In certain ways, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage is concerned more with a later American generation forgetting the Civil War than with a realistic depiction of how that war was actually fought from the viewpoint of the common soldier. Such forgetting paradoxically occurs through the way Americans remembered—and continue to remember—the Civil War: the emphasis of major campaigns won or lost or, to use the title of a text regarded as one of Crane's major sources, on "battles and leaders of the Civil War." The Red Badge, of course, obfuscates both battles (is the scene Chancellorsville?) and leaders (Fleming's army "superiors" go unnamed except for "MacChesnay," an unknown regiment colonel). The major cause of the war also is virtually forgotten, perhaps, because of middle-class, post-Reconstructionist sentiments; the only sign of it appears with the "negro" teamster who "sits 'mournfully down' to lament his loss of an audience" (Kaplan 277). In Crane's novel, even the warring parties have lost their political specificity, being reduced in cultural memory to visual metaphors, the "blue" and "gray" armies, as if mere figures in a game.

One can regard such forgetfulness as a duplication of Crane's general vision of epistemological solipsism. In the novel Fleming never knows what his fellow soldiers are thinking ("His failure to discover any mite of resemblance in their view points made him more miserable than before" [2:428]) or, from one moment to the next, how to regard his desertion. Critics continually debate the issue of his growth, arguing either that he achieves it or, relying on manuscript evidence, that Crane frames his protagonist's own sense of growth ("He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood" [24:538]) in an ironic light. How, then, can a later generation fully appreciate the social struggles that an earlier one experienced?

More recent critical arguments make the novel's war setting an allegorical representation of the social turbulence, especially the class warfare, wrought by postbellum industrial capitalism in the 1890s: "The battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to [ Fleming]" (8:458). That social war, unlike the Civil War, was one that Crane witnessed first-hand as a muckraking journalist and depicted in the earlier Maggie. In the interests of "national reconciliation," popular contemporary works treated the war as a "spectacle" or ideological trope that, besides preparing people to accept American imperialist projects on the international stage, could effectively distract the American public from the social "civil war" then occurring (Kaplan 271, 279, 285). ¹

Critics have often noted how Crane's narrative style mimics a visual realism purveyed by contemporary models of photography and Impressionistic painting (see Nagel 250-51). But instead of combining them to achieve a more comprehensive realistic effect, Crane's literary Impressionism calls attention to the representational medium, smudging images of reality with subjective associations indigenous to language. The sun, in that famous line at the end of chapter 9, is "like a wafer"—an objective observation? a religious or, in context, an antireligious allusion? a sign of Fleming's transitory, moodinfluenced perception of nature?

In exposing the vulnerability of photo-realism to indeterminate, interpretive codes, Crane also contests the mass media's attempt to change how one recollects historical events like the Civil War. He challenges the pervasive publicization or photo-pictorialization by the mass media of private experience defining the American public sphere by the 1890s. The American Civil War, after all, was one of the first wars to receive extensive mass media coverage, notably including the use of photographs, Matthew Brady's being the most famous. ²

Fleming, in fact, personifies this media in the way he constantly sees things as if he himself were a camera eye: "Each blade of the green grass was bold and clear. . . . His mind took a mechanical but firm impression, so that afterward everything was pictured and explained to him, save why he himself was there" (19:510). He even sees himself "pictur[ed] . . . as the central figure in blazing scenes" (15:495), "his public deeds . . . paraded in great and shining prominence" (24:535) back home. But in Crane's narration, these pictured media accounts become overexposed ("save why he was there"), are quickly forgotten with changing events, or otherwise, like the officers whom Fleming sees "neglect[ing] to stand in picturesque attitudes" (5:444), keep going out of focus.

Public or media pictorialization preempts Fleming's—an army private's— private experience of the war (compare Cox 316). It also blocks an artist like Crane, who as a correspondent himself trafficked in the attractive power of the mass media, from being able to imagine the Civil War as it was actually lived. The Red Badge of Courage thus comprises a realistic account of Crane's struggle to render a realistic account of that war. It is the same battle that modern Americans must fight to remember it precisely, in the face of the documentation and photographic records that the mass media use to make the Civil War entirely a public spectacle. In the end, the novel gives credence to Whit man 's observation in Specimen Days ( 1882), "Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors . . . of the Secession war . . ." (778).

—LOUIS A. RENZA, Dartmouth College

NOTES

WORKS CITED

Cox, James M. "On Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage". The Red Badge of Courage: An Authoritative Text. Ed. Donald Pizer. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1994.

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Prose and Poetry. Intro. William M. Gibson . 1895. New York: Holt, 3rd ed. 1968 .

Kaplan, Amy. "The Spectacle of War in Crane's Revision of History". The Red Badge of Courage: An Authoritative Text. Ed. Donald Pizer. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1994 .  

Nagel, James. "Impressionism in The Red Badge of Courage". The Red Badge of Courage:An Authoritative Text. Ed. Donald Pizer. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1994 .