Letteratura angloamericana

Stephen Crane and 'The Monster'

Question: "Is Stephen Crane a racist writer?"

We have different shades of unconscious racism due to his cultural background. We have some sections in the story that are really disturbing. They seem to be stereotypically racist. However, the story needs to be analysed in its entirety, we need to contextualize the sections to the whole story and context.

It's important to understand who is the narrative voice. It is very difficult to situate, to state any degree of reassurance that it is embracing, whatever is the way of staging the scene. There is a lot of irony towards almost everyone in the story. We are not sure what is the narrator's point of view.

Karl Marx defends Balzac as a conservative person in life but very reactionary as a writer. He asserts that a writer should be a progressive force. He is doing a kind of cognitive critical writing. Regardless of your personal ideology, we have a representation of reality.

– a personal unconscious– as to make the whole representation open to different interpretations that could not be reconciledwith the writer’s personal point of view. However, we should be aware of overlappings.

Key Topics: race, morality, conscious, fantasy, heroism, ….

As regards the doctor’s decision, the judge referring to Harry says “the Nature has given him up”.

So since this moment on, Harry becomes a doctor’s creature.

“He looks like the devil” > this quotation remind us of Billy Budd’s mutiny: it appears to be so, butit isn’t something that really happened. We also have the presence of a “black veil”. We don0t havea puritan community, but on the other hand there is a lot of religious imagery that we should takeinto account. We have the connection between religion and morality but also between religion,morality and law. Law is not explicit in the story because we don’t have a crime (in

Hawthorne, for example, we have a vagueness about a crime). However, the idea of crime is pervasive all along the story, for example when we have a sort of lynching, when Harry is put in jail, when the doctor is asked to take him hidden or to bring him out of the jail at night. Everything becomes a crime. The fact that one of the main characters is a judge puts the question of justice implicitly in the story. Judgment is always present in the story, since the beginning. Jimmie commits a "crime" and he is judged by his father. "The Monster" - Chapter One The starting is almost disorienting. A little boy is playing a game, he is pretending to be a train or a train's driver. We have no way to access immediately what is going on. The same sense of disorientation characterizes every section of the story: we are constantly faced with new people and situations. In terms of narrative habits, one of the things we immediately realize is the fact that the narrator is trying toshow things from a kind of detached perspective. The narrator is not orienting the reader's judgement. There's very little or no judgement at all. Flaubert's Madame Bovary > the author went on trial for obscenity. All the adultery attitude of the protagonist is never judged in the story. We have an ironical, detached narrator, devoid of any moral judgement. There is not that ostensible punishment that was always present in the former literature. We have a narrative perspective that has not a moral attitude that, before Flaubert, readers found reassuring. We have a kind of attitude that slowly developed in the Art for art's sake attitude. In Crane's The Monster it is impossible to access the attitude of the one who is narrating the story. It is also a staging of what it means to be non-conformist, it looks back to Thoreau's kind of tradition. And we neither know if it's ironic or not. This kind of detached attitude could have areference to Naturalism. Naturalism was a kind of international movement. It was also an American movement. However we have some discrepancies with respect to European vision. We have a mix with Modernism. Naturalism (as well as Positivism, Darwinism, etc.) is not so explicit in Crane. However we have a moment in the story which has a lot to do with Determinism. During the house fire, Harry is at the point of giving up "because of his ancestry". The habit of surrendering is a sign of a deterministic point of view. And yet he resists, he stands up and fights. It is a very crucial moment politically but also racially (notice the inscription about American Revolution). "The de-familiarization of the narrator" The Narrator is identifying with the child's imagination. This kind of identification goes on throughout much of the story. And yet there are other parts in which he is completely detached. We have a kind of double attitude in Crane's prose. The use ofimagery reinforces the self-perception and performance, which is the way in which each character performs him/herself and in relation to others. The way in which the sections are constructed gives an emphasis on theatrical quality of human life. It's like Crane is putting on stage different acts of a work. Theatre, theoretically, is an objective representation, a pure mimetic form of representation. However, we have a simultaneous emphasis embracing character's point of view of themselves and of others. It's a kind of paradox that becomes disorienting.

"Who is guilty?" From the very beginning of the story we have a "guilt": Jimmie "looked guiltily at his father". Guilt is immediately connected to a hierarchical relationship father-son. We have a social hierarchy. The father "had his back to this accident", he doesn't witness what had happened. At the same way, he is not there when the fire occurs. He is an absent-minded,

distracted authority.
The sin that occurs is in a garden with a cherry tree in the middle. The father is mowing the lawn, he is busy on his own. Crushing a peony is not such a big crime. It seems we have a kind of concentration and comic focus of what will happen in the story. We have the idea of the impossibility of reparation of what has been crashed.
We have a political implication, too. There is a famous anecdote about President George Washington. As a child, he had fortuitously cut off and destroyed a cherry tree in his father's garden. When the father asked what had happened, the little George said something like "I cannot lie, father. It was me/it was my fault". We have a typical American attitude: to lie is considered a crime. The whole culture revolves around the lie as a cultural taboo. We have a cultural value of sincerity.
Readers of the time were soon reminded of George Washington's anecdote. It elicits expectations about the sincerity of the son and he is.actually punished. We have expectations of somebody who acts nobly and the father as a good father punishes him in a quiet way.

"The Garden"

The garden is simultaneously the Eden and G. Washington's garden, which is the garden of the Republic. We have different layers of meaning: historical, biblical, but we also have a reference to the Gospel. On the other hand, the stage is steeped in national folklore: moral, religious, and political implications. Of course, we know that there is not a real guilt, but we have a guilty sense and feeling.

Sacrificial loop

Harry is sacrificing himself for Jimmie. The doctor is sacrificing himself and his family for Harry. There is nothing that says that we should privilege a religious interpretation over other points of view or thematic threads. All the interpretations are overlapping but also conflicting in the story. The doctor does what he couldn't avoid doing. However, he submits himself and his family to a series of negative consequences. When

the story stops, we are suggested that probably the doctor is going to do nothing. He cannot undo what has been done. We have a kind of moral choice between being good and do a moral action. We have heroic actions of at least two characters in the story that lead to some unpredictable consequences that disorient the whole community, which is trying to defend the ordinary life in the village. The moral implications of the doctor's decision is threatening the whole community. So, whose is the fault? It is very difficult to judge. (Notice that we have the whole Trescott family that is scapegoated, even the doctor's wife that was never able to decide). Lezione 15 – 3/05/2018 Other monsters: Frankenstein, Dracula, etc. They just come from modern literary text, actually novels. There are many ways in which Johnson is called or defined after his transformation and it's not so frequent to be called "monster", maybe it only happens once or twice; there are other ways inwhich he is called: he is repeatly defined as "a thing, something undefinable, undefined". He is out of tune with a number of different potential discourses. This is one of the features defining monstruosity. So he is defined in several ways (something awful) and "the monster" is not the most prominent way in which he is defined. So if Crane chose to title this story "The Monster" there has to be some deep meaning to the idea of the monster, to the idea of monstruosity! So firstly the monster is something that is completely...it is against nature. Although as we know from previous experience (from tv series, fantasy fictions, cartoons) within the context of the stories in which you meet monsters, monsters are part of the nature. They are something that are simultaneolsy against of nature because so completely different and part of the nature. Apart from Frankenstein, who is a completely different character because it's constructed, most of the other monsters.that we meet in fantasy stories, fairy tales, legends, Beowulf --> Grendel. It's the favourite monster of the anglophone people. If you think of Grendel, he is completely, as a legendary figure, natural within the context of that story, people are not surprised at the existence of Grendel because in their world view it's normal to have monsters (it's a different story when you travel to Kafka, because Kafka is making use of that motif in a very modern and different way). But if you think of the usual, of the customary context, customary literary and legendary context of monsters, one of the things that are typical of monsters is that he is really part of a kind of coherant world in which monsters are featured along with human beings and along with other ordinary things. Let's follow the path of the legendary, fantasy monsters for a while: is there any moment in this story in which we as readers have the impression of being taken outside of ordinary reality and ordinary.

realistic literary discourse and taken into a more fantastic world where you would expect monsters to live? On one hand you have moments in t