The Red Badge of Courage - a Pilgrimage of Defiance

A Pilgrimage of Defiance

Stephen Crane is the quintessential American pilgrim of literature. In the manner of the European settlers who contested the ways of their homelands and journeyed to build new foundations for their futures, Crane challenged tradition and built a visionary framework not for his own future, but for that of all humanity. Romanticism, the movement inspired by classical individualism and idealism, was imported from Europe in the earliest days of the nineteenth century and quickly became the most influential philosophy in American culture. Even the harsh brutality of the Civil War could not entirely displace the people's belief in the natural goodness of man and power of the individual, but in the time to follow an author tempered by misery would write to expose its fallacies. Disillusioned with his orthodox religious upbringing and determined to test the validity of Romantic belief, author Stephen Crane employs universal themes and a detached writing style to unseat conventional faith in human transcendence in his naturalist work, The Red Badge of Courage.

Raised in a strict household under devout parents, Crane soon came to mistrust the religious doctrine with which he was instructed and turned away, searching both internally and externally to discern the answers to life that society and its values could not provide for him. In order to understand how Crane wrote a novel as deviant and iconoclastic as The Red Badge of Courage, it is necessary to know something of his experiences and personality. Crane was the fourteenth child of a Methodist preacher and a founder of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. His education was a traditionally orthodox one, focusing on religious text and the literature of the Romantic era. Independent from an early age, "Crane's reaction to being a preacher's child included cultivating the vices of card-playing, dancing, drinking and smoking- all of which his father had condemned" (Dooley 1). Defying all convention, he would live with a woman who operated a brothel in Florida and testify for a prostitute arrested by corrupt policemen in New York. Though he never saw a battle before writing The Red Badge of Courage, he would later occupy himself as a reckless war correspondent in foreign countries whose daringly inquisitive coverage would nearly end his life several times (Willa 6).

It is mysterious then, how at the age of twenty-one with no war experience and only a history of recklessness behind him, Crane was able to convey such keen insight and satire in the novel. Some critics argue he simply held acute disdain for tradition and society because he felt suffocated from the pressures put on him by his traditionalist parents (Beaver 4). Others suggest his beliefs stem from a loss of faith, as the gloomy world of his childhood could not satisfy the idyllic claims of the literature of his education (Willa 15). Yet the complexity and clearness he demonstrates in his writing suggests some experience deeper then a mere loss of faith or impatience with the doctrine he deemed incompetent. Crane died before seeing his twenty-ninth birthday, having finally lost his battle against the exhausting ailments which had plagued him since childhood. An early sense of his own mortality, coupled with the deaths of his father and sister when he was nine and thirteen, gave him a familiarity with death none should have to experience. Crane's callous nature was a direct consequence of this misfortune, but beneath his external façade of indifference there existed a disquieting fear for a future he could not know and could not control; paralleled in the quest of self-discovery and fear the protagonist Henry experiences in The Red Badge of Courage. Truly contrary to the Romantic tradition of his time, the tragic but unique circumstances of Crane's short life yielded to him a focused understanding of the realities of life, ultimately the naturalist philosophies he conveys in the novel.

Crane's unfamiliarity with warfare prior to writing The Red Badge of Courage indicates that his interest in its creation was founded in his desire to examine the validity of individualism and civilization in an environment free from conventional morality- the battlefield. Crane found inspiration for his idea in the controversial recent works of biologist Charles Darwin. Darwin's theories focused on the concept of a perpetual species struggle, perfect for the idealess combat Crane wished to portray, "for the Darwinian metaphor, red in tooth and claw, had been miraculously turned inside out on that battlefield to become a scenario for this naturalist... Here Crane could study the human condition, in all its turbulence, with the most exacting details of historical research" (Beaver 67). The principles of Darwinism had already brought into question the foundations of traditional moral and religious authority and were even used to explain trends outside of biology, profoundly influencing Crane in his attack on traditionalist Romanticism (Gibson 4). It is in the context of this Darwinian struggle that Crane reveals the hatred and fear inspired by human war to be no more refined or elevated then that of the lowest inhabitants of the earth. While the doctrine of individualism claimed man was an enlightened, civilized being, Crane exposed humanity as quite capable of reducing itself to a primitive state beneath the values of its perceived superior society. Driven by the same primordial instincts as all living creatures, "Man is out of control... far from reason or courage, it is illusion and impulse, again and again, that twitches and throws us" (Beaver 71).

In an effort to promote a clearer human understanding of concepts shrouded in the vague optimism of Romanticism, Crane utilizes naturalist themes in The Red Badge of Courage to emphasize the inapplicability of traditional concepts in a world confused after the dark struggles of the Civil War. Crane's naturalistic view on the nature of valor deviated significantly from that of his predecessors. The war novels of the Romantic era disguised the face of battle by focusing on vast visionary clashes and the valor of soldiers' struggle. This elevated perception of courage was one Crane sought to ground, encouraging readers to evaluate human conditions in a more realistic way (Royal 2). This intent is expressed in the novel through Henry Fleming, whose quest for a heroic struggle of bravery is grounded as the reality of war makes him "feel that in this crisis his laws of life were useless. Whatever he had learned of himself was here of no avail... he resolved to remain close upon his guard lest those qualities of which he knew nothing should everlastingly disgrace him" (Crane 8). Henry had until this point held a firm conviction in his