[In the following essay, Feaster proposes a less cosmic reading of “The Blue Hotel” by looking at it through a specific cultural context.]

Critical commentary on Stephen Crane's “The Blue Hotel” during the past four decades provides an instructive example of the general dominance of interpretive critical methods that regard literary works, in the words of Jerome J. McGann, as “modeling rather than mirroring forms.” From this dominant a-historical (and at times rigidly antihistorical) viewpoint, literary works “do not point to a prior, authorizing reality (whether ‘realist’ or ‘idealist’), they themselves constitute—in both the active and the passive senses—what must be taken as reality (both ‘in fact’ and ‘in ideals’).”¹ Readings of Crane's provocative story of course differ widely in interpretive details; what they also share widely, however, is a strenuous formalist insistence that somehow it needs rescuing from the taint of “mere” referentiality.²

With the exception of a very few readings that have treated it as a story concerned largely with the passing of the Old West,³ the trend in interpretation of “The Blue Hotel,” consistent with what McGann has observed about interpretive strategies in general, has been to regard the story in rarified symbolic terms—as a “model” of reality, not a “mirror,” in which universal man plays out his destiny in a placeless and timeless context devoid of any “authorizing” historical circumstance. When the work is regarded as having any mirroring function at all, what it reflects (consider Bruce L. Grenberg's references to Crane's “religious and philosophical values,” for example) is approvingly regarded as transcending the trivially historical through achievement of some cosmic level of significance. While such readings may bring the story more in line with the “isolative sensibility” (the phrase is Daniel G. Hoffman's⁴) of Crane's poetry, they ignore certain of the universalizing versus particularizing distinctions inherent in the whole question of genre, isolate the story from other of Crane's works (fictional as well as journalistic) which, I will argue, are related intentionally, and, above all, dissociate the story from its specific and clarifying social ground. What I will argue, on the contrary, is that the issues of first order importance in “The Blue Hotel” are not cosmic but cultural, and as such are definable with reference to the complex social and economic factors, and accompanying ideology, that shaped the evolving frontier culture in which the story is set and of which Crane had exact “historical” experience. Whatever the cosmic implications of the story, and I would suggest that they are peripheral and slight, they cannot be wrenched free from these containing and shaping objective as well as subjective circumstances. Crane was hardly unique in his fascination with the western experience and its effects on the development of American character and moral identity. For Crane, as for others of his time, the Old West may have been dead, but this hardly lessened his interest in it as a site of alleged human progress.

I

“The Blue Hotel” was first published in 1898, just five years after Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address on the “Significance of the Frontier in American History” before the American Historical Association meeting at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That the Exposition was being held in Chicago at all, as Larzer Ziff observes, was a tacit acknowledgement that by the 1890s the center of commercial energy in the United States had shifted dramatically to the west. “Those who came to see the Exposition would also see Chicago,” Ziff writes, “and that young city, if it had no past to display, was at least equipped to give visitors a glimpse into the future and show them how things were done in a wide-awake commercial fashion.”⁵ Turner's purpose was to explain the whole complex process of social evolution involved in the civilizing of the American people and their institutions, to explain, in more specific terms, how the “complexity of city life” had evolved from “the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier.”⁶ As Crane would be just five years later, Turner was concerned (somewhat more optimistically than Crane) with the process by which American society evolved from “savagery” to “civilization.” For Crane, the process was far from complete.

The phenomenon of the Western frontier, according to Turner, has made our experience peculiarly American. For Turner, the development of that frontier was not accomplished by a simple process whereby the civilized was extended into and displaced the uncivilized. This may have been true of the Eastern experience, which occurred in a relatively limited geographical area, but such a theory hardly explains the complexity of social development in such large areas as those involved in the American West. According to Turner's thesis, settlement of these vast areas was characterized by successive returns to primitive conditions along an advancing frontier line. This meant that different stages in the evolution of social, political, and economic organization could be seen at any one time on the leeward side of that advancing line. Moreover, “as successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics.”⁷ A place like Nebraska, for example, would still possess certain displaced frontier characteristics even when it had ceased to be front-line frontier.

Turner's theory was meant to explain, and did so in idealistic and at times even poetic terms, the relationship between the American character and the harsh environment that had shaped it. But however eloquent Turner might have been in his description of the American character and the environmental press in which it developed, it is clear that his ideas were rooted very firmly in the practical realities of political economy. Indeed Turner's vaunted Individualism, as his biographer, Ray A. Billington, has pointed out, must be understood more as economic individualism than as some kind of ideal or heroic “distinctiveness.” As Billington somewhat trenchantly observes, “individualism in its distinctly American usage does not apply to the non-economic world,” a world in which, as a matter of fact, Americans tend to be decidedly conformist. “The legend of frontier individualism,” Billington goes on to say, “rested on what people thought should be true, rather than what was true. The West was in truth an area where cooperation was just as essential as in the more thickly settled East.”⁸ The inevitable conflict between an unrestrained individualism and the more complex cooperative needs of a settled society, as John Cawelti has shown in his Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, was a central feature in the development of the western formula.⁹ In a somewhat modified form, I will suggest, this conflict is equally central to the evolution of social organization depicted in “The Blue Hotel.” Of particular relevance in this context is that, for Turner, social evolution meant economic (even, more basically, commercial) evolution, development from a primitive hunting society up through various stages of trading, ranching, farming, to an urban manufacturing society, the highest form of social and economic organization, and precisely the kind of organization, according to Scully, that Fort Romper is well on its way to achieving.

Without attempting to show the utterly improbable, that “The Blue Hotel” is in any sense “influenced” by Turner's thesis, however influential that thesis in fact turned out to be, I nonetheless want to suggest that, like Turner, Crane is similarly concerned with fundamental issues of cultural evolution involved in development of the American West. Unlike the more idealistic Turner, however, the ironic Crane provides not only cultural description but cultural critique as well. The world of “The Blue Hotel,” microcosmic in a socio-cultural sense, provides an ideologically rich ethnographic portrait of a culture caught at a significant moment of social and economic development and, ultimately, of moral failure.

II

Stephen Crane's only direct experience of Nebraska was acquired during a brief tour of the West, Southwest, and Mexico in the spring of 1895 sponsored by the Bacheller, Johnson, and Bacheller newspaper syndicate. What made Nebraska newsworthy at this particular time was a severe drought in the north central area of the state that had begun in the summer of 1894 and by the time of his visit, as Crane would eventually write, had brought “this prosperous and garden-like country” to a “condition of despair.”¹⁰ During the years between the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862 and the late 1880s, the plains states had experienced an unparalleled boom, made possible, as it was then becoming apparent, by a period of uncharacteristically generous rainfall. In the period alone between 1880 and 1890, the population of Nebraska had increased by 134٪ (from 452,402 to 1,058,910¹¹), but by the time of Crane's arrival in February of 1895, a process of exodus eastward had begun that was not to reverse itself until after 1897 when a period of relative prosperity returned—but by which time, of course, Crane was living in Ravensbrook, England, far away from the scene where a set of lasting impressions of economic devastation had been formed. “In the single year of 1891,” according to John D. Hicks, “no less than eighteen thousand prairie schooners crossed from the Nebraska to the Iowa side of the Missouri River in full retreat from the hopeless hard times,” with the eventual result that “from one-third to one-half of the counties in Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota had a smaller population in 1900 than in 1890.”¹²

When Crane arrived in Lincoln in February of 1895, as Joseph Katz writes in his Introduction to Stephen Crane in the West and Mexico, he arrived unsuspectingly “in the midst of a Situation.”¹³ If the region were to survive economically, then the kind of Eastern capital investment that had flowed westward so plentifully during the prosperous 1870s and 80s would have to continue. But, as Katz points out, “Nebraska business interests feared that Eastern investors would shy away from a state that lived so perilous a relationship with nature.”¹⁴ Although Crane's fame was somewhat limited in 1895, his arrival was nonetheless heralded by Nebraska newspapers as an opportunity for Eastern readers to acquire a “true” conception of conditions in the drought-stricken area. “Mr. Crane's newspapers have asked him,” the Nebraska State Journal reported (in an article that Crane in fact clipped for his scrapbook), “to get the truth, whether his articles are sensational or not, and for that reason his investigations will doubtless be welcomed by the business interests of Nebraska.”¹⁵

In his resulting report, “Nebraska's Bitter Fight for Life,” Crane does in fact emphasize that “the grievous condition is confined to a comparatively narrow section of the western part of the state,” and quotes freely then-governor Silas A. Holcomb, who in an interview with Crane described incipient irrigation projects that would return Nebraska to conditions “‘safe and profitable for agriculture,’” and assured Crane that “in a year or two her barns will be overflowing”’ (“Nebraska's Bitter Fight,” 13). To some extent, given the burden placed on him by certain “interests” to “get the truth,” Crane must have felt compelled to enter into this suspiciously optimistic rhetorical defense of Nebraska as a safe place for capital investment. And while Crane did attempt to counter “extraordinary reports which have plastered the entire state as a place of woe” (“Nebraska's Bitter Fight,” 12), his overall account of conditions is decidedly bleak.

The “business interests of Nebraska,” as a consequence, could hardly have been entirely pleased by Crane's imaginative portrayal (somewhat sensational after all) of the onset of the drought in the summer of 1894:

From the southern horizon came the scream of a wind hot as an oven's fury. Its valor was great in the presence of the sun. It came when the burning disc appeared in the east and it weakened when the blood-red, molten mass vanished in the west. From day to day, it raged like a pestilence. The leaves of corn and of trees turned yellow and sapless like leather. For a time they stood the blasts in the agony of futile resistance. The farmers helpless, with no weapon against this terrible and inscrutable wrath of nature, were spectators at the strangling of their hopes, their ambitions, all that they could look to from their labor.

(“Nebraska's Bitter Fight,” 4)

Nor would those business interests have been much pleased by Crane's account of the subsequent winter of 1894-95, one of the harshest in memory, which he experienced first-hand and therefore gave a sense of impressive immediacy, writing from an Eddyville rooming house where “the temperature of the room which is the writer's bedroom is precisely one and a half degrees below zero”:

Meanwhile, the chill and the tempest of the inevitable winter had gathered in the north and swept down upon the devastated country. The prairies turned bleak and desolate.

The wind was a direct counter-part of the summer. It came down like wolves of ice. And then was the time that from this district came that first wail, half impotent rage, half despair. The men went to feed the starving cattle in their tiny allowances of clothes that enabled the wind to turn their bodies red and then blue with cold. The women shivered in the houses where fuel was as scarce as flour, and where flour was sometimes as scarce as diamonds.

(“Nebraska's Bitter Fight,” 6)

It was during Crane's journey by rail from Lincoln to Eddyville, according to Thomas Beer, that at “a dreary junction town” in Dawson County he chanced to see the light blue hotel that was to serve as the germ of “The Blue Hotel.” “In a hotel painted so loathsomely,” Beer suggests, “some dire action must take place and, after four years, he made it seem so.”¹⁶ Of Eddyville itself, very likely one of the small towns later to serve as a partial model for Fort Romper,¹⁷ Crane reports: “Approaching it over the prairie, one sees a row of little houses, blocked upon the sky. Most of them are one storied. Some of the stores have little square false-fronts. The buildings straggle at irregular intervals along the street and a little board side-walk connects them. On all sides stretches the wind-swept prairie.” “This town was once a live little place,” Crane writes of Eddyville, “where the keepers of the three or four stores did a thriving trade.” What he saw when he arrived there, however, was “as inanimate as a corpse,” a place where “in the rears of stores, a few men, perhaps, sit listlessly by the stoves” (“Nebraska's Bitter Fight,” 9-10).

What Crane saw in Eddyville was a scene of economic depredation brought about by a set of unfortunate natural conditions, not malevolent cosmic ones; and when he finally set about writing “The Blue Hotel,” these conditions along with their practical economic implications could hardly have been far from his mind—and all of this associated with that memorable blue hotel. But Crane's conceptions of the “true conditions” of the West had been formed in some measure even before he arrived in Eddyville. His journey there from Lincoln had been delayed by his much-reported “arrest” (more likely only a brief detention, as Bernice Slote has suggested) on unspecified charges for interfering in a barroom fight in a Lincoln hotel the night before his departure for Eddyville. As Beer recounts this episode, Crane pushed himself between “a very tall man” who was “pounding a rather small one.” “‘But thus I offended a local custom,’” Crane wrote of the encounter. “‘These men fought each other every night. Their friends expected it and I was a darned nuisance with my Eastern scruples and all that. So first everybody cursed me fully and then they took me off to a judge who told me that I was an imbecile and let me go. …’”¹⁸

This episode, actually more reminiscent of the staged confrontations between Jack Potter and Scratchy Wilson in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” than of the grim and savage encounter between the Swede and Johnnie in “The Blue Hotel,” must have impressed Crane with the peculiarities of local custom on the Western frontier, especially as it pertained to the display, and the containment, of human violence. His consistent vision of the West, in the group of Western stories he wrote between the summer of 1897 and late 1899, is of a place where the inclination to violence is never far from erupting to the surface, though as a matter of carefully calculated public policy that particular feature of Western reality is generally suppressed by a not disinterested citizenry. And as I am about to suggest, this is exactly the social reality that Crane depicts in “The Blue Hotel.”

III

What Crane accomplishes in “The Blue Hotel” (if the story is viewed, as I am suggesting, as a kind of cultural critique) is essentially the “unmasking” of a coercive socio-cultural situation, one in which significant economic forces operate beneath the social surface to inform what may broadly be considered a motivating and, in the general context of theories like Turner's, a peculiarly American frontier ideology. I am using the term ideology here to describe, in the words of Sacvan Bercovitch, “the system of interlinked ideas, symbols, and beliefs by which a culture—any culture—seeks to justify and perpetuate itself; the web of rhetoric, ritual, and assumption through which society coerces, persuades, and coheres.”¹⁹ At the root of this ideology in “The Blue Hotel” is the submerged but nonetheless powerful assumption that peaceful order is the sine qua non of a modern economic progressivism, that violence—whether man-made or meteorological, reputed or real—is the absolute nemesis of the capitalist free enterprise system. Substantively, this ideology is inscribed in “The Blue Hotel” in a number of ways, as I shall try to show, but most notably in a rhetoric and an accompanying system of (what for want of a more suggestive literary term we may call) “manners” that deny violence, suppress it, attempt to veil or curb it, and, when all else fails, work ceremonially, almost ritually, to defuse, contain, or otherwise mask its presence behind an affirming guise of civilized normalcy.

The violent snowstorm in which the action of “The Blue Hotel” occurs need hardly be considered the manifestation of some transcendent and malign cosmic force. It is a real storm, even “historical” in the sense that Crane experienced one like it during his Nebraska visit.²⁰ It is symbolic, I would suggest, only in the limited sense that it represented for Crane the whole complex of naturally occurring violent conditions that threatened the economic recovery, indeed survival, of a radically depressed area. It represents the causes of the oppressive anxiety and frustration for which, at the same time, it serves as a highly suggestive background. Uncontrollable and unrestrained, moreover, this natural violence serves the artistic end of accentuating the proclivity for violence in the human community it contains. Crane ironically suggests, more to the point, that the human community has an even greater potential for violence than the storm itself: the Palace Hotel, with its garish blue contrast to the colors of the natural world, “was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush” (“Hotel,” 142).²¹

It is of course Pat Scully, that priestly entrepreneur, who has the most to gain or lose in this fragile economic environment and therefore Scully who works the hardest (in both language and act) to affirm a benign climate that has at least all the superficial appearance of peacefulness and civilized stability. His guests are made to feel, with a purpose, that attempting to escape his kindly blandishments would be “the height of brutality” (“Hotel,” 143). Yet Scully's propitiatory acts are almost comically at odds with the volatile situation he is struggling to control. Having captured the cowboy, the Easterner, and the Swede at the railway station he subsequently ushers them, “with boisterous hospitality,” into a room dominated by an enormous stove “humming with god-like violence” where Johnnie and an old farmer are involved with almost equal heat in a game of High Five: “They were quarreling. Frequently the old farmer turned his face toward a box of sawdust … and spat with an air of great impatience and irritation. With a loud flourish of words Scully destroyed the game of cards and bustled his son upstairs …” (“Hotel,” 143). This is followed by a kind of initiatory rite in which Scully conducts these guests through (what the cowboy and the Easterner have almost certainly been through before) an almost liturgically precise series of tranquilizing “ceremonies” by which they are “made to feel that Scully was very benevolent. He was conferring great favors upon them” (“Hotel,” 143). Scully's language and his actions seem clearly and deliberately calculated to create a placid atmosphere free of physical threat. But the Swede, who merely “dipped his fingers gingerly and with trepidation” in the basin of water Scully has offered him, is dangerously and mysteriously dissident. He represents, and acts according to, that mythologized view of the West as a place of violence and danger (viz., the Eastern view) that Scully and the others are determined, in the full sense of that word, to deny, in a kind of unwitting in-group conspiracy through which this society, to repeat Bercovitch's terms, “seeks to justify and perpetuate itself.” To put this more succinctly, Western ideology, spurred on at a subliminal level by largely capitalist considerations, motivates the production of a peace-affirming counter-myth. The Swede's particular myth, according to the Easterner (who is probably right), is derived from a fictional, dime-novel context; but as events of the story ultimately make clear, the competing counter-myth is equally fictitious. As Richard Slotkin points out in “Myth and the Production of History,” “myth is fictional in a double sense: it is an artifact of human intelligence and productive labor (although it may be made to appear as a ‘fact of nature’); and it is a ‘falsification’ of experience—a partial representation masquerading as the whole truth.”²² Myth and ideology, in this respect, are essentially inseparable. At least in this particular context, myth might profitably be thought of as the end-product of the distortions worked upon reality by an informing ideology.

The extent to which language, behavior, and event in “The Blue Hotel” are markers of competing ideologies, competing myth and counter-myth, is made clear if, as an instance of culturally purposeful narrative, the story is approached as an example of what Clifford Geertz has called, borrowing the term from Gilbert Ryle, ethnographic “thick description.” “Doing ethnography,” Geertz explains, “is like trying to read (in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherences, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.”²³ Whereas Geertz is here making a case for culture being “read” as literature (“as interworked system of construable signs,”²⁴) it is obviously the case that much is gained, invoking Geertz's corollary idea of “blurred genres,” if we read literature culturally. This way it is far easier to understand the extent to which, in “The Blue Hotel,” the violent reality of a frontier cultural situation is being systematically distorted in the service of specific ideological interests, even though the specific actions through which this distortion is accomplished or even the ultimate purpose of these actions is not fully understood, not fully willed, by those collectively engaged in them. Human activity, the “human movement” noted by the Easterner at the conclusion of the story, all inclines towards the accomplishment of an economically progressive cultural assent.

If we return to the story itself with this in mind, then, behavior that at first might seem random, trivial, purposeless, cosmically meaningless, is revealed as culturally meaningfull. In this sense, “The Blue Hotel” is not simply cultural portrait; it is, more complexly, cultural interpretation as well. Like ethnographic description, to again cite Geertz, “what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the ‘said’ of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms.”²⁵

What is it, then, that is getting “said”? The Swede, as I have already suggested, is the dissident outsider in this otherwise homogeneous group, and it is worth noting that his outsider status is reinforced by a narrative voice that consistently measures him from an insider viewpoint. In our first extended view of the Swede, he “seemed to be occupied in making furtive estimates of each man in the room. One might have thought that he had the sense of silly suspicion which comes to guilt. He resembled a badly frightened man” (“Hotel,” 144; emphasis added). What this distancing accomplishes is to intensify reaction to the Swede as an unfathomable cipher, representative of an ideologically conflicting viewpoint that, when finally vocalized, can be neither accepted nor acknowledged, as the baffled reactions of his listeners indicate: “Finally, with a laugh and a wink, he said that some of these Western communities were very dangerous; and after his statement he straightened his legs under the table, tilted his head, and laughed again, loudly. It was plain that the demonstration had no meaning to the others. They looked at him wondering and in silence” (“Hotel,” 144).

What immediately follows is a series of failed attempts to co-opt the Swede, to get him to “play the game” in real as well as ideological terms. But even before the Swede joins the game of High Five, it is plain to see that this game, played amidst the “profligate fury” of the storm, is a means by which the latent violence of the human community is simultaneously revealed and ceremonially contained. The old farmer, for example, agrees to the game “with a contemptuous and bitter scoff,” and it is not long before the game is “suddenly ended by another quarrel.” The old farmer leaves, but only after “casting a look of heated scorn at his adversary.” Small wonder that when the Swede agrees to join the game, he does so “nervously, as though he expected to be assaulted” (“Hotel,” 144-45). Far from placating him, the game only intensifies his fears, and understandably so since it is dominated by the “boardwhacking” cowboy:

Each time he held superior cards he whanged them, one by one with exceeding force, down upon the improvised table, and took the tricks with a glowing air of prowess and pride that sent thrills of indignation into the hearts of his opponents. A game with a board whacker in it is sure to become intense. The countenances of the Easterner and the Swede were miserable whenever the cowboy thundered down his aces and kings, while Johnnie, his eyes gleaming with joy, chuckled and chuckled.

(“Hotel,” 145)

As the only truly indigenous citizens of the West in this group, the cowboy and Johnnie appropriately, but with some irony given their shared protests of bewilderment at the Swede's view of Western conditions, come to represent the latent violence of Fort Romper in its rawest and least calculating form. It will be Johnnie who eventually fights the Swede and, in a litany of savage accompaniment, the cowboy who shouts “‘Kill him, Johnnie! Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!’” (“Hotel,” 160), this in spite of his earlier assertion that “‘this ain't Wyoming, ner none of them places. This is Nebrasker’” (“Hotel,” 152).

During this first card game the Swede's sense of being “formidably menaced” becomes, literally, most pronounced. Clearly, because of their reactions in common to the cowboy's board-whacking and because both are from “back East,” the Swede has mistakenly come to regard the Easterner as a kind of ideological ally. But now that the Swede asserts his belief that “‘a good many men have been killed in this room’” (“Hotel,” 145-46), the Easterner (who, as a travelling “drummer,” must have a good deal to win or lose in this economic environment) obtusely aligns himself with the others and their cooperative fiction of a peaceful West. “‘They say they don't know what I mean,’ he remarked mockingly to the Easterner. The latter answered after prolonged and cautious reflection. ‘I don't understand you,’ he said impassively” (“Hotel,” 146). Thus having “encountered treachery from the only quarter where he had expected sympathy if not help,” the Swede is now fully convinced that he “‘won't get out of here alive’” (“Hotel,” 146-47), and at this point therefore represents the greatest menace to the peaceful front Scully has taken such pains to create at the Palace Hotel—especially in view of the Swede's threat to take his custom elsewhere. Unwilling to lose a paying customer, Scully redoubles his efforts to pacify the dissident Swede: “‘You will not go 'way,’ said Scully. ‘You will not go 'way until I hear the reason for this business. If anybody has troubled you I will take care of him. This is my house. You are under my roof, and I will not allow any peaceable man to be troubled here’” (“Hotel,” 148).

That Scully's deeper motives are imbedded in the practical economics of the situation is made apparent in his subsequent efforts to convert the Swede to his own carefully nurtured ideology of non-violence, although during his attempts to proselytize the Swede he is not much helped by the fact that in the feeble light of the Swede's room “he resembled a murderer” (“Hotel,” 149). Scully's chamber-of-commerce exhortation on the virtues of Fort Romper as a commercial and cultural center is infused with the kind of “rhetoric of mission” that Bercovitch has elsewhere associated with that peculiarly American form of public address in which fact and rhetoric are seriously at odds, the “American Jeremiad,” a form with Puritan origins that has nonetheless persisted, according to Bercovitch, “throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in all forms of the literature, including the literature of westward expansion.”²⁶ In the person of the immigrant Irishman Scully we see distilled the ideological views of what Bercovitch describes as “a population that, despite its bewildering mixture of race and creed, could believe in something called an American mission, and could invest that patent fiction with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest.”²⁷ Crane underscores the gulf between the fact of violence and the rhetoric of peace, prosperity, and progress, in subtle ways, as evidenced in the nature of Scully's sermonic delivery: “Scully banged his hand impressively on the footboard of the bed. ‘Why, man, we're goin' to have a line of ilictric street cars in this town next spring.’ ‘A line of electric street cars,’ repeated the Swede stupidly. ‘And,’ said Scully, ‘there's a new railroad goin' to be built down from Broken Arm to here. Not to mintion the four churches and the smashin' big brick school-house. Then there's the big factory, too. Why, in two years Romper'll be a met-tro-pol-is’” (“Hotel,” 149-50).²⁸

While Scully is thus absorbed in establishing a relationship of backslapping camaraderie with the Swede upstairs, the others are engaged below in an analysis of the Swede's fearful state of mind. According to the Easterner, whose viewpoint on the matter seems entirely credible, “‘this man has been reading dime-novels, and he thinks he's right out in the middle of it—the shootin' and the stabbin' and all.’” After all, the cowboy adds (“deeply scandalized”), this isn't one of those really violent places, like Wyoming; this is Nebraska. “‘Yes,’ added Johnnie, ‘an' why don't he wait till he gits out West?’” (“Hotel,” 152; Crane's emphasis). This suggests that the cowboy and Johnnie have the same misconceptions about conditions of violence “out West” that the Swede, in their biased view, has about Nebraska. Because, as I suggested earlier, he is not altogether economically disinterested, the Easterner now finds himself in the somewhat compromising position of having to repudiate everyone's preconceptions about Western violence and laughingly denies that there is such a thing even in the “far” West: “‘It isn't different there even—not in these days. But he thinks he's right in the middle of hell’” (“Hotel,” 152). Given that the text of “The Blue Hotel” is saturated with terms of violent suggestiveness, it is hardly too much to submit that the Easterner's refutations have about them the hollow ring of false rhetoric, a rhetoric that has become second nature to him since in some (admittedly vague and unspecified) way he is himself representative of Eastern commercial interests and therefore bends the truth to meet his own needs. Unlike the Swede, whose deeper motives are as yet unformed, Mr. Blanc is a man of easy virtue, a “converted” Easterner who has been effectively seduced by the violence-denying ideology of the West.

But what, then, are we to make of the elaborate reversal that takes place in the Swede's behavior after the upstairs episode with Scully? Up to this point, quarrels, registrations of scorn and contempt, a general atmosphere of just-barely-submerged brutality—a kind of generalized “board-whacking” demeanor—all have served in complex ways to reveal a latent predisposition to violent behavior, but at the same time have either displaced or masked that predisposition through a series of small rituals and rhetorical gambits, the most typical being the regulars' expressions of dismay at the Swede's fears and their insistent efforts to explain away those fears as part of some completely fictitious Eastern myth. At the evening meal—where he “fizzed like a firewheel”—it appears that the Swede is prepared to play a version of this game himself, but with this considerable difference: while he may model his behavior on a pattern he has seen operating around him, his particular brand of violence is not informed, and therefore not defused, by the same underlying cultural purposiveness—is not, that is to say, a part of the same social construction of violence that informs the behavior of the Fort Romper regulars. What Scully has created in the Swede, quite to the contrary, is a monstrous distortion of the terms of the game being played here. If Scully's instinctive strategy has been to exaggerate peace, the Swede's equally instinctive counter-strategy is to exaggerate violence. Neither drunk nor insane, as has been widely suggested, the Swede is simply, accommodating himself to the aggressive terms of his environment—doing as the Romans do, so to speak, with the result (as J. C. Levenson has observed) that his “wild fear” is changed to “wilder courage.”²⁹ The consummate irony of “The Blue Hotel” is that in this process of change the Swede becomes the very thing he has feared. More precisely, he becomes a gross caricature of the reality of human violence untempered by either fear or the restraining influence of “interests.” He had been “scared,” Johnnie observes, but now he's “too fresh”:

The Swede domineered the whole feast, and gave it the appearance of a cruel bacchanal. He seemed to have grown suddenly taller; he gazed, brutally disdainful, into every face. His voice rang through the room. Once when he jabbed out harpoon-fashion with his fork to pinion a biscuit the weapon nearly impaled the hand of the Easterner which had been stretched quietly out for the same biscuit.

(“Hotel,” 154)

In the card game that follows, significantly, the Swede (having adopted a “new viewpoint,” as Johnnie puts it) now becomes the aggressive board-whacker, with the difference again that his aggressiveness does not serve as a masking strategy but serves, rather, to unmask duplicity. His accusation that Johnnie is cheating reveals that more than one kind of deception has been taking place in Fort Romper, that place of play and false fronts.

This fragile and deceptive system of order, this whole house of cards, it is too tempting to resist saying, comes falling down with incredible rapidity; it is as if “the floor had been suddenly twitched out from under the men. … The whole company of cards was scattered over the floor, where the boots of the men trampled the fat and painted kings and queens as they gazed with their silly eyes at the war that was waging above them” (“Hotel,” 156). Neither the Easterner (“importuning in a voice that was not heeded”) nor Scully (who “undoubtedly made the most noise, [but] was the least heard of any of the riotous band” [“Hotel,” 157]) can muster a sufficient rhetorical authority to counteract the violence that the Swede has unleashed. And so it is that Johnnie and the Swede must fight.

Given his usual efforts to go against the grain of events (and against his own suppressed inclinations, as it turns out), it is hardly surprising that Scully still seems convinced that some semblance of regularity can be preserved through ceremonial arrangement of the preliminaries, but once the fight begins, “the cowboy bounded into the air with a yowl,” and Scully stands “immovable as from supreme amazement and fear at the fury of the fight which he himself had permitted and arranged” (“Hotel,” 160). When the fight is finally over and Johnnie has been savagely defeated, the extent of Scully's suppression of his own potential for violent behavior is fully revealed. The Swede departs, and—

As soon as the door was closed, Scully and the cowboy leaped to their feet and began to curse. They trampled to and fro, waving their arms and smashing into the air with their fists. “Oh, but that was a hard minute!” wailed Scully. “That was a hard minute! Him there leerin' and scoffin'! One bang at his nose was worth forty dollars to me that minute!”

The old man burst into sudden brogue. “I'd loike to take that Swade,” he wailed, “and hould 'im down on a shtone flure and bate 'im to jelly wid a shtick!”

(“Hotel,” 164)

Consistent with his dominant economic motives, the wrathful Scully is still capable of placing a carefully deliberated cash value on a therapeutic poke at the Swede. One can only speculate as to why Scully (or Crane) should have settled on the particularly complex figure of forty dollars.

If the events occurring in and around the Palace Hotel can in some respects be considered comically ironic, what follows in the saloon is tragically so. The Swede, still bloody from the fight, opens his visit by announcing that he has just “‘thumped the soul out of a man down here at Scully's hotel’” (“Hotel,” 166), hardly a welcome revelation to this thoroughly “civilized” audience of “prominent local business men,” the Fort Romper district attorney, and a gambler, “delicate in manner,” “explicitly trusted and admired,” a man of “quiet dignity,” whose peacefulness is underscored by the rumored (certainly not actual) possession of “a real wife and two real children in a neat cottage in a suburb, where he led an exemplary home life” (“Hotel,” 166-67). Like the denizens of the Palace Hotel, who have refused to acknowledge what this dissident Swede represents, these men “in some subtle way incased themselves in reserve” (“Hotel,” 166). The same deceptive facade of civilized order, domestic normalcy, and moral decency that characterizes the Palace Hotel, in short, is recapitulated here in the fatal saloon. But none of this can obscure the reality that the gambler's virtuous identity is a sham, a convenient social construction (“popular,” Crane calls it) through which the practiced violence of this man, nothing more than “a thieving card-player” (“Hotel,” 167), is conspiratorially justified. He is a man just like any other man in this community of deceptions: “a scrutiny of the group would not have enabled an observer to pick the gambler from the men of more reputable pursuits” (“Hotel,” 166). As a means of preserving his economic hegemony, the gambler appears to be—indeed is collectively made to appear—what he is not: “so generous, so just, so moral” (“Hotel,” 167). He is just another man of business, like Scully, whose prosperity has been momentarily threatened by the Swede's disruption of the rigorously correct system of social forms by which his authority is established, maintained, and, worst of all from Crane's moral point of view, given a sanctifying and corrupting cultural assent. As the Easterner later remarks to the cowboy, “‘Seems there was a good deal of sympathy for him in Romper’” (“Hotel,” 169).

It is not simply environment either as some vaguely malevolent or randomly disinterested cosmic force that has created conditions leading to the Swede's death, but environment understood in exact cultural terms as precisely what the Easterner says it is, a “collaboration,” “a human movement” that has programmatically conspired to deny violent “true conditions” in order to simulate an atmosphere of stability favorable to a progressive economic achievement. Thus Fort Romper as a society “justifies and perpetuates” itself by constructing itself in its collective mind as something it is not. It therefore seems entirely appropriate and profoundly suggestive, in economic terms, that after his murder, the eyes of the dead Swede should be fixed on a message that appears atop a “cash-machine” (“Hotel,” 169).

IV

Those who read a profound cosmic significance into what R. W. Stallman has called this “dramatic ending of the story” are set somewhat adrift by Crane's actual conclusion—“a second ending, a moralizing appendix,” as Stallman dismissively refers to it.³⁰ What such readers find baffling to their cosmic interpretations is that Crane so plainly attributes the Swede's death to socio-cultural causes, and the moral failure arising out of those causes, rather than to the preferred transcendent ones. “The two endings,” Stallman insists, “contradict each other in their philosophical import. What traps the Swede is his fixed idea of his environment, but according to the second conclusion it is the environment itself that traps him. The two endings thus confound each other and negate the artistic unity of ‘The Blue Hotel.’”³¹ What Stallman is assuming here is that the Swede's “fixed idea” of the dangers inherent in this environment is false, and that the Swede in fact creates the conditions of violence that lead to his death. While it is true that the Swede adopts a mode of behavior that serves as a catalyst in provoking violence, he is subtly persuaded to adopt the fashion of aggressiveness and false bravado by what he is convinced are the accepted, indeed the demanded, terms of that environment. As events plainly prove, the Swede's views about violence finally turn out to be a more accurate conception of “true conditions” than the deceptively peaceful views collectively expressed by the citizens of Fort Romper. What causes the Swede's death, ultimately, is a general collusion on the part of Fort Romper society to deny its actual organizing principles, to indulge, in Slotkin's terms, in a cooperative “falsification of experience.” That only the Easterner finally recognizes what has taken place makes the entire society no less morally culpable, and redoubles the irony of the Cowboy's final protest, “‘Well, I didn't do anythin', did I’” (“Hotel,” 170).

The disposition towards violence and the felt need to conceal that disposition by various means is never far from the surface of “The Blue Hotel” but it is not the almost sole issue as is the case with two western stories Crane was to publish the following year (1899), “Twelve O'Clock” and “Moonlight on the Snow.” The themes he treats with subtlety and ambiguity in “The Blue Hotel” he treats with a directness, even a crudity, in the two later stories that makes them less memorable and less effective as artistic accomplishments but nonetheless valuable as indicators of his earlier intentions.

The first of the two stories, “Twelve O'Clock,” opens with the citizens of a nameless western town lamenting the negative effects on their economic progress of visiting cowpunchers' gunplay. In what follows, Ben Roddle, who returns to his home and sits in the cellar whenever the cowboys ride into town, is speaking of the latest outrage, the shooting of ten pumpkins in front of a local store:

“That don't do a town no good. Now, how would an eastern capiterlist”—(it was the town's humor to be always gassing of phantom investors who were likely to come any moment and pay a thousand prices for everything)—“how would an eastern capiterlist like that? Why, you couldn't see 'im fer th' dust on his trail. Then he'd tell all his friends that ‘their town may be all right, but there's too much loose-handed shootin' fer my money.’ An' he'd be right, too. Them rich fellers, they don't make no bad breaks with their money. They watch it all th' time b'cause they know blame well there ain't hardly room fer their feet fer th' pikers an' tin-horns an' thimble-riggers what are layin' fer 'em. I tell you, one puncher racin' his cow-pony hell-bent-fer-election down Main Street and yellin' an' shootin' an' nothin' at all done about it, would scare away a whole herd of capiterlists. An' it ain't right. It oughter be stopped.”

A pessimistic voice asked: “How you goin' to stop it, Ben?” “Organize,” replied Roddle pompously. “Organize: that's the only way to make these fellers lay down.”

(“Twelve O'Clock,” 171-72)

While this is admittedly a wilder West than the Nebraska setting of “The Blue Hotel,” the above quotation should make it clear that Crane is working out a very similar set of concerns: the perceived negative effects of violence on the “capiterlist” system; the felt need, as a result, to suppress those disruptive conditions; and, finally, the consequent justification of a defusing social “organization.” Certain formal elements of “Twelve O'Clock,” moreover, make it clear that Crane is working with a set of background circumstances ironically reminiscent of those in “The Blue Hotel.” Placer, proprietor of the “best hotel within two hundred miles,” is in nearly every respect the direct opposite of the garrulous Scully: “His customary humor was so sullen that all strangers immediately wondered why in life he had chosen to play the part of mine host.” He responds to a request for a banquet for a group of celebrating cowboys “with a certain churlishness, as if it annoyed him that his hotel was being patronized,” and seems mainly engaged in entering figures in his ledger behind “a wooden counter painted a bright pink” (“Twelve O'Clock,” 173). An entrepreneur of a different stamp from Scully, Placer is nonetheless just as ineffectual in quelling violent disturbances. He is killed intervening in an argument over what a cuckoo clock is and does: “Big Watson laughed, and, speeding up his six-shooter like a flash of blue light, he shot Placer through the throat—shot the man as he stood behind his absurd pink counter with his two aimed revolvers in his incompetent hands. … Placer fell behind the counter, and down upon him came his ledger and his ink-stand, so that one could not have told blood from ink” (“Twelve O'Clock,” 177). Blood and ink—the means for recording random violence on one hand, peaceful economic transaction on the other—are here commingled in a complex image that captures the insanity of their competitive ideological status in the violent West, an image of cultural dementia further enhanced (as it is by the image of the cash-register in “The Blue Hotel”) when “the tiny wooden bird appeared and cried ‘Cuckoo’—twelve times” (“Twelve O'Clock,” 178).

Crane was obviously aware of the cultural ironies involved in the strenuous pursuit of this ideology of peace and equally aware that its roots lay not in a high-minded pursuit of Justice on the western frontier (as it was popularly mythologized) but almost entirely in the unabashed desire for a prosperous and progressive economy. This is made clear beyond any serious doubt in the bland irony with which he portrays the conflict between a rhetoric of peace and the reality of violence in the second story, “Moonlight on the Snow.” As does “Twelve O'Clock,” this story opens with a group of citizens in the appropriately named town of War Post waking up to the economic facts that their widespread reputation for violence, of which they hitherto have been “grotesquely proud,” is keeping them from getting their fair share of Eastern dollars being invested in the West by the “serene-browed angel of peace.” Other, less deserving towns, which have “listened to his voice,” are selected as the sites of “mammoth hotels” and parceled into building lots—

But no change had come to War Post. War Post sat with her reputation for bloodshed pressed proudly to her bosom and saw her mean neighbors leap into being as cities. She saw drunken old reprobates selling acres of red-hot dust and becoming wealthy men of affairs, who congratulated themselves on their shrewdness in holding land which, before the boom, they would have sold for enough to buy a treat all 'round in the Straight Flush saloon—only nobody would have given it.

War Post saw dollars rolling into the coffers of a lot of contemptible men who couldn't shoot straight. She was amazed and indignant. She saw her standard of excellence, her creed, her reason for being great, all tumbling about her ears, and after the preliminary gasps she sat down to think it out.

The first man to voice a conclusion was Bob Hether, the popular barkeeper in Stevenson's Crystal Palace. “It's this here gun-fighter business,” he said, leaning on his bar, and, with the gentle, serious eyes of a child, surveying a group of prominent citizens who had come into drink at the expense of Tom Larpent, a gambler. They solemnly nodded assent.

(“Moonlight,” 179-80)

In the end, the citizens of War Post “resolved to be virtuous,” and “decreed that no man should kill another man under penalty of being at once hanged by the populace” (“Moonlight,” 181), all of this for what Crane paints as purely economic motives.

What finally distinguishes Crane's treatment of conflicting ideologies in “The Blue Hotel” from its treatment in the two stories I am discussing only briefly here is the pronounced difference in the level of awareness of motive in the characters themselves. In “The Blue Hotel,” only the Easterner recognizes, or expresses, any awareness at all of the extent to which the reality of violence has been masked by a collusive behavior. In both “Twelve O'Clock” and “Moonlight on the Snow,” on the other hand, this masking is proposed as an overt and deliberate social policy, and assent is public and vocal. As Tom Larpent, the cynical gambler in “Moonlight on the Snow,” remarks, “the value of human life has to be established before there can be theatres, water-works, street cars, women and babies” (“Moonlight,” 180). It is the cynical Larpent, moreover, who realizes that what is at issue is not a superficial matter of law and order, but a larger matter of economic expedience. Chiding his fellow citizens for their reluctance in carrying out this new “law” they have agreed on (he is its first and almost immediate transgressor), he says: “‘It seems to me there should be enough men here who understand the value of corner lots in a safe and godly town, and hence should be anxious to hurry this business’” (“Moonlight,” 182-83). Fortunately for Larpent, but unfortunately for the reputation of War Post, the planned lynching is witnessed by a stagecoach filled with Easterners and thus becomes just one more example of the town's essential lawlessness. The plan to hang Larpent turns back on itself, only having secured the image for unbridled violence it is meant to dispel. In the same sense that the killing of the Swede in “The Blue Hotel” is described by the Easterner as “a culmination, the apex of a human movement,” the willingness to hang Larpent is described as nothing more than “a detail in a set of circumstances at War Post” (“Moonlight,” 190), and of course those circumstances, as only Larpent is capable of understanding, amount to nothing more than shrewd economic policy, nothing more, finally, than “speculation in real estate” (“Moonlight,” 182).

Notes

1. Jerome J. McGann, ed., Historical Studies and Literary Criticism (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 4.

2. Joseph N. Satterwhite, for example, has suggested that “‘The Blue Hotel’ is more nearly a parable than an immediate transcript of experience” (“Stephen Crane's ‘The Blue Hotel’: The Failure of Understanding,” Modern Fiction Studies, 2 [1956-57], 239). For James Trammel Cox, “Crane's fictional method is that of the symbolist rather than the naturalist in that he carefully selects his details not as pieces of evidence in a one-dimensional report on man but as connotatively associated parts of an elaborately contrived symbolic substructure” (“Stephen Crane as Symbolic Naturalist: An Analysis of ‘The Blue Hotel,’” Modern Fiction Studies, 3 [1957], 148). Hugh N. Maclean regards the world of “The Blue Hotel” as “isolated, mysterious, highly symbolic; it is not an ideal world, but one in which … the actions of men seem to have meaning beyond the immediate environment” (“The Two Worlds of ‘The Blue Hotel,’” Modern Fiction Studies, 5 [1959], 263). For Chester L. Wolford, “the hotel is an expression of ego and order, a worthy antagonist to the chaos of nature represented by a mindless, indifferent blizzard …” (Stephen Crane: A Study of the Short Fiction [Boston: Twayne, 1989], p. 31). Finally, Bruce L. Grenberg, in what may be taken as a representative summary of critical views on the story, asserts that “however interesting the literal story of ‘The Blue Hotel’ might be there can be little doubt that Crane was interested in depicting higher values related directly to the ultimate nature of man's existence.” In Grenberg's view, the storm is the “sine qua non” of the story's meaning and clearly has “symbolic,” “metaphysical,” and “cosmic” implications. The meaning of “The Blue Hotel,” ultimately, is imbedded in and must be made consonant with Crane's “religious and philosophical values” (“Metaphysic of Despair: Stephen Crane's ‘The Blue Hotel,’” Modern Fiction Studies, 14 [1968], 204).

3. See particularly Frank Bergon, “Introduction,” The Western Writings of Stephen Crane (New York: New American Library, 1979), and J. C. Levenson, “Introduction,” The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, Volume V: Tales of Adventure, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1970).

4. Daniel G. Hoffman, The Poetry of Stephen Crane (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957), p. 6.

5. Larzer Ziff, The American 1890's: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 4.

6. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History, ed. George Rogers Taylor (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1972), p. 6.

7. Turner, p. 5.

8. Ray A. Billington, “Frontier Democracy: Social Aspects,” The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History, ed. George Rogers Taylor (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1972), pp. 162, 165.

9. John G. Cawelti, Adventures, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976). See esp. Ch. 8, “The Western: A Look at the Evolution of a Formula,” pp. 192-259.

10. Stephen Crane, “Nebraska's Bitter Fight for Life,” Stephen Crane in the West and Mexico, ed. Joseph Katz (Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 1970), p. 4. Future references are cited parenthetically in the text.

11. John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 20.

12. Hicks, pp. 32, 34.

13. Joseph Katz, “Introduction,” Stephen Crane in the West and Mexico, ed. Joseph Katz (Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 1970), p. xii.

14. Katz, p. xiii.

15. Qtd. by Katz, p. xii.

16. Thomas Beer, Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (New York: Knopf, 1924), p. 113.

17. For a complete account of the Nebraska towns that might have served as a composite model for Fort Romper, see Bernice Slote's “Stephen Crane in Nebraska,” Prairie Schooner, 43 (1969), 192-99.

18. Beer, pp. 113-14.

19. Sacvan Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry, 12 (1986), 635.

20. See Slote, 195-96.

21. Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel,” The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, Volume V: Tales of Adventures, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1970). All references to “The Blue Hotel,” “Moonlight on the Snow,” and “Twelve O'Clock” are to this volume and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

22. Richard Slotkin, “Myth and the Production of History,” Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 74.

23. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic, 1973), p. 10.

24. Geertz, p. 14.

25. Geertz, p. 20.

26. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 11.

27. Jeremiad, p. 11.

28. The town Crane apparently has in mind here is Broken Arrow, Nebraska; and the fact that he changes it to Broken Arm (surely not a mere slip of the pen) seems calculated to embellish the image of a violent West, Scully's protests notwithstanding.

29. Levenson, p. xcvi.

30. R. W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A Biography (New York: Braziller, 1968), p. 488.

31. Stallman, p. 488.