[In the following essay, McMurray argues that Stephen Crane's novella The Monster recalls the 1892 lynching of Robert Lewis in Crane's hometown.]

The critical history of Stephen Crane's story of a black man who becomes a social outcast after his face is destroyed in a laboratory fire is divided unevenly between moralists, theorists, and historians.¹ Irony and textual unity are no longer fashionable, but common sense and the bulk of informed opinion continue to find Henry Johnson less of a “monster” than the community that ostracizes him. If one scholar's recent defense of the citizens of Whilomville is meant as pragmatic historicism, this argument nonetheless reverses the traditional moral and might be grouped with the more theoretical accounts of scholars like [Michael] Fried and [Lee Clark] Mitchell, who describe a writerly and less realistic Crane.² Without joining a rich debate about Crane's understanding of ethics or the categorical problem of his relationship to realism, we can classify most treatments of the novella as either moral and implicitly humanistic or hermeneutic and post-structuralist. That both these strands of reading have tended to bypass the problem of history is not surprising, for Crane's text invites a universalizing reading, and his treatment of race exposes the historicity of novella and critic alike. Because Henry's marginalization seems to be primarily the result of an accident, it makes sense to see his blackness as incidental to a transhistorical moral about the need for tolerance or, somewhat more subtly, interpret his unusual plight as a meditation on the defacing effects of writing. Moreover, the story presents racial stereotypes—Crane's likening, for instance, of Henry and the Farragut women to “three monkeys”³—that seem to imply a disconnection between Crane's sympathy for Henry and any progressive racial awareness.⁴ In this light, Patrick Cooley's anachronistic indictment of Crane's “sadly limited racial consciousness” (p. 14) is persuasive, while Stanley Wertheim's rejection of readings which attempt “to modernize The Monster by reductively centering attention on Henry Johnson's blackness” (p. 98) seems a rearguard action, a generic appeal to historical difference which will not suffice in our era of highly politicized canons.

While we might understand Crane's acquiescence in racial stereotyping as a corollary of his naturalism, a strategy for negotiating the marketplace, or as part and parcel of his general contempt for humankind, we would still be left with the problem of why “The Monster” offers the interpretive temptation Wertheim urges us to resist. Henry's accidental “monstrousness” is not at a great remove from the racist constructions of the black as “burly beast” or “savage” current when Crane wrote the story. Similarly, the community's response may be Crane's way of making a general statement about intolerance, but given the context of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), it is difficult not to think that the more specific issue is segregation.

Situating “The Monster” in the context of late nineteenth-century racial ideology, I suggest that the central problem of the story—what to do with Henry after his accident—restages a debate about black extinction and white philanthropy. Less abstractly, I speculate that Henry's precarious existence recalls the death of Robert Lewis, who was lynched in Crane's home town of Port Jervis, New York, in the summer of 1892. In light of these connections, Crane does not so much act as polemicist writing a roman à clef (or an apologist offering the rationalization that racism is an accident) as he allows ideology to shadow his story and disrupt the realistic surface of his text. If Crane's passing allusion to the burning of the engraving “Signing the Declaration” in his description of the destruction of the Trescott house is a nod to one of the enduring contradictions of American political life, it is also the most obvious marker of a densely allusive ideological subtext that runs beneath—often counter to—the surface of “The Monster” and links it to contemporary debates about segregation and miscegenation. In short, although Crane has made it easy for us to rehearse his novella as a universal story about social misfits, a sufficiently historical reading of “The Monster” may serve to show that his thinking about race (and realism) was more complex than is generally acknowledged.

Both the fact of Crane's ideological involvement and the obliquity of his procedure are suggested by pursuing the hypothesis that Plessy is a shaping context for the novella. While “The Monster” does not allude to the case with the explicitness, say, of [Charles W.] Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, several details nudge us in this direction. Jimmie's destruction of a flower in chapter 1, which almost all critics understand as foreshadowing Henry's fate, is a case in point, for he is playing train. Recalling the nineteenth-century habit of likening black suffrage to a child's driving a train, we might feel that the novella begins not with a young boy's fantasy but with the politics of segregation.⁵ When Henry is removed from the burning house by “a young man who was a brakeman on the railway” (p. 26), or Reifsnyder and the engineer Bainbridge debate in chapter 14, it would be difficult not to suspect Crane of quietly establishing a meaningful pattern of detail.

The most suggestive appearance of this motif is in chapter 18, after Henry has been pursued through the streets of Whilomville and finally captured by the police. Concerned about growing unrest within the community and faced with a problem because “no charges [can] be made” (p. 48) against Henry, the chief of police visits Trescott, urging him to intervene and recalling the events of the previous evening: “He began to run, and a big crowd chased him, firing rocks. But he gave them the slip somehow down there by the foundry and in the railroad yard. We looked for him all night, but couldn't find him” (p. 48). While the chief's bafflement is credibly realistic, Henry's disappearance in the railroad yard is also a narrative correlative for his ambiguous legal status. The irony here is that the historical and allegorical (in this case ideological) senses of Crane's text contradict rather than reinforce one another. Henry Johnson the “monster” may represent a category outside the law and find refuge in the railway yard, but Henry Johnson the black man would have found that it was in the neighborhood of the railroad that his legal status was defined with the most punishing clarity.

Crane's references to the railroad are few enough that we might suppress historical and ideological irony in the name of realist common sense, but to do so would complicate rather than simplify the novella. Crane's decision to cast a physician as Henry's protector, fundamental to the story's conception, has a similar complicating irony, for the role the nineteenth-century medical community played in establishing and promulgating racist ideology is well documented. John Haller, for instance, notes that “throughout the late nineteenth century the physician remained the chief source of information for comparative race analysis”; on the basis of census numbers, crime statistics, and anthropometrical data such as cranial measurements, the members of the medical community found themselves “generally agreed on the condition of the Negro.”⁶ The grim consensus, to which Crane seems to allude when he locates Henry's accident in a physician's laboratory, was that the extinction of the black race was a certainty.

Trescott is not a proponent of scientific racism, and the broad irony of a doctor's acting as Henry's protector could be fortuitous; however, Crane hints that Trescott's reaction to Henry's destruction is shaped by his education as a physician. Upon learning that Henry is still within the burning building, the generally mild-mannered doctor lapses into a fit of rage: “These cries penetrated to the sleepy senses of Trescott, and he struggled with his captors, swearing, unknown to him and to them, all the deep blasphemies of his medical school days” (p. 26). The phrase “unknown to him and to them” may make the ironic point that the closest Trescott can come to “deep blasphemies” (or heroic resistance) is to mutter under his breath, but there is no doubt that Henry's fate returns Trescott to his medical school days. This academic history, which Trescott fails to recognize in the spectacle before him and Crane declines to detail, lies at the back of the doctor's determination to protect Henry and is presumably the source of the barely-suppressed emotion a “leonine” (p. 30) Trescott shows when Judge Hagenthorpe suggests that Henry should be allowed to die.

The doctor seems psychologically compelled rather than ideologically aware, but his dilemma, generally understood as an abstract problem about the competing demands of obligation and a need for acceptance in the social order, also reflects the discourse of race. One of the byproducts of nineteenth-century scientific racism was a critique of philanthropy that held that any attempt to resist the Darwinian certainty of black extinction was unintentional cruelty. William Benjamin Smith, for example, waxes naturalistic and elegiac as he presses the case against “racial immorality” in The Color Line (1905):

But even if it were possible for us to turn back the tide of time, to stay or slacken the rolling of the wheel of birth, would it be well or wise to do so? We venture to question it most seriously. There is a personal and even a social morality that may easily become racially immoral. There are diseases whose evolutionary function is to weed out the weak, and so preserve the future for the strong. The sufferers cannot be treated with too careful attention, too loving gentleness, too tender sympathy. It is the glory of our humanity to cherish these frail flowers, to water them with dew, to shield them from the sun, and not to suffer even the winds of summer to visit them too roughly. But not to gather from them the seed for generations to come! Let theirs be the present, but not the future. He who should discover some serum and apply it greatly to prolong their lives and give them equal chance with the vigorous in the matter of offspring, whatever thanks he might win from individuals or the community, would deserve and receive the execration of his race as its deadliest and most invidious foe. So too, we hold it to be certain that all forms of humanitarianism that tend to give the organically inferior an equal chance with the superior in the propagation of the species are radically mistaken.⁷

The disconnection between tenor and vehicle in this cloying endorsement of genocide may strain belief, but its floral and medical imagery are reminiscent of “The Monster,” as is The Color Line's concern with the problem of monstrousness. Smith presupposes black regression, imagines miscegenation as a Frankensteinian “serum,” and predicts that the humanitarian will become a moral monster worthy of the “execration of his race,” but couches his argument in an insistently naturalistic rhetoric which, while perhaps meant as a palliative for a Christian audience, is more distressing than any straightforward declaration of racist intention would have been. Smith's attack on misguided sympathy illuminates the ideological subtext in the crucial conversation between Trescott and Judge Hagenthorpe in “The Monster”:

There was in Trescott's face at once a look of recognition, as if in this tangent of the judge he saw an old problem. He merely sighed and answered, “Who knows?” The words were spoken in a deep tone that gave them an elusive kind of significance.

The judge retreated to the cold manner of the bench. “Perhaps we may not talk with propriety of this kind of action, but I am induced to say that you are performing a questionable charity in preserving this negro's life. As near as I can understand, he will hereafter be a monster, a perfect monster, and probably with an affected brain. No man can observe you as I have observed you and not know that it was a matter of conscience with you, but I am afraid, my friend, that it is one of the blunders of virtue.”

(p. 31)

The “old problem” is less scientific hubris or simple euthanasia than the familiar race question. Trescott and Hagenthorpe consider the specific case of Henry Johnson, maimed by an accident, but their conversation moves within the precincts of a larger system of belief in which black regression and eventual extinction were givens. When the judge makes the chilly determination that Trescott would be “performing a questionable charity in preserving this negro's life,” it is difficult not to hear the racist critique of philanthropy in the background.

The real bone of contention for racist ideologues was miscegenation or, as Smith puts it, “the matter of offspring,” and Crane's carefully-constructed ethical dilemma traps Trescott in just this sort of sacrificial logic. The doctor may acknowledge that his son's survival requires the destruction of a black man, or he may resist and follow a quixotic “blunder of virtue” to its logical and “monstrous” conclusion, but escape the dilemma he cannot. Or so we might infer from Trescott's halting account of his obligation: “What am I to do? He gave himself for—for Jimmie” (p. 32). Trescott's sense that his dilemma somehow involves a choice between Henry and Jimmie is inchoate; however, his limited capacity for insight here is consistent with his regressive rage during the fire and suggests a limit to the novella's critique: Trescott is at odds with the race analysis offered by his profession (and ratified by the law), but he cannot offer any sort of positive alternative.

Henry's plight restages the “monstrousness” of black regression, and Trescott's “blunder of virtue” is a version of the philanthropy attacked by racists; “The Monster” also investigates the central axiom of segregationist thought, namely, the construction of the black male as sexual predator. Henry's first tryst with Bella Farragut, for instance, is an exercise in low comedy which prepares for the grotesqueries of chapter 17, but this should not keep us from seeing that the central fact about Henry, at least so far as the community outside the Trescott household is concerned, is his sexuality. Similarly, the scene with the men in the barbershop allows Crane to establish Henry's dandyism without resorting to the inflammatory expedient of parading him before a group of white women.⁸ The obliquity of these scenes is of a piece with the latter stages of the novella, where Crane equivocates about whether the men or the women of Whilomville are most disturbed by Henry's disfigurement.

The event that most clearly links Henry to the sexual politics of segregation is his appearance at Theresa Page's party and subsequent flight through the streets of Whilomville. Henry is pursued by a stone-throwing crowd which includes men, women, and children, but the narrative dwells on the fear he inspires in women such as Bella Farragut, her mother, and the nameless Irish girl in the street. Henry's attempt to return to the community establishes a narrative trajectory which takes us from a party for a little white girl to a jail cell with a crowd gathered outside, a trajectory that just barely skirts the familiar scenario of a rape followed by a lynching.

The one recorded lynching of a black man in New York state in the last decade of the nineteenth century occurred in Port Jervis, Crane's hometown and the real-world model for Whilomville. While there is no direct evidence for Crane's whereabouts on June 2, 1892 or confirmation that he joined “Judge” William Crane in resisting the mob that lynched Robert Lewis for allegedly raping a white woman, it would seem beyond doubt that he knew of the lynching.⁹ On June 3, the day after the lynching, a front-page story appearing in the New-York Tribune under the headline “Mob Law in New-York” recounted the lynching, concluding melodramatically: “A noose was adjusted about his neck, and he was strung up to a neighboring tree in the presence of a howling mob of over a thousand people.”¹⁰ Damage control began almost immediately, and a much longer article appeared in the next day's paper, featuring the outrage of prominent citizens, promises of swift justice, and a spirited defense of the town by Mayor O. P. Howell: “We all deplore the lynching, as every decent citizen should. … Port Jervis is a thriving, growing place, and it is to be regretted that a disreputable mob should defy the officers of the law and commit a murder.”¹¹ Editorials on June 4 and 5, the latter of which may have been written by the younger Townley Crane, echoed Howell, and the coverage of the proceedings of the coroner's jury, which began in a front-page article on June 7, featured testimony from a police officer who had been overpowered by the mob as well as continuing assurances that the identities of many of the culprits were known and indictments imminent.¹² Yet the tide shifted quickly, and on June 10 a brief article declared that the coroner's jury probably would not implicate anyone in the lynching. On June 11, 1892, the Tribune printed the finding of the coroner's jury verbatim and without comment: “Robert Lewis came to his death in Port Jervis, June 2, by being hung by the neck by a person or persons unknown to this jury.”¹³

These newspaper articles indicate that the hypocritical intolerance of Crane's Whilomville is a good representation of the original article. Significantly, the affair was more one of intersectional public relations than race relations for Crane's contemporaries. The Atlanta Constitution mentioned the Lewis lynching in a brief editorial taking a dig at Northern criticism of Southern justice, and the June 7 Tribune article noted that Mayor Howell had been “fairly deluged with ‘crank’ letters from all parts of the country.” This snickering about a Northern “negro problem” suggests a ready and even gleeful cynicism on the part of Crane's contemporaries, but it is also indicative of a general cultural anxiety. There were forces at work in America in the 1890s that might erupt at a moment's notice and without regard for place or civic virtue.

The mixed messages of the lynching debate are recapitulated in twentieth-century universalizing accounts of Crane's novella, the primary difference being that we gloss over the uneasy repressions in the historical record. While Crane's contemporaries were unable to do the kind of cultural analysis that would let them link outbreaks of “lawlessness” with larger social and racial tensions, we seem to think the question too obvious to ask. Given the context of the Lewis lynching, might not the effect of “The Monster” be one of defamiliarization? Unless we want to see Crane's strategy as acquiescence at one remove, or, worse, a way of corroborating the analysis of his contemporaries, we have to assume that it was a critical gesture. The distance between the Lewis lynching and Crane's story could be reassuring, implying that a Southern eruption of racial violence in a town like Port Jervis was nothing more than an accident or a freak of nature; or it could be an oddly-veiled rehearsal of a painful scandal suggesting that the race problem had not yet been “faced.”

The conventional biographical reading is that the model for Henry Johnson was Levi Hume, who hauled ashes in Port Jervis and had a face disfigured by cancer.¹⁴ Simply to equate Henry Johnson and Levi Hume, however, not only depends on a largely uncritical endorsement of mimesis, as if Henry's facelessness were a simple equivalent to cancer, but it also seems inappropriate, for a story dramatizing the alienating effects of facelessness perhaps should not be so transparent in its historical references. Crane's belief that “The Monster” would be upsetting to the residents of Port Jervis, which he voiced in a letter to his brother, makes little sense if the story documents only the plight of a cancer victim ostracized by his community.¹⁵ A recent lynching would be greater cause for embarrassment. If not, we would have to assume that Crane's blindness was greater than we have imagined, that he was incapable of seeing any racial component in either the plight of Levi Hume or the lynching of Robert Lewis. Inasmuch as “The Monster” is clearly about race, and Henry's disfigurement is a rather studied example of what Fried describes as the “scene of writing” in Crane's work, we might do well to look for a more rather than a less complex solution to the problem of the historical referentiality of Crane's text. A more complex account might have it that Crane's conflation of a cancer patient and a lynching victim, though appearing to duplicate the medical and scientific account of race, marks a tension in his thoroughgoing naturalism. If Crane superimposes Levi Hume on Robert Lewis, effacing the racial content of his story and subordinating politics to biology, “The Monster” nonetheless details the anguish of a physician, and this anguish, which aligns Crane's art with the agon of resisting a naturalistic universe of death and disease, underscores his dissent from the consequences (if not the premises) of the naturalistic politics ratified by the findings of comparative race analysis.

That Crane's text alludes to the Lewis lynching, and does so quite warily, could be deduced from its treatment of journalism as Johnson lies injured in Judge Hagenthorpe's house after the fire:

The reporter of the Morning Tribune rode thither [to Judge Hagenthorpe's house] on his bicycle every hour until three o'clock. …

The morning paper announced the death of Henry Johnson. It contained a long interview with Edward J. Hannigan, in which the latter described in full the performance of Johnson at the fire. There was also an editorial built from all the best words in the vocabulary of the staff. The town halted in its accustomed road of thought, and turned a reverent attention to the memory of this hostler. In the breasts of many people was the regret that they had not known enough to give him a hand and a lift when he was alive, and they judged themselves stupid and ungenerous for this failure.

(pp. 29-30)

The premature report of Henry's death is striking, for the New-York Tribune was equally careless in its initial coverage of the Lewis lynching, referring to Lewis on June 3 as “Williams” and “Jackson.” While nineteenth-century newspapers were not as factually or typographically precise as their modern counterparts, this error is of a piece with the more disturbing banality that at least one other black man was nearly lynched in Lewis's stead.¹⁶ For either a lynching or its reporting, one black would do as well as another; and Crane's outlandish conceit of a man with no face, which the Morning Tribune inaccurately but rightly constructs as death, is a fitting representation of the racial status quo.

Inasmuch as Crane was a contributor to the New-York Tribune and worked summers from 1888 to 1892 at his brother Townley's news agency, it is reasonable to imagine that he was familiar with the coverage the Lewis lynching received. On this reading, the error in the Morning Tribune is both a sign of the times and an intertextual marker. The general shape of the fictional Johnson coverage, which includes a factual write-up, an interview, and an editorial, is reminiscent of the historical Lewis coverage, in which an initial story was followed by articles consisting primarily of interviews with persons close to the event and some editorializing. While any important event in a relatively small town might have been written up in this fashion, the New-York Tribune coverage of the Lewis lynching casts an odd shadow on Crane's apparently generic send-up of contemporary journalism. The hourly updates and civic boosterism mentioned in the Morning Tribune become all the more self-serving when set against the efforts of an embarrassed Port Jervis community at damage control. That the townspeople of Whilomville wish they had done more for Henry while he was alive becomes less a cynical commonplace of human psychology than a cutting allusion to the failure of the Port Jervis community in the face of mob violence. The phrase “a hand and a lift when he was alive,” which is at once an underestimation of Henry's initial status in the community and a redundant way of saying “help,” might be understood as a macabre glance at the mechanics of lynching.

The proposition that “The Monster” should be read against the backdrop of the Lewis lynching has a variety of interpretive advantages, not the least being that it makes the novella more culturally meaningful. Furthermore, Crane's experience might have predisposed him to weigh his culture's construction of race. It takes no love of psychology to imagine, assuming the story is reliable, that the experience of seeing a white woman stabbed by her black lover in the summer of 1884 had an effect on the twelve-year old Crane.¹⁷ The subject matter of Crane's first signed piece, a sketch of Henry Stanley published in 1890, suggests that race inhabited Crane's earliest sense of authorial vocation. While most adolescent boys like stories of travel and adventure, the life of the explorer appears to have interested the young Crane and might have shaped an (unconsciously) evolving literary program: much as Stanley explored and wrote of the exotic reaches of Africa, so too Crane would shortly find his métier by venturing into and describing the slums of New York.

That this “other” for Crane could be specifically black, rather than simply fallen, as were women like Dora Clark, could be inferred from “The King's Favor.” Published in May of 1891 in the Syracuse University Herald, “The King's Favor” is the story of Albert Thies, a tenor who performs for the Zulu King Cetewayo and, in recompense, is offered the King's wife.¹⁸ While the sketch's humor seems forced, its interest in miscegenation is reminiscent of a letter Crane wrote to Virginian Armistead Boland on February 16, 1892: “So you lack females of the white persuasion, do you? How unfortunate! And how extraordinary! I never thought the world would come to such a pass. … Just read the next few lines in a whisper:—I—I think black is quite good—if—it is yellow and young.”¹⁹ Crane's self-dramatization speaks volumes about what he considered transgressive, and still another early story suggests that he explored the issues of black regression and miscegenation in a consciously inflammatory fashion. Written in February of 1895, rejected by Harper's, and ultimately destroyed by Crane, “Vashti in the Dark” was reportedly the story of a Methodist preacher who kills himself after learning that his wife has been raped by a black in a forest.²⁰ “Vashti in the Dark” does not survive, of course, and the story concerning the summer of 1884 may be apocryphal, but these events can be read as consistent with a larger pattern.²¹ If it is going too far to say that the shadow of race fell across Crane's adolescence and literary career, serving, perhaps, as the unstated premise of The Red Badge of Courage, the letter to Boland implies at least a prurient interest in miscegenation.

A somewhat more philosophical version of this interest is central to the argument of “The Monster.” We need not read Crane's psycho-biography into the interstices of the narrative to see that the novella investigates miscegenation and gives the sexual component of this problem an oedipal inflection. Trescott's dilemma, his inchoate sense that Jimmie and Henry must either perish or prosper together, allows us, as Joseph Church has suggested, to put the cultural analysis of “The Monster” in the form of a question: in a society dependent on the institution of black infantilism, how are white boys are to become men?²² This question emerges from the oddly-textured opening scenes of the novella, where Jimmie has an accident and destroys a peony. Noting that the flower “would only hang limply from his hand” (p. 9) and explaining that Jimmie “felt some kind of desire to efface himself” (p. 11), Crane invites the suspicion that Jimmie suffers from castration anxiety and links the boy's dilemma with Henry's later fate, thus overdetermining the story from the start. What presumably allows Jimmie to satisfy his desire without having to efface himself is Henry's availability as a scapegoat. Particularly suggestive in this regard is Henry's admonition to Jimmie lest he get wet washing the wagon: “Look out, boy! look out! You done gwi' spile your pants. I raikon your mommer don't 'low this foolishness, she know it. I ain't gwi' have you round yere spilin' your pants, an' have Mis' Trescott light on me pressen'ly. 'Deed I ain't” (p. 12). Not only does this passage suggest that the black man might function as a substitute in oedipal fantasy, but Crane's use of the verb “light” confounds cause and effect and is a brilliant intuition of the contradiction in a culture which demanded sexual maturity on the part of white males while forcing black men to remain “boys.” The mother's act of “lighting” on the black man may be read as cause: Henry's ambiguously adult status makes him available as a substitute in oedipal fantasy, leading the boy to spoil his pants. Or it may be read as effect: because the boy's fantasy is interrupted by a mother who “lights” on the black man, the act of oedipal repression is coterminous with the violation of racial propriety.

The color line was a central problem of the American 1890s, and my aim in this excursus to the Lewis lynching, the young Crane's experience of race, and the opening of the novella has been to argue that “The Monster” should be read in the context of contemporary debates about miscegenation and segregation. While some of the evidence is conjectural, consideration of Crane's treatment of Henry's accident will make the large picture less speculative. What I suggest is that the appearance of the “fairy lady” in Dr. Trescott's laboratory replays the fantasy of Mrs. Trescott's “lighting” on Henry. Both moments raise the issue of miscegenation indirectly, but to read them in tandem gives the novella a thematic center, and the obliquity of Crane's procedure is of a piece with his cautious treatment of the sexual component of Henry's dandyism. If the linkage between racial and psychological narratives in the opening of the novella seems idiosyncratic or peculiar to Crane, the climactic scene in which Henry reprises his role as Jimmie's protector is more culturally analytic.

The ideological strands surrounding the central event of the novella nevertheless take some untangling. Crane's narrative is a disabling fiction, for it not only recounts Henry's disfiguring and disabling accident but also highlights the vexed relationship between history and ideology in the novella. Although the fact that Henry is destroyed in a burning building would seem to preempt any specifically historical, racial, or ideological reading of his situation, it is at this moment that Crane most overtly presents “The Monster” as political allegory. The crucial detail is the burning of an engraving hanging on the wall of the Trescott house: “In the hall a lick of flame had found the cord that supported ‘Signing the Declaration.’ The engraving slumped suddenly down at one end, and then dropped to the floor, where it burst with the sound of a bomb” (p. 21). Since Crane is sparing in his use of the Howellsian realistic detail, and a phrase like “the sound of a bomb” is not credibly verisimilar, the detail implies an interpretation of American history that smuggles a political and specifically racial subtext into the fiction that Henry's accidental facelessness is the reason there is no place for him in Whilomville.

That the burning of this engraving is meant both to foreshadow the central event of the story and to anchor it in a political context becomes more apparent in light of the likely historical original of this fictional image. Crane is not specific, but any engraving of the Signers present in a late nineteenth-century home probably would have been a mass-produced reproduction of John Trumbull's famous painting accompanied by a “Key” or chart identifying each figure in the picture.²³ Both Trumbull's painting and the “Keys” accompanying reproductions of it had the effect of calling attention to both the factitiousness of political myth and the precariousness of identity in the very gesture of memorializing the patriarchs of American history. At the time of the painting's composition, for instance, there was acrimonious debate about whether to include all the Signers or just those present on July 4. While Trumbull was not troubled about modifying history for the sake of myth, his decision to include all of the Signers left him with a variety of practical problems, and many of his portraits were based on the work of other artists. On at least two occasions, he resorted to the expedient of using sons of the original Signers as models. The “Durand Key” of 1823 and the “Mercein Key” of 1826, which were the most famous of the early “Keys” and based on Trumbull's original identifications, actually mislabel several figures. As this history suggests, the timeless mimetic present/presence of painterly mythology was in need of some discursive help.

Generally consisting of a row of numbered heads with a corresponding list of names, the “Keys” imply that one's countenance secures one's person and depend on a synecdochical logic that is clearly appropriate to Crane's “The Monster.”²⁴ More than a generic complaint about the cultural contradictions surrounding the declaration “all men are created equal,” Crane's allusion to the Declaration establishes a relay between Henry's facelessness and the overdetermined visages of the Signers and critiques the logic of historical commemoration. If the faces of the Signers are numbered to preserve their identities, this is rather different from the numeration, for example, which led Frederick Hoffman in 1896 to urge the Prudential Life Insurance Company of America not to insure blacks. Subject to the incursions of both segregation and a world of statistical persons, Henry is a man whose “facelessness” dislocates a timeless myth into the realities of late nineteenth-century America.²⁵ The most trenchant irony in Crane's procedure is that Henry's situation is the truth of the matter. Barring the intervention of the “Keys,” the faces of the Signers are effectively blank or unrecognizable. Henry's facelessness reveals that what distinguishes him from the patriarchs of American history is what we make of him. What we make of these men, however, through slavery and segregation or the biographical and autographical cults of the Signers, is not so much a universal drama as it is the stuff of history.

That Crane might have been predisposed to see these ambiguities is quite likely. Although Townley Crane's letter of November 2, 1871, announcing Stephen's birth and explaining that he had been named for the ancestor “who signed the Declaration,” is either Beer's fabrication or simply erroneous, the Cranes were proud to trace their lineage back to the days of the Revolution and the Stephen Crane who was a member of the Continental Congress.²⁶ Responding in December of 1896 to John Hilliard's request for biographical information, for instance, Crane showed a suggestive scrupulousness about the family history, writing of his ancestor: “he was sent by New Jersey to the Continental Congress and he served in that body until just about a week before the Declaration was signed.”²⁷ If not quite family romance, this does seem the “aching missed opportunity” described by one biographer.²⁸ Given Crane's investment in the Revolution and its ethos, his lapidary account of the burning of “Signing the Declaration” is less an instance of the realism of detail than a “signature” moment in which Crane swaps personal belatedness for the aggressive insights of modernity. Were we to see the link between Henry's face and the faces of the Signers as an instance of Crane's obsession with the motif of the “upturned face,” we could argue that this brief allusion marks the point at which textuality confounds the distinction between history and ideology.

What Crane's allusion does more obviously is register a protest; like the attorneys for Homer Plessy, he pits the promise of the Declaration against the encroachments of segregation. Yet this complaint is complicated by an admixture of historical pessimism, as becomes clear when Crane again intrudes to underscore the political dimension of his story: “He was submitting, submitting because of his fathers, bending his mind in a most perfect slavery to this conflagration” (p. 23). While the allusion to Henry's fathers conjures up a specific historical moment, his “slavery” seems more metaphorical and psychological than historical, and the logic of this often-discussed indictment of slavery is that of a political naturalism more naturalistic than political. The facts of history fade, but their legacy, whether construed in the language of deterministic psychology or genetics, remains. Thus it is not surprising that Crane thoroughly divests Henry's actions of heroism (e.g., “His legs gained a frightful faculty of bending sideways” [p. 23]). This may be the “passion and irony” we have come to see as a distinctive feature of Crane's art, but the balance of the evidence is that Henry's capacity for heroism is limited, and limited primarily because of race. Indeed, a similar notion of diminished capacity can be discerned in the way the citizens of Whilomville react to Henry—a rite de passage which Crane codes, with varying degrees of explicitness, in terms of heroism. Although we are told that Henry frightens everyone (the universalizing point), what we see for the most part is the fear Henry inspires in white children and black adults (a more local notion of black infantilism).

In saying as much, however, I do not want to suggest that Crane was not deeply invested in his story, or that “The Monster” exists merely to confirm some axiom about black inferiority. That the protagonists of “The Monster” and The Red Badge of Courage have the same first name and similar fates—Henry Fleming dies while trying to rescue some horses from a burning building—suggests that Crane was working through his deepest imaginative concerns.²⁹ What we view as acquiescence in racial stereotyping might have seemed nothing more than a remorselessly consistent naturalism to Crane. The naturalistic suggestion that Henry is unlikely to escape his unfortunate patrimony may qualify the complaint in Crane's allusion to the Declaration, but it does not nullify it. Nor do Crane's ironies dilute the meaning of a scene which is meant as an allegorical miniature of American racial history: Henry resists and triumphs over the legacy of his slave fathers only to be destroyed by Reconstruction and the rise of segregation.

If Crane's naturalism made it easy for him to blunt the political implications of his story, Crane's analysis is no less incisive for its caginess. The phantasmagoric description of the accident in Dr. Trescott's laboratory, the central event of the novella, is a case in point.

The room was like a garden in the region where might be burning flowers. Flames of violet, crimson, green, blue, orange, and purple were blooming everywhere. There was one blaze that was precisely the hue of a delicate coral. In another place was a mass that lay merely in phosphorescent inaction like a pile of emeralds. But all these marvels were to be seen dimly through clouds of heaving, turning, deadly smoke.

Johnson halted for a moment on the threshold. He cried out again in the negro wail that had in it the sadness of the swamps. Then he rushed across the room. An orange-colored flame leaped like a panther at the lavender trousers. This animal bit deeply into Johnson. There was an explosion at one side, and suddenly before him there reared a delicate, trembling sapphire shape like a fairy lady. With a quiet smile she blocked his path and doomed him and Jimmie. Johnson shrieked, and then ducked in the manner of his race in fights. He aimed to pass under the left guard of the sapphire lady. But she was swifter than eagles, and her talons caught in him as he plunged past her. Bowing his head as if his neck had been struck, Johnson lurched forward, twisting this way and that way. He fell on his back. The still form in the blanket flung from his arms, rolled to the edge of the floor and beneath the window.

Johnson had fallen with his head at the base of an old-fashioned desk. There was a row of jars upon the top of this desk. For the most part they were silent amid this rioting, but there was one which seemed to hold a scintillant and writhing serpent. Suddenly the glass splintered, and a rubyred snakelike thing poured its thick length out upon the top of the desk. It coiled and hesitated, and then began to swim a languorous way down the mahogany slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down into Johnson's upturned face.

(p. 24)

This is Crane at his most mystified and mystifying. While the writerly extravagance in this oneiric account of a chemical accident dazzles, distracts, and implicitly makes great claims for art, imagery overdetermined enough to find a woman in a cloud of gas must have a point. A glowing garden, a mysterious woman, and a destructive serpent mark a version of the Eden story, but for Crane slavery and racial injustice constitute the American fall from grace. Recalling that a series of racist ideologues from Buckner Payne (a.k.a. “Ariel”) in 1867 to Charles Carroll in 1902 maintained that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was none other than the “Negro,”³⁰ we might suspect that Crane, the skeptical son of a preacher, took a certain satisfaction in exposing self-serving credulity.

A closer estimate of Crane's act of historical re-cognition, though, could probably be had by comparing his scene with the following passage from The Color Line:

Flood and fire, fever and famine and the sword—even ignorance, indolence and carpet-baggery—she may endure and conquer while her blood remains pure; but once taint the well-spring of her life, and all is lost—even honour itself. It is this immediate jewel of her soul that the South watches with such a dragon eye, that she guards with more than vestal vigilance, with a circle of perpetual fire. The blood thereof is thereof; he who would defile it would stab her in her heart of heart, and she springs to repulse him with the fiercest instinct of self-preservation.

(The Color Line, p. 63)

While it was not novel to call the South a woman or sexual purity a jewel, this passage's imagery of fire, jewels, a woman, and a dragon is reminiscent of “The Monster.” Smith's personification, of course, is less a private fiction than an example of the anxiety documented in historian W. J. Cash's classic analysis of the “feminization” of the South during Reconstruction.³¹ The “fairy lady” who appears before Henry is presumably her relative, Crane's version of the post-Reconstruction South, if not the nation as a whole. Indeed, the description of Henry after he is caught in the woman's “talons”—the justice of the American eagle supplanted by the lex talionis?—seems almost a subliminal reminder of what happened to black men caught in the insidious web of segregationist racial and sexual politics: “Bowing his head as if his neck had been struck, Johnson lurched forward, twisting this way and that way.”

Henry Johnson is “effaced” rather than literally lynched, and his story is the more meaningful for it. The verisimilar narrative of a man ostracized by his community, “The Monster” is shadowed by a story of the ideological construction and marginalization of black Americans. Because Henry is trapped in a doctor's laboratory, we are reminded of the role science and medicine played in validating and consolidating racism in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Because it is Henry's face that is disfigured, we realize that his life, unlike the hallowed biographies of the Signers, is imperiled by a “scene of writing” that is nothing less than coextensive with the founding of the nation.

This dissenting subtext is not so much something we might arbitrarily impose on Crane's phantasmagoric effects as it is an essential feature of the novella's conception and structure. If a series of brief but cogent allusions to the railroad remind us that we are in the world of Plessy, Crane's decision to cast a physician as Henry's protector points up the central motive of the story, namely, the testing of the logic of racial euthanasia. In this respect “The Monster” is a twice-told tale and makes the trenchant observation that black extinction is no more natural than a fire in a laboratory. Were we to assume some commerce between theory and practice, between the scientific findings of comparative race analysis and the business end of a rope, the novella could also be understood as a restaging of the Lewis lynching. Henry's facelessness is not an immediately apparent vehicle for such an idea, but any analysis of “The Monster” must answer the following question: Why does Henry's attempt to save Jimmie lead to an encounter with the “fairy lady”? One response is that in the American of the 1890s a black man's heroism consisted precisely of the impossible attempt to overcome the sexual politics of segregation. On this reading, the defamiliarizing effect of the fiction of Henry's facelessness is both a strategic necessity and a critical gesture: it allows Crane to broach sensitive issues without antagonizing a largely white readership and simultaneously implies that a town concerned with decency and the rule of law did not entirely know what it was about.

Yet if Crane's novella is the recognition of both a general ideological proposition (black extinction) and a specific event (the Lewis lynching), the fiction of having a black man rescue a white child still seems an odd way of getting at the problem of miscegenation. Part of the rationale for Crane's strategy could be deduced by recalling that The Color Line is sub-titled A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn. While ideologues like Smith argue that racial euthanasia will benefit children, “The Monster” reverses this: because Henry's attempt to rescue Jimmie and his attempt to escape Trescott's lab overlap, Jimmie's survival is not only dependent on the intervention of a black man, but this act of intervention is synonymous with resistance to the premise of racial extinction. A slightly different reading, however, one that more completely registers the obliquity of Crane's procedure, might emphasize the related issues of Trescott's blindness and Henry's motivation. After all, Trescott's inability to see beyond his dilemma is matched only by Henry's certainty that there is no dilemma at all: regardless of the risk, Jimmie must be saved. The most vexing and intriguing lacuna of the novella, Henry's determination to rescue Jimmie is a “mystery of heroism” and the unarticulated premise of “The Monster.”

While Henry is doubtless motivated by affection for Jimmie and loyalty to the Trescott family, more suggestive is the fact that it is his sudden recollection of a “little private staircase” linking an upper-story bedroom with the laboratory below which allows him to escape his “slavish” submission to the flames. We can account for these events in realist fashion, arguing that a servant would be familiar with the layout of a home but not too familiar with what is presumably the master bedroom, yet Crane's adjective “slavish,” his most overt allusion to slavery, gives Henry's retrieval of a repressed memory a political dimension. Indeed, that Henry's liberating recollection of private passages in the Trescott home happens at about the same time the doctor, outside the home, revisits the repressed “blasphemies of his medical school days” would seem to confirm that his escape through bedroom and laboratory reconnoitres the territory of reproduction, eugenics, and miscegenation. But it takes a great deal of work to see as much. One senses that the remorseless cultural analysis of “The Monster” wavers before the dark continent of oedipal drama, that what we might call Crane's primal scene of miscegenation is finally more psychological than political. Yet this too is arguably an American problem, for D. H. Lawrence warned us long ago of the difficulties in reading a literature comprised of “children's books.” If “The Monster” shares the adolescent emphasis of much of Crane's fiction, and seems too cagey (or irresolute) in its ideological negotiations, it is nonetheless a searching treatment of the American race question.

Notes

1. For scholarship on “The Monster,” see R. W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A Critical Bibliography (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1972), and Patrick K. Dooley, Stephen Crane: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Scholarship (New York: G.K. Hall, 1992), pp. 204-9. A good New Critical reading is Thomas Gullason, “The Symbolic Unity of ‘The Monster,’” [Modern Language Notes; hereafter MLN] 75 (1960), 663-68.

2. Patrick K. Dooley, The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 97-102; Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 93-161; Lee Clark Mitchell, “Face, Race and Disfiguration in Stephen Crane's The Monster,” [Critical Inquiry; hereafter CritI] 17 (1990), 174-92.

3. Stephen Crane, “The Monster,” Tales of Whilomville, Volume 7 of The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers, intro. J. C. Levenson (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1969), p. 16. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

4. For discussions of “The Monster” that consider the problem of race see, in addition to Mitchell, Ralph Ellison, “Introduction,” “The Red Badge of Courage” and Four Great Stories by Stephen Crane (New York: Dell, 1960), pp. 23-24; R. W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A Biography (New York: George Braziller, 1968), pp. 332-34; Catherine Juanita Starke, Black Portraiture in American Fiction: Stock Characters, Archetypes, and Individuals (New York and London: Basic Books, 1971), pp. 160-62; Charles W. Mayer, “Social Forms vs. Human Brotherhood in Crane's The Monster,” Ball State University Forum 14, no. 3 (1973), 29-37; John Cooley, “‘The Monster’—Stephen Crane's ‘Invisible Man,’” Markham Review 5 (1975), 10-14; David Halliburton, The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 182-200; Stanley Wertheim, “Stephen Crane's The Monster as Fiction and Film,” in William Carlos Williams, Stephen Crane, Philip Freneau: Papers and Poems Celebrating New Jersey's Literary Heritage, ed. John W. Bauer (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1989), pp. 97-105. One of the better treatments of race and history is Malcolm Foster's “The Black Crepe Veil: The Significance of Stephen Crane's The Monster,” International Fiction Review 3 (1976), 87-91. The crucial intersection of race and psychology is discussed by John Berryman, Stephen Crane (New York: William Sloane, 1950), pp. 191-96, 305-13, and Joseph Church, “The Black Man's Part in Crane's Monster,” American Imago 45 (1989), 375-88.

5. That this metaphor was a commonplace of cultural analysis, limited to neither the ideological terrain of the ultra-racist nor the geography of the American South, is suggested by a lecture delivered at Oxford shortly after the turn of the century: “But the Backward race may be really unfit to exercise political power. … The familiar illustration of the boy put to drive a locomotive might in some communities be no extreme way of describing the risks a democracy runs when the suffrage is granted to a large mass of half-civilized men.” James Bryce, The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind (1902), repr. in Racial Determinism and the Fear of Miscegenation, Post-1900, Vol. 8 of John David Smith, ed., Anti-Black Thought, 1863-1925, 11 vols. (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 36. This example is particularly compelling because Bryce was both a liberal and the foremost interpreter of America in Victorian England.

6. John S. Haller, Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 50, 68. See especially pp. 4068, “The Physician versus the Negro.”

7. William Benjamin Smith, The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (1905), repr. in Racial Determinism and the Fear of Miscegenation, Post-1900, Vol. 8 of Anti-Black Thought, pp. 244-45.

8. In “The Knife,” for instance, Henry's dandyism is explicitly denoted as sexual prowess: “Peter Washington was one of the industrious class who occupied a position of distinction for he surely spent his money on personal decoration. On occasion, he could dress better than the mayor of Whilomville himself, or at least in more colors, which was the main thing to the minds of his admirers. His ideal had been the late gallant Henry Johnson whose conquests in Watermelon Alley as well as in the hill shanties had proved him the equal if not the superior of any Pullman-car porter in the country.” Tales of Whilomville, Vol. 7 of The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, p. 185.

9. Robert Lewis was hanged in a tree in front of the Reformed church across from the home of “Judge” William Crane, Stephen's brother. One of the few men to resist the mob, William Crane was called on during the inquest, and his testimony was reported in the Port Jervis Evening Gazette. For a reprinting of this article, see Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871-1900 (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), p. 73. For details of the affair, as well as Crane's possible involvement, see Stallman, A Biography, pp. 10-11, 564-65.

10. “Mob Law in New York,” New-York Tribune, June 3, 1892, p. 1.

11. “The Lynching Denounced,” New-York Tribune, June 4, 1892, p. 1.

12. “Naming the Lynchers,” New-York Tribune, June 7, 1892, p. 11. For the attribution of the June 5th editorial to Townley Crane, Jr., see Stallman, A Biography, pp. 564-65.

13. “The Port Jervis Lynching Case,” New-York Tribune, June 10, 1892, p. 11; and “The Port Jervis Lynching,” New-York Tribune, June 11, 1982, p. 8.

14. See, for instance, Stallman, A Biography, pp. 13, 333.

15. For the anticipated reaction in Port Jervis to “The Monster,” see The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, 2 vols., ed. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), No. 479. Hereafter cited as Correspondence.

16. See “The Lynching Denounced,” New-York Tribune, June 4, 1892, p. 1.

17. Stallman, A Biography, p. 10. Although it has become the standard reference, Stallman's biography is not entirely reliable. For commentary about the state of Crane biography, and this incident in particular, see Wertheim and Sorrentino, Log, pp. xvii-xxv. See also Wertheim and Sorrentino, “Thomas Beer: The Clay Feet of Stephen Crane Biography,” [American Literary Realism; hereafter ALR] 2, no. 3 (1990), 2-16, and John Clendenning, “Stephen Crane and His Biographers: Beer, Berryman, Schoberlin, and Stallman,” ALR 28, no. 1 (1995), 23-57.

18. For a psychoanalytic treatment of the story, see Berryman, pp. 306-7.

19. Correspondence, No. 10.

20. Because the story did not survive, its existence is speculative. See Stallman, A Biography, pp. 426, 602, and A Critical Bibliography, p. 228.

21. Berryman's discussion in Stepehn Crane (pp. 297-325) of how the young Crane thought about race warrants revisiting; his analysis has the virtue of recognizing and attempting to account for the most highly-charged recurrent metaphors in Crane's writing.

22. For the linkage between race and psychology, see Berryman, pp. 191-96, 305-13, and Church, esp. pp. 379-81.

23. On Trumbull, see Theodore Sizer, The Works of Colonel John Trumbull: Artist of the Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), and Irma B. Jaffe, John Trumbull: Patriot-Artist of the American Revolution (Boston: New York Graphics Society, 1975).

24. There are later “Keys” to Trumbull's painting in which the individual's face is omitted entirely and replaced with a numbered oval. Yet the earliest of these “Keys,” or at least the earliest I have been able to track down, dates from circa 1925.

25. For the realist project of “accounting for persons,” as well as illuminating remarks about Crane, see Mark Seltzer, “Statistical Persons,” Diacritics (Fall 1987), 82-98. Although statistics are not an explicit feature of The Monster, more than one critic has noticed that the novella is obsessively “about” numbers, and the motifs of counting and saving face come together in the idea of the countenance, motifs that appear in “Signing the Declaration.” Frederick Hoffman was a statistician for the Prudential Life Insurance Company, and his study, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, was published in 1896 by the American Economic Association. See Haller, pp. 60-68.

26. This mistaken bit of genealogy seems to have originated with Thomas Beer, Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), p. 35. See also Berryman, pp. 6-7, and Stallman, A Biography, p. 1. Townley Crane's diary entry for November 1, which does not make this error, is reprinted in Wertheim and Sorrentino, Log, pp. 2-3.

27. Correspondence, No. 169.

28. Christopher Benfey, The Double Life of Stephen Crane (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 52.

29. Crane kills off Henry Fleming in “The Veteran,” a brief story that first appeared in McClure's Magazine in August of 1896.

30. The primary texts can be found in The “Ariel” Controversy and The Biblical and “Scientific” Defense of Slavery, Vols. 5 and 6 of Anti-Black Thought.

31. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941).