A Literary Essay about The Red Badge of Courage Research Paper

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A Literary Essay about The Red Badge of Courage
The American Civil War (1861-1865) is a set of many stories of bloodshed, defeat, bravery and triumphal end of slavery that has inspired some well-known authors. One of them is Stephen Crane with his best-selling novel The Red Badge of Courage.
The Historical Context of the Novel
Long before the American Civil War started, the Northern and Southern states have had already unsettled social, political and economic issues. The economy of Northern states largely depended on industrial trade while the Southern counted in its crops such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco. With the issuance of tariffs, the Southerners believed that it only favored the economy of Northerners. Furthermore, the origin of the war was the widely disputed slavery—the Northern states were strongly against it while the Southern states were taking advantage of it. Finally, the winning of Abraham Lincoln as the president, who was an anti-slavery advocate, caused the secession of eleven Southern States that ignited the war on April 1861 at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The war lasted for four years, and on April 1865, General Robert E. Lee, leader of Southern Confederate forces surrendered to U.S. General Ulysses Grant. Although the war succeeded in freeing the slaves, it is considered the bloodiest war in the American history that left millions of lives shattered (Crane x-xi).
Meanwhile, many people presumed that Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage narrated the Battle of Chancellorsville which took place on May 2-4, 1862 at Virginia. The place was surrounded by thick forest wherein Union soldiers retreated, and many Confederate soldiers died—which were congruently described in the novel.
Biography and Works of Stephen Crane
Six years after the war, Crane was born on November 1, 1871, at Newark, New Jersey to Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane and Mary Helen Peck Crane, who worked as newspaper and journal writer, and was the youngest among the fourteen children. The Crane family had moved to three towns of New Jersey and New York due to his father’s appointment to different churches. Moreover, at a young age, Stephen had already endured hardships and poverty with the early death of his father. Unhindered with their difficulties, Stephen pursued his passion for literature, and at the age of seventeen, he already worked as a writer for a local news bureau run by his brother. His love for reading and writing, however, overshadowed his interest in studying that resulted in him to drop-out to two schools, namely: Lafayette College, where he took up engineering, and Syracuse University. On 1891, Stephen became a full-time newspaper writer in New York, and he began to write his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, writing about a poor woman in a hopeless situation. Two years after, Stephen, out of his penury, published his first novel by borrowing the money left by his late mother as his small inheritance. A year later he was able to publish The Red Badge of Courage as a series in a few newspapers.
Moreover, in 1895, D. Appleton and Company agreed to publish the whole novel. Other literary works of Stephen Crane include The Black Riders, The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War, George’s Mother, The Open Boat, Action Service, War is Kind, The Monster and Other Stories and The O’Ruddy. On 1897, Stephen married Cora Taylor, and in 1900, at the age of twenty-eight, he died due to pulmonary tuberculosis (Crane, v-ix).
Literary Movements Portrayed in The Red Badge of Courage
Romantic style of writing, wherein the ideal concept of life is overplayed, ruled the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Stephen Crane did not follow this style as he wanted to deliver something new out of his own experience. Likewise, Crane broke away from typical American Civil War stories of liberating the slaves by depicting the life of young soldiers. Crane’s Red Badge of Courage is a testament to his unique style that incorporated naturalism, impressionism, and realism (Carmignani 22).
According to The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, naturalism is a form of literature that concentrates on the environment and social conditions in molding the human character. In other words, nature dictates the behavior of people (qtd in Faican 86). An example of naturalism in the novel is when Henry Fleming, the main character, rationalized his escape from war by comparing himself to a squirrel.
Nature had given him a sign. The squirrel, immediately upon recognizing danger, had taken to his legs without ado. He did not stand stolidly baring his furry belly to the missile, and die with an upward glance at the sympathetic heavens. On the contrary, he had fled as fast as his legs could carry him; and he was but an ordinary squirrel, too (Crane 51).
Impressionism, as defined by Webster’s Dictionary, is “the depiction of scene or character by details intended to achieve a vividness or effectiveness more by evoking subjective and sensory impressions than by recreating an objective reality (”Impressionism,” def. 2a). Throughout the novel, Crane described the scenario of battlefields picturesquely, e.g., “rows of guns making gray clouds, which were filled with large flashes of orange-colored flame (Crane 110-111).” Moreover, other characters were mostly mentioned as what Henry Fleming deems them-- tall soldier, tattered soldier and loud soldier.
Lastly, according to most critics realism was the most accurate style represented in this Crane’s novel. Realism is a literary style that shows the daily living of people among middle and lower classes. In the Red Badge of Courage, Henry is not a typical mighty soldier but instead a young boy who naively enlisted as a soldier for the glory of becoming a hero and eventually found himself afraid of the war.
Indeed, Crane’s novel reveals the reality of war and heroism in the eyes of an amateur soldier. As this paper unfolds these revelations, three arguments will be further discussed: 1) A soldier’s conception of the war does not reflect its reality 2) Self-doubt is fed by the fear of being defeated during the war. 3) A hero is not made overnight.
A soldier’s conception of the war does not reflect its reality.
Henry was blinded by his dreams of being in a battle. His young mind was thrilled of bloody conflicts and images of people that would find security under the “shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess (Crane 3).” It seemed to him that there was much glory in being a part of those marches and sieges than by reading it alone. This led Henry to enlist in the military despite his mother’s disapproval. Likewise, these deceptive conceptions also existed at the actual civil war. Civil War was also called “The Boy’s War,” since there were children as young as nine ...