounds, or any other element one chooses, to Henry's state of mind. Crane always reflects his protagonist's feelings in some concrete object in the environment. One of the most famous images from this book, for instance, comes after Henry's friend Jim Conklin has just died: "The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer." The red color reflects Jim's death, while the flatness of the sun being "pasted" reflects Henry's sense of being numbed, flattened by his loss. The use of the word "wafer," however, suggests the eucharistic wafer, the body of Christ offered in communion, with all its connotations of sacrificial death and redemption.

Source: Sharon Cumberland, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque concerns a young German infantryman's experience in World War I.
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger relates in first person the story of a adolescent in New York City and his ironic, and comic, views of life.
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell tells the saga of a young woman's life during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods in the South.
• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell is a British soldier's firsthand account of the Spanish Civil War, during which he fought with the Republicans against fascism.