SOURCE: Morgan, William M. “Between Conquest and Care: Masculinity and Community in Stephen Crane's ‘The Monster.’” Arizona Quarterly 56, no. 3 (autumn 2000): 63-92.

[In the following essay, Morgan explores the constitution of white masculinity in “The Monster” and how this is called into question through division of community.]

“The Monster” (1897) was penned while Stephen Crane lived in exile in England and shortly before he made his mark as a front-line reporter during the Spanish-American War. The novella records Crane's ambivalence toward the strenuous ethos of white masculinity that Theodore Roosevelt championed and came to embody, and that Crane often represented in his journalism during the 1890s. TR's triumph over his own sickly Victorian adolescence and then over the bodies of racial others to become a “Rough Rider” is perhaps the Anglo-American story of masculinist ideology the nation has inherited from the cultures Crane experienced. Roosevelt, in his zeal to spread his message of Anglo-Saxon, masculine superiority, had even written to Crane in 1896 suggesting: “Some day I want you to write another story of the frontiersman and the Mexican Greaser in which the frontiersman shall come out on top; it is more normal that way!” (qtd. Correspondence 1: 128).

This passage is brief and blunt, yet it sets forth the racial mandate implicit to the strenuous ethos. According to Roosevelt's logic, the “Mexican Greaser” is to serve as a foil, as a figure less than fully manful, against which to construct the “frontiersman.” As in The Winning of the West (1889-1896) and his other writings and speeches advocating for imperial engagement, Roosevelt's vigorous emphasis here is that the “frontiersman,” the “peculiarly American” (qtd. Bederman 191) individual who could only be a white man, has “to come out on top” if fiction, life, and national identity are to be “normal.” Roosevelt stresses to Crane that, although Crane fictionalizes the right material, Crane's fiction would be better if he too would observe a “normal” logic of race and masculinity. In “The Monster,” Crane in a sense writes back to Roosevelt.

When read in the context of cultural and biographical history, Crane's “The Monster” depicts how the strenuous ethos of white masculinity was constituted, suggests its cultural power, yet demystifies its imagined moral force. On the one hand, the displacement of an inward-looking, sentimental, Victorian American cultural order by a more outward-looking and militant formation of United States culture is readily decipherable in the novella. Still, the most profound result of the grotesque effacement of Henry Johnson, a black stable-hand whose fate divides the community, is to call this cultural reorientation into question.¹ As the character of Dr. Trescott is partially maternalized through his care and sense of responsibility for the maimed patient, Crane's novella recuperates a nurturing masculine ethos with links to the tropes of a woman's domesticity. In addition, during the final four years of Crane's life, he increasingly turned away from a masculinist ethos of self-control, physical virility, and racial conquest and toward one of communal care, intersubjective compassion, and responsibility.² “The Monster,” structured by its various aesthetic, ideological, and generic tensions, depicts a divide between a residual and nurturing masculine ethos, which Crane comes to associate with high culture and his own sense of exile, and the strenuous ethos ascendant in his time.³

I

“The Monster” was first published in Harper's Magazine in 1898 during the heyday of a local-colorist project that was sponsored, according to Richard Brodhead, by Eastern high-cultural periodicals and their elite and middle-class urban readerships (107-41). Crane sets the novella in “Whilomville,” which seems, at least on some narrative surfaces, a timeless small-town. Closer to Winesburg, Ohio than Dunnet Landing, Maine, Whilomville sometimes produces nostalgia by offering glimpses of the routines and rituals once organizing the cultural life of the nation's village-communities. Sharing with Crane's other Whilomville Stories (1900) their fascination with the “pure animal spirits” (“The Carriage-Lamps,” Prose [Prose and Poetry] 1209) and “meanings of boyhood” (“Showin' Off,” Prose 1191), The Monster also brings the imagery of boys out of an insulated world of fantasy and into relation with a larger, rationalizing community. Indeed, Crane's novella flickers continuously with imagery of rowdy boys playing in neighborhood yards and “being sent out of all manner of gardens upon the sudden appearance of a father or a mother” (499), delicately-dressed genteel children who sit “quite primly in the dining-room, while Theresa and her mother plied them with cake and lemonade” (488), white men who humorously rib each other while waiting to be shaved at the immigrant's barbershop, middle-class women who gossip, hold teas, and police the neighborhood from the kitchen, and black people who smile, imitate and play on white society while living on ghettoized alleys or in the outlying wastes.

The most important source for Whilomville in Crane's life was Port Jervis, a small town in New York's Sullivan County. Crane lived there between his seventh and twelfth years and, early in the 1890s, frequently escaped to a family house in Port Jervis, owned by his eldest brother William, as a haven from poverty, incipient fame, and the bohemian experimentation characterizing his life in New York City. Biographers recount Crane's fondness for riding horses, playing with his nieces, and romping in the woods nearby (Berryman 121-22). “The Monster,” however, both draws from and repudiates the culture of Port Jervis, creating an adversarial stance against local color in narrative based on a favored locality. In a letter written to his brother William in 1899, Crane states: “I forgot to reply to you about the gossip in Port Jervis over ‘The Monster.’ I suppose that Port Jervis entered my head while I was writing it but I particularly don't wish them to think so because people get very sensitive …” (Correspondence 2: 446). Crane's desire that people in Port Jervis not imagine themselves as the citizens of Whilomville was warranted, given the contradiction between his nostalgic musing to William in 1897 about someday returning to his childhood home—“My idea is to come finally to live at Port Jervis. … I am a wanderer now and I must see enough but—afterwards—I think of PJ …” (Correspondence 1: 301-2)—and his realistic representation of the townspeople.

“The Monster”'s Whilomville has experienced soul loss while undergoing a transformation. Its citizens are emotionally crippled by racially-figured, despotic mores. The dominant strand of local color actually corresponds with what Leslie Fiedler describes as “the rigor mortis of Anglo-Saxon rigidity” (126). As with Martha Goodwin and Judge Hagenthorpe, who wear the “contemplative frown” (495) marking the elders, Dr. Trescott is also introduced to the reader as “frowning attentively” and initially evokes the image of the “moon” (450-51) for his son Jimmie and Henry Johnson. Even the young men attending the summer concert in the park practice at reserve. They stand “beyond the borders of the festivities because of their dignity, which would not exactly allow them to appear in anything which was so much fun for the younger lads” (457). Compulsive attempts to rein in nature, purify the body, and purge the community of affectionate displays round out Crane's delineation of emotional severity among the white citizenry. Throughout the novella, Crane highlights the loss of feelings of enjoyment or pleasure as the cost of Victorian restraint.⁴ In addition to Anglo-Saxon rigidity, however, vertigo also plagues Whilomville. In fact, the entire novella is made decidedly surreal by the various urban, national, and international images circulating throughout the local tableaux. Whether it is when the vocabulary of a labor dispute shows up in the conversation of Judge Hagenthorpe and Alek Williams or when thronging crowds rushing to the fire at Trescott's house turn the streets into a riot scene, a sense of “weightlessness” informs this parochial culture. Neither rural, urban, nor international imagery ultimately achieves primacy in the text, for all exist simultaneously, at once visible and invisible, creating many “situation(s) … without definitions” (493) as between Martha and Kate Goodwin in their kitchen.⁵

Crane undermines the imagery of the white village and challenges the consciousness of the middle-class citizenry by putting into question the cultural system of racial classifications on which the illusions of stability were based. Most obviously, Henry Johnson/the monster, the text's pre-eminent liminal image embodying “a confusion of type” (Harpham 6), emblematizes the social and epistemological crisis plaguing not just manhood but all of Whilomville. Johnson/the monster appears in the novella as a result of a mystic eruption of grotesque energy.⁶ In the fire-scene, as wisps of smoke are drawn from the Trescott house to “the boughs of the cherry-tree” (suggestive of an agrarian past) in “increasing numbers” by “a current … controlled by invisible banks” (punning on numbers, current/currency and banks), flames break out as if planned “by professional revolutionists” to destroy a facsimile of the “Signing of the Declaration.” “Fire imps,” like threatening, primitive (non-white) others, are said to be “calling and calling, clan joining clan, gathering the colors” as if for a revolt of the oppressed (461-62). This sensational and heavy-handed mixing of images invokes the paranoia of the times, what Jackson Lears deems the 1890's “crisis of cultural authority” (5) in the midst of an exploding volcano. As the Doctor's edenic laboratory erupts in “billows of smoke,” kaleidoscopic flaming-colors, assailing odors, and as a lava-like “red snake” of acid bursts from a beaker to flow “down into Johnson's upturned face” (465), Crane draws on the trope of the volcano that was ubiquitously employed during the 1890s to represent persistent “fears of domestic insurrection” (Lears 31). Disfigured beyond recognition, Henry Johnson, who entered the house to save Jimmie Trescott, becomes the victim of the volcanic imagery.

The white racial ethos of extreme reserve and remanded pleasure (Lott 482) persists throughout “The Monster” despite being challenged by the communal crisis figured as the grotesque effacement. Still, Whilomville is not passed over by the American push toward modernity. The novella's few fleeting images of the cult of domesticity—most stereotypically evoked by Mrs. Trescott's empty teacups in the final scene—are usually displaced by others associated with the masculinist cult of fighting. Just as the tea-making ceremony, which had engaged the most intense feelings of Ellen Montgomery and her mother in The Wide, Wide World (1850), remains evident as a fading memory trace in “The Monster,” the joys of public companionship formerly shared by the March sisters in Little Women (1868) are revisited as a “curious public dependency,” an “inheritance” shared “in silence” and with “no particular social aspect” (457) among the girls of Whilomville. In one passage about Martha Goodwin's dreams, Crane both distills the social reorientation overtaking Whilomville—the substitution of an outward-looking, martial, home-town imaginary for an inward-looking, sentimental image of village-life—and begins to demystify it:

Her dreams, which in early days had been of love of meadows and the shade of trees, of the face of a man, were now involved otherwise, and they were companioned in the kitchen curiously, Cuba, the hot-water kettle, Armenia, the washing of dishes, and the whole thing being jumbled.

(493-94)

A spinster, iron maiden and easy target for masculinist irony, Goodwin is represented as “a mausoleum of a dead passion” and an “engine” (494) of communal opinion. The text's jingoist, she becomes identified with Theodore Roosevelt's expansionist doctrine. Like Roosevelt, who asserts in a speech given in 1893 to the Naval War College that “All the great masterful races have been fighting races. … No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war” (qtd. Zinn 293), Goodwin is “a woman of peace, who … argued constantly for a creed of illimitable ferocity” (493) and a social activist whose “plan … for the reform of the world … advocated drastic measures.” As her desires are divested from traditional matronly fantasies and transfixed by international events, she is imagined, then, not as a feminist, but as a bold person of “adamantine opinions” (492) and “blood-thirsty” (495) utterances who shares Roosevelt's conservative convictions about the social order (Kaplan, “Romancing” 673-75). Given the chance, Goodwin too, Crane suggests, would assert that “if this country had not fought the Spanish War; if we had failed to take the action we did about Panama; all mankind would have been the loser” (Roosevelt, Autobiography 545).

While Mrs. Trescott's sentimental teacups may be almost empty of meaning, then, Martha Goodwin, with her belief that the flirtatious “Mrs. Minster and young Griscom should be hanged” (493) and her new-found interest in “the duty of the United States towards the Cuban insurgents” (492), moves in tandem with the nation. The white culture of Whilomville, on the surface of things, implies a historical truth: that a vigilant change in gender conceptions and communal mores occurred almost simultaneously with the rapid development of great home-front interest in United States military activities abroad. According to Richard Harding Davis, “nearly every [local] paper in the country that could afford to send” (938) a reporter to cover the Spanish-American War did so. Covered widely and without federal censorship in the press, this War became the most popular war in American history, rivaled afterward only by World War II and Desert Storm (Linderman 60-90, 148-73; Brown 125-66). As numerous communities rooted for their own local regiments fighting in Cuba as if cheering for football teams, star reporters like Crane were able to gain reputations for being “quite as much of a soldier as the m[e]n whose courage … [they] described” (Davis 942). Still, photographs of Crane's slight and often sickly frame, even when stylishly dressed for war, indicate how far he was from actually embodying the physical image of masculinity celebrated in and among the yellow press.⁷ Indeed, although Crane, as his war-reporting shows, was complicit in United States imperial activities, his equation of TR's world-vision with Goodwin's domestic ferocity and his parodying of both indicates his sense of ambivalence about the patriotic righteousness behind imperialist zeal.

“The Monster”—part boy's book, part regionalist excursion, part grotesque exploration of social codes, and part realist critique of provincial vigilance and zealous masculinity—is above anything else generically dissonant.⁸ Rather than functioning as either a paean to backwater folkways or an incitement of the masculinizing ethos shaping imperialist fantasies, this radically impure tale has a more subtle cultural politics, one with a coherent moral logic and that places Crane into paradoxical relations with the dominant gender trends of his time.

II

Whilomville appears to be undergoing a transformation in “The Monster”: an effeminizing cultural ethos has nearly been replaced by a more masculinizing one. When viewed in the context of Crane's personal history, however, “The Monster” suggests that the recession of the domestic and the emergence of the strenuous is a cultural pattern Crane not only records, but also questions, qualifies, and at least partially repudiates. Crane's family had a fairly distinguished local lineage in New Jersey dating from before the American Revolution. His father was an ardent, uncompromising Methodist minister, and both parents were temperance workers. As Ann Douglas has shown, the Methodist minister as a mid-century cultural type was an active and important figure in the sentimental reformation of Victorian America. Still, although J. T. Crane ministered and administrated in various New Jersey churches and schools and wrote books “reproving intemperance, card-playing, … theater-going” (Berryman 8) and novel-writing, he died early (when Crane was nine) and is often assumed not to have had more than a residual influence on Crane's career. The artist notably rejected his family's path toward sanctimonious respectability and their religious ethos by dropping out of college, working as a journalist, and slumming in the New York Bowery during his formative years.⁹

If Crane seems not to have confused “physical strength and strength of character” (Rotundo 233) like many men of his time, he was popularly known for writing The Red Badge of Courage (1895), our culture's canonical text of coming to manhood in the Civil War, and as a reporter-hero in the same military theater where TR and his “Rough Riders” made their mark. “The Monster” was written, however, when Crane lived in the English countryside. England became a haven, albeit an exiled one, serving as a momentary yet important place of retreat between several of Crane's extreme experiences: between his departure from New York in sensational public scandal and his mysterious, four-month disappearance into impoverished Havana, between his self-acknowledged peak experience during the sinking of the Commodore and his apparent attempt at suicide during the Spanish-American War, and between his initially inept coverage of the Greco-Turkish War and his subsequent distinction, at least in Richard Harding Davis' mind, as “the best correspondent” (941) in Cuba. Crane's war-time contact with Roosevelt, Davis, and others made him well placed to comment on masculinity, and his use of the strenuous ethos in his writing makes his failure to toe the TR line that much more significant. Indeed, what is clear in the author's biography and in Whilomville is the excising of sentimental tropes and the insertion of more martial ones in their place. What is more surprising, however, is the way sentiments and virtues formerly associated with domesticity and women return to Crane's aesthetic and moral vision in a different guise.¹⁰

The development of a “metonymical process” wherein “turn-of-the-century manhood constructed bodily strength and social authority as identical” has been widely documented by many recent critics.¹¹ In “The Monster,” Crane illustrates how the muscular, theatrical formation of masculinity emerges in Whilomville to repudiate the nostalgic imagery associated with a simpler communal past. At once evocative of organic communal life yet denied the illusions of permanence, a small-town tableau of a summer band playing patriotic tunes in the park is impressionistically suggested and then broken apart in the text. With typical Cranian speed, the band conductor's “look of poetic anguish” causes the crowd to smile in the pause between marches but also is interrupted by factory whistles and church bells warning of the fire in district two. As the crowd awakens from its complacent reverie, a new set of clichés invades the scene. The bells and whistles release the “muscles of the company of young men on the sidewalk” who “vanished like a snowball disrupted by dynamite” and then reappear pulling “madly in their fervor and abandon” at fire-trucks. Soon spectacular figures of stalwart white masculinity, like Jake Rogers “bent like hickory in the manfulness of his pulling … the heavy cart … slowly to the door,” arise in “the glare of the electric light” to transfix the eyes of young “lads” (458-59). According to Crane, strenuous masculinity is preeminently a public performance before a domestic audience in the 1890s. Imitating the volunteers who “perform all manner of prodigies” (468), Jimmie Trescott and a pal later make their own “white and desperate rush[es] forward” (498) to touch Johnson/the monster and prove themselves to their bratty peers.¹²

No other scene in “The Monster” more clearly establishes the martial character of the hometown culture while linking it to battlefront imagery. Crane describes “the thrill of patriotic insanity,” a thrill designed to generate patriotic feeling among those at home reading war reports, in his “Vivid Story of the Battle of San Juan” (Uncollected Writings 360); this same thrill also drives Whilomville's response to the fire. In addition, just as Jake Rogers is depicted in splendid isolation in “The Monster,” Crane, with similar admiration in a Cuban dispatch, isolates “a spruce young sergeant of marines, erect, his back to the showering bullets” as he “solemnly and intently [is] wigwagging [the flag] to the distant Dolphin” (336-40), an American ship in the harbor. Indeed, Crane's representation of the volunteers in Cuba and Whilomville can seem to contribute to what has been deemed the pressing “cultural work” of white masculinity in the 1890s: the erection of a strenuous, phallic, and unifying national image of American identity after the Civil War and Reconstruction (Kaplan, “Black” 219-36; Brown 142).

In “The Monster,” however, Crane deploys the tropes of the strenuous ethos only to challenge them in their turn. In addition to parodying Goodwin's domestic ferocity, Crane also satirizes the ineffectual actions of the strenuous fire-fighters. The volunteers may quicken the imaginations of Whilomville's boys, but they arrive too late to perform any real feat of heroism. Henry Johnson, Dr. Trescott, and an anonymous “young man who was a brakeman on the railway” (467) arrive before the volunteers, save Jimmie Trescott, and disappear from the scene as the volunteers douse the charred remains of the house with their hoses. The “brakeman” anticipates a significant difference in Crane's front-line journalism as well; in his dispatches from Cuba he turns away from the publicity-generating performances of Roosevelt's elite volunteers and the legions of hometown volunteers to make visible the unappreciated “regular” soldier, an underclass figure named “Nolan.”

Whereas Crane left Lafayette College and Syracuse University before ever finishing a year, Roosevelt studied at Harvard University with Owen Wister, several “Rough Riders,” and under William James. At Harvard in the 1890s, the institutionalized cult of manhood often served to stabilize class distinctions by, in James' words, “posit[ing] life” in place of vocational doubt and by kindling the “will to believe” through the experience of risk-taking (Townsend 38-47, 256-86; Cady 376-82). Although Roosevelt could seem to caricature the complexity of James' masculinist philosophy and pedagogy, and despite the vitality of James' own anti-imperialist stance and the yellow press' caricaturing of even Roosevelt, TR nevertheless achieved in Cuba a remarkable “display of an advanced individualism” that boosted him toward the presidency and consolidated federal power for the cultural elites he represented after William McKinley's assassination. As Roosevelt asserts in several lengthy recollections, he felt his regiment of cowboys and aristocrats was “worth bragging about” (Autobiography 232, 227).

Instead of memorializing the “Rough Riders” for singing “‘Fair Harvard’ in the rifle-pits” (Davis 944), however, Crane portrays them as gallant but blundering, as a “silly brave force … wandering placidly into a great deal of trouble.” After feigning to qualify his criticism by saying he knows “nothing about war, of course, and pretend[s] nothing,” Crane then suggests “this regiment of volunteers [also] knew nothing but their own superb courage” as they were “ambushed” because of their noisy approach and suffered “a heavy loss … due to a remarkably wrong idea of how the Spanish bushwack” (Uncollected Writings 345-48). The jingoistic tendencies of Crane's Cuban journalism appear more readily in his representation of the regular soldier as “the best man standing on two feet on God's green earth.” But even here, in the process of writing about “the sweating, swearing, overloaded, hungry, thirsty, sleepless Nolan,” who gets “shot” despite his strenuous effort and about whom “the public doesn't seem to care” (371-72), Crane depicts tragedy rather than manly conquest leading to a nationally regenerative victory (Cady 380). In these instances when he criticizes the Rough Riders and suggests tragedy for the common soldier, Crane passes beyond his earlier ambiguity about heroic masculinity in his depiction of Henry Flemming's confused and selfless heroism in The Red Badge of Courage. Crane's fiction and journalism, in their moments of most revealing realism, consistently register ambivalence over the status of spectacular heroism and other manly acts of individual aggression or physical assertion.

Crane's second apparent assent to but ultimate dissent from the strenuous ethos, which is more difficult to decipher yet important to “The Monster,” is along the axis of power configured by race relations. Rather than pathologizing physical masculinity directly as a pacifist might (Brown 129), Crane's critique is larger and more inclusive: he problematizes the dominant racial logic of the normative culture undergirding the strenuous life. In “The Monster,” whereas mature whites appear cold, humorless, and warlike, infantile blacks are depicted as warm, amusing, and cowardly. Before his effacement, Henry Johnson in particular bears the desires whites repress and against which they define themselves. Associated with the horse, a mythic sign of masculine potency, and commonly thought of as “the biggest dude in town—anybody knows that” (456), Johnson is a familiar, rollicking figure of fun and “revivification” to the theatrical imagination of the white citizenry.¹³ Demonstrating the “elasticity of his race” (451), Johnson strikes in quick succession the minstrel's poses of an old-time, happy-go-lucky negro, a conjurer using “seductive wiles” (452) to charm children, and an irrepressible dandy whom Bella Farragut finds “divine” (457).

Beyond just “grin[ning] fraternally” (451) at Jimmie Trescott, in a scene of panic and violence Johnson also encounters the figure of the white goddess—“a trembling sapphire shape like a fairy lady”—in the erupting laboratory. After she “blocked his path and doomed him,” the “fairy lady” catches Johnson in “her talons” (465), in effect initiating his disfiguration. This occluded meeting between a white woman and a black man not only evokes the conventional fears (and their cultural effects) of rape and miscegenation signified by black masculinity in the white imagination (Barryman 323), it also inverts the sentimental work of Eva and Tom in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) by turning a black man back into “a thing” (467).¹⁴ Johnson's character, in fact, never appears rounded in the text, despite his heroism and care in attempting to save Jimmie Trescott. He is never more than a montage of stereotypes, and the predicament of the story remains a white predicament throughout. Crane puts on display the tendency of the white community to see African Americans primarily as figures in their own moral drama. Throughout the novella, Johnson is a moral index of Whilomville and a marker of the imaginative limitations of its white citizenry.

Arising from a millennial belief that “civilized” man has a duty to triumph both inwardly and outwardly over “savagery,” the dominant racial logic of the white society Crane problematizes was at once capacious and reductive enough to unite the culture's various drives toward self-control, social control, and imperial conquest. Indeed, a control-conquest continuum is evident in Roosevelt's The Strenuous Life (1899). In “Christian Citizenship,” the final essay of the collection, Roosevelt links the difficulty of self-control to his belief in the need for “leaders” capable of “suppressing” the passions of the people: “The truth is that each one of us has in him certain passions and instincts which if they gain the upper hand in his soul would mean that the wild beast had come uppermost in him. … What we need in our leaders and teachers is help in suppressing such feelings” (329). Correspondingly, in his jingoistic “Expansion and Peace,” Roosevelt argues: “whether the barbarian be the Red Indian on the frontier of the United States, the Afghan on the border of the British India, or the Turkoman who confronts the Siberian Cossacks, the result is the same. In the long run civilized man finds he can keep the peace only by subduing his barbarian neighbor; for the barbarian will yield only to force …” (31-32). As these passages suggest, Roosevelt believed that just as strenuous men must fight within themselves to gain control over their bodies and to subdue their psyches, they also must struggle vigorously (in their narratives of national community) to quell dissent at home and to conquer various racial others abroad (Takaki 1-55, 253-89; Townsend 256-86; Bederman 170-215). Ronald Takaki has suggested that this conceptual scheme for imagining selfhood and nationhood was derived from a blended heritage of Protestant asceticism, classical republicanism's valuing of homogeneity and social consensus, and social Darwinism's evolutionary hierarchies.

Roosevelt's account of the Spanish-American War in The Rough Riders (1899) exhibits not only his belief in Anglo-Saxon, masculine superiority but also the control-conquest continuum undergirding his stance toward domestic and international others. While the American conquest over the decadent, aristocratic Spanish and the Cubans who cannot protect themselves is TR's ostensible theme, an important counternarrative, as Amy Kaplan has shown, functions alongside his depictions of the conquesting “Rough Riders” to secure hierarchical racial relations among United States troops (“Black” 219-36). At one point in his narrative Roosevelt notices, in contrast to the Rough Riders who hold their positions in every case, “the colored infantrymen” fighting adjacent to him on San Juan Hill have lost their commanding officer and “begun to drift to the rear.” As the fighting intensifies, Roosevelt “jump[s] up,” confronts the retreating “‘smoked Yankees,’” and threatens to shoot those who disobey his order to hold their positions. The spectating Rough Riders attest to the legitimacy of TR's threat in “chorus.” The passage, written for the edification of the home-front audience, conveys TR's sense that “colored soldiers … are peculiarly dependent upon their white officers” while indicating how social control as a policy for national order depends on the very real threat of force. Once racial domination and hierarchical order are reassured, however, pleasure reappears in TR's attitude toward the colored troops. Taking obvious satisfaction in their acceptance of his authority, Roosevelt states that they “flashed their white teeth at one another, as they broke into broad grins, and I had no more trouble with them” (Rough Riders 92-93). African-American troops who played or could be represented as playing the parts of black-faced minstrels under his command signify to Roosevelt “normal” racial relations.¹⁵

As with TR on the imperial battlefront, the white men of Whilomville also gird themselves into aggressive imaginings of African-American men. Before the effacement of Johnson, they pay obsessive attention to his public actions. They attempt to secure interpretive mastery over him by contrasting him to themselves, and they enjoy fixing him in their gaze as a harmless minstrel player. A gang of young men on the street corner sees Johnson walking down the street and reads “cakewalk hyperbole” into his gait. They encourage him to “throw out your chest a little more” and reaffirm their gaze with rhetorical questions like “Ain't he smooth?” The men in the barbershop also debate excitedly about “the coon that's coming” (453-55). Their anxiety to manage the black masculine population of Whilomville is as intense as Roosevelt's need to master the colored troops in Cuba. Indeed, if only Henry Johnson could be made to smile again after the accident like a minstrel figure, he could be re-positioned within the social hierarchy and reassure Whilomville in the same way the “smoked Yankees” reassure TR. But by refusing to restore Johnson's absent face, Crane, instead of demonstrating Anglo-Saxon masculine superiority, problematizes it and explores the very racial anxieties that give urgency to white masculine efforts at conquest and control.

While Crane's imaginative act to disturb provincial culture in “The Monster” is not figured exclusively in relation to white masculinity, the effacement of Johnson disrupts the defensive drives to control or conquer the racial other which are most urgently acted on by white men. Moreover, Crane's exploration of racial pathology—of the pleasures white men take in imagining black masculine abjection—leads to his rejection not only of martial masculinity but also the bureaucratic manhood of self-control. For as “The Monster” and the writings of Roosevelt both suggest, the style of physical masculinity that achieved stability through self-repression and muscular acts of heroism often shared its racial logic with the type of bureaucratic masculinity that aimed to manage racial difference through equally insidious rational means. As the narrative focus of “The Monster” shifts from the muscular firemen who fail to save Jimmie Trescott to the town's business and judicial leaders who are eager to insulate the white community from Johnson/the monster after the accident, “The Monster” illustrates how neither style of white masculinity ultimately eradicates the sense of nervousness shaping the community's paranoid style of self-understanding and stimulating its racism.

Henry Johnson/the monster may still be “crooning a weird line of Negro melody” (496) even after his effacement, likely calling to mind for Crane's readership “coon songs” like “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” which sold millions of copies of sheet music during the 1890s (Roediger 98), but the fact remains that his return from unassimilable injury to minstrelsy is never more than suggested; similarly, the representation of him after the effacement as a non-human monstrosity is not an ideologically finished one, as Dr. Trescott's care for him shows. The destabilization of racial categories accompanying Johnson's effacement, the laying open and explication of the ambivalent workings of racial objectification, is the most obvious sign of the contrariness visited upon whiteness itself by the grotesque event of the effacement. By rendering Whilomville's vocabulary for racial categorization inadequate to the task of encoding Johnson's absent face, Crane indeed beleaguers the attempt of the home-front colonizer—more often an older bureaucratic man than a younger strenuous one—to objectify and manage the (non-white) home-front colonized.¹⁶ Moreover, although the novella, as Michael T. Gilmore suggests of Crane's realism more generally, remains “imbued with imperialist logic” (100), Crane dismantles the existing social order enough to suggest another kind of social organization and another style of masculinity, both of which are incompatible with the control-conquest continuum and the strenuous life.

III

As the local press eulogizes Johnson, whom the community presumes to be dead, six of ten doctors attending him after the fire also privately assert he is “doomed” (471). This collective reaction to the patient suggests the “kind of spectatorial paralysis” that Michael Davitt Bell characterizes as typical of middle-class, observer-figures in naturalist texts (110-11).¹⁷ Upon hearing the diagnosis of “doom,” however, Dr. Trescott springs “up quickly” from his own bed “to see if the bandages need readjusting” (471). Trescott's action to aid and treat rather than ignore and abandon Johnson/the monster are significant to the “cultural work” of Crane's novella. By depicting Trescott as a somewhat effeminized alternative to the strenuous man, Crane allows us to question the usual realist-naturalist trajectory of hyper-masculinity ushered in by Norris and London. “The Monster” suggests the continuities and unresolved tensions within white masculinity in the 1890s and that the men's project American literary realism is often taken to be is multivalent, conflictual in its manifestations, and morally diverse.

Resulting from Trescott's nearly maternal “vigil” of “long nights and days” at the “bedside” of the patient, a vigil which Judge Hagenthorpe cannot understand, Chapter XI depicts the breakdown of communication between the two professional men over what to call and what to do with Johnson/the monster. Hagenthorpe's assertion that “somehow I think that poor fellow ought to die,” suggesting Johnson/the monster ought to be erased from the community for his own sake, brings forth a “look of recognition” and disbelief from Trescott concerning what Crane names “an old problem” (472-73). The two men cannot agree upon a common vocabulary through which to signify the grotesque figure. As their speech fragments, the emotional structure of the scene recalls the opening of the novella where Jimmy Trescott, having destroyed a peony while imagining himself a train, “could do no reparation” and undergoes “a severe mental tumult” as if “the importance of the whole thing had taken away the boy's vocabulary” (449-50). It also initiates a return for the entire town to what Bill Brown deems an “originary moment in [the history of] American racism” (229) by deconstructing the racist vocabulary undergirding the white community. Trescott in particular refuses to validate the social Darwinist notion that blacks had to die because they were not the fittest—he rejects, in other words, the stigma of mortality often associated with being black in the 1890s.¹⁸

The rift between Hagenthorpe and Trescott serves as the origin of Whilomville's subsequently failed search for a unifying narrative and course of action through which to respond to Johnson/the monster. At least two contradictory ways of reading him/it emerge from the crisis of interpretation, and by extension, at least two irreconcilable propositions or stories are imagined for constructing the white male self in relation to the other.¹⁹ The more easily detectable story is the re-affirmation of an ethos for white masculinity derived from the control-conquest continuum. The story of Trescott's awakening, however, figures the capacity of white men for empathetic communal action despite the apparent costs. Part of what makes “The Monster” such a compelling fiction of United States community and masculinity is that it depicts the divided feelings, both the loathing and the regret, at the heart of white relations with African Americans.

The grotesque event of Johnson's effacement displaces onto white masculinity the contrasting racial logic used elsewhere to draw distinctions between men of different races. As the accident creates a perceptible gulf within the white community, white masculinity itself becomes a contradictory social category wherein “opposing processes and assumptions coexist” (Harpham 14). As with Judge Hagenthorpe, many in Whilomville wish to pass from the knowable reality through the unassimilable event to the knowable reality again without accepting or even acknowledging the altered presence of Johnson. If the minstrel face formerly making him familiar could only be restored, the difference he has become would not need to be recognized, admitted, cared for, or internalized. Without a recognizable face, however, Johnson/the monster is perceived as a threat, and the strategies for purging him/it from Whilomville run the gamut from death to deportation to re-objectification. In the barbershop, Bainbridge reiterates the Judge's position that the Doctor “should have let him die” (482). Once it is confirmed that Johnson/the monster will live, Mr. Twelve, the reputed millionaire and community leader, proposes to exile Johnson by getting him “a place somewhere off up the valley” (507); others suggest institutionalizing him/it. Finally, the drive to create narratives re-objectifying him/it returns with unrelenting force among the part of the community for whom Bainbridge speaks. Acting like a minstrel-player himself, Bainbridge turns the effacement into an occasion for pleasure as he sings his own adapted lines to the lewd song “No Hips at All”: “He has no face in the front of his head, / in the place where his face ought to grow” (483).²⁰

By contrast, because of the moral burden placed on him by Johnson's attempt to save his son, Trescott cannot see Johnson/the monster in a way that allows him to cease caring for the patient. The Doctor refutes Hagenthorpe's suggestion that Johnson/the monster “ought to die” by asking the Judge: “Would you kill him?” When Hagenthorpe asserts that Johnson will “be a monster, and with no mind,” Trescott also refuses to accept this re-objectification or non-human naming by replying: “he will be what you like, judge, … but, by God! he saved my boy” (473-74). And in response to Twelve's plan to send Johnson/the monster up the valley, Trescott states: “You don't know, my friend. Everybody is so afraid of him, they can't even give him good care” (507). Although Trescott's care for Johnson/the monster has more to do with his debt of gratitude than with his/its questionable racial status after the accident, Johnson's race before the accident still shapes the white community's need to re-personify, re-place, or dispose of him/it. Trescott's actions thwart this compulsive need of the white community to purge itself of the unassimilable other.²¹

Critics have suggested that “The Monster” participates in the communal attempts to finish the othering and eradication of Johnson/the monster. As Joseph Church points out, “insofar as Crane, like the men of Whilomville, uses the disfigured black man to represent his own [aesthetic] power, he is guilty of the very [racial] logic that indicts the culture he condemns” (386). The justice of Church's critique lies in the fact that even Trescott's sociable and sentimental awakening can be read as resulting from Johnson's effacement. Still, this reading overlooks the fact that it is actually Johnson's act of care—his agency, not his effacement—which enables Trescott to recognize his humanity. In addition, it also remains blind to Crane's critique of a culture, and specifically a construction of white masculinity, that is repressive and fearful of black masculine agency. Indeed, the novella portrays those who advocate the strategies for purging the community of Johnson/the monster as emotionally crippled and childish. Bainbridge is identified as a “flint-hearted fish” (482); his aggressive refusal to grasp ethical subtleties is perhaps only equaled by Martha Goodwin. Hagenthorpe and Jake Winters, who stands on his porch “still yelping … like a little dog” (502) after expelling Trescott from his house, also exemplify moral coarseness and cowardice. Even Twelve mistakes his own shirking of responsibility for considerate leadership by arguing that although “this thing is out of the ordinary, … there must be ways to … beat the game somehow” (506-7). In these instances, Crane portrays the insensitivity and defensiveness he intuits to be the psychic companions of the unfinishable process of racial objectification.

As a capable medical practitioner who won't take anyone else's word that the patient has no chance for survival, Trescott treats Johnson/the monster rather than attempting to rid the community of the imagined threat posed by his/its alterity. After carrying his son from the burning laboratory where Johnson dropped Jimmie, Trescott hears Hannigan's howl that “Johnson is in there” and sentiments “penetrated to … [his] sleepy sense” (467). Later, upon learning of Jimmie's use of Johnson/the monster to test the courage of his pals in the performative mode of the firemen, Trescott “groaned deeply” and “his countenance was so clouded in sorrow that the lad, bewildered by the mystery of it, burst forth in dismal lamentations” (500-1). Indeed, Trescott becomes marked in these scenes by his compassion. He cannot seem to unburden himself of the thought uttered by the chief of police: “Guess there isn't much of him to hurt any more, is there? Guess he's been hurt up to the limit” (491). Rather than anxiety or loathing, he experiences the kind of sentimental or humanitarian grief over Johnson's injuries which Hawthorne suggests makes people capable of sympathy.²²

Crane figures the novella's counternarrative around Trescott's compassionate alteration. The underlying trope of this counternarrative is a chiasmus, a crossing that entails an inverted exchange between past and present relations. Trescott passes from a professional ethos of control to one of care and from emotional reserve to the capacity for kindness as a result of his response to the crisis.²³ Before the fire he rides home from his day's work “feeling glad” he has “subdued” his last case into “complete obedience,” as if practicing medicine were like breaking “a wild animal” (466), but afterward he nurses Johnson throughout the night. His original cold and distant demeanor associating him with “the moon” is replaced by a new tenderness. When Jimmie cries, Trescott “sat in a great leather reading-chair, and took the boy on his knee …” (501). He also attempts to comfort Grace Trescott when her tea fails, and as the maimed Johnson descends from a carriage, he holds “both arms [out] to the dark figure … [while] it crawled to him painfully” (476).

Trescott assumes a cultural function similar to that of a domestic mother by grieving and caring for Johnson and his family; he also comes to represent in the novella her formerly absent ethos. In Trescott's character, what Charlotte Perkins Gilman identifies as “the naturally destructive tendencies of the male have been gradually subverted to the conservative tendencies of the female.” Perhaps the most subtle gender theorist of her day, Gilman identifies in Women and Economics (1898) “maternal energy” as having the ability “to love and care for someone besides himself … to work, to serve, to be human” (126-28). In Trescott, Crane suggests the supersession of martial and managerial actions with “maternal” ones as a manly form of risk-taking. The Doctor's emotional reconnection to his family, of which Johnson becomes an integral part, consequently evinces the possibility of fashioning a more “maternal” and thus a more versatile formation of masculinity in the increasingly hyper-masculine culture of the turn of the last century. Moreover, in these instances when “The Monster” evokes the figure of the “man-mother” (125) Gilman delineates, Crane in effect rewrites post-bellum white masculinity itself as a grotesquely divided construct rather than a monolithic image.

As Crane attempts to retool and redeploy a culturally recessive, or more nurturing construction of manhood, which Anthony Rotundo suggests nineteenth-century doctors and ministers often cultivated because of their work in healing professions (205-9), Dr. Trescott, Jimmie, and Johnson/the monster are partially released from the discursive systems of the normalizing communal order. When one reads “The Monster” from a point of view that privileges Trescott's humanitarian extension beyond the emotional limits set by the normative culture, the grotesque event of Johnson's effacement begins to undermine the social conventions which create “reality” in Whilomville (Harpham 4). From this perspective, “The Monster” is a text which implies a desire to reanimate a revolutionary humanitarian or sentimental ethos and then channel it into communal action. Still, if Crane's novella shows the contingency of Whilomville, the impermanence of its mores, and opens a horizon of imaginative possibility, it doesn't suggest the end of the line for the emotional and discursive conventions governing this “reality.”²⁴ Instead, a spliced narrative structure arises after the grotesque event, as Trescott experiences his difference from normative Whilomville (as Crane had experienced his difference from Port Jervis) without being entirely liberated from its imaginative constraints. Trescott's difference without liberation from a community vigilantly demanding like-mindedness suggests, then, the deep logic behind Crane's own aesthetic disposition and moral sensibility.

The alteration in Trescott's masculine ethos also doesn't provide an escape from the paradigms and imagery of colonization. With his grief and sense of a debt, his sincere desire to show charity but inability to save Johnson/the monster from his fate, Trescott embodies Crane's equivocations about the colonizer's obligations to the colonized. In an article Crane wrote from Havana in 1898 to indict United States imperial policy just after the war, he offers clear insight into the ethics of gender underlying his depiction of Trescott's transformation. Several weeks after the United States victory over the Spanish but before any American soldiers had arrived in Havana, Crane grows impatient with the American delay and writes of the United States government:

The next three months are likely to be more disastrous for Cuba than were the months of war. … If a man lacks a spine it is not of a surety his privilege to enter heaven without challenge as a just and charitable spirit. The lack of spine is not mentioned by any available authority as the supreme virtue of mankind. What we mistake for generous feeling for our late enemy is more than half the time merely a certain governmental childishness.

(Uncollected Writings 393-94)

Crane criticizes American “governmental childishness” in Cuba much as he criticizes the white men of Whilomville because of their inability to act charitably toward Johnson/the monster. To Crane, the American government is figured as a “man,” and Crane defines manhood as having a “spine” and a “just and charitable spirit.” Thus, the government's delay in providing care and security for the Cubans amounts to a failure of masculinity for Crane. This delay also announces the almost immediate erosion of national interest in the Spanish-American War, substantiating in Crane's particular account the widespread interpretation of this war as fought more for the domestic audience than the liberation of Cubans. Still, the ethos of masculine care-taking Crane advocates here and in Trescott's character remains imperialist, for Crane's ostensible hope is that white men will take up their burden in Cuba and Whilomville.

In 1900, while considering William Watson's response to allegations he had written unpatriotically about the English presence in South Africa, Crane suggests that he also cannot banish moral questions from his imperial experiences. He states:

In the end, one seems to find in Mr. William Watson's letter an expression of decent, equitable patriotism, which might be worth perusal. First, he approves of some of his country's acts because he can't help it. … [But] instead of being the letter of a fiery agitator, it is the letter of a saddened man.

A critical commonplace in Crane scholarship is that his was a deep patriotism, that even as an expatriate living in the English countryside he almost always wrote of his homeland, its people, and their issues. Still, despite initial chauvinism, Crane, like Watson and unlike a “fiery agitator,” identifies regret to be at the core of his sense of patriotism and imperialism. Moreover, unlike Watson, whom Crane identifies as having “failed to express that comic vanity which leads one to long that the enemy should know that one is an honorable man,” Crane admits to his own “burning wish for a quick success of the American arms in the Philippines” and “a still more burning wish that the Filipinos shall see us as just men” (Uncollected Writings 428). As he satirizes the “comic vanity” of his own desire to be recognized as “just” by the Filipinos, Crane shows his inability to fully accept the racial logic of white male superiority. Still, while emphasizing his difference from the “fiery agitator” and evincing his sense of the hubris of “big-stick diplomacy,” Crane refrains from rejecting imperialism outright.

When one returns to the local community of “The Monster,” charity, compassion, and a just demeanor also emerge as the salient features of the style of masculinity and social authority the novella privileges. From Shipley, the quiet fire-chief the boys can't grasp but whom the “fathers” vindicate, to the chief of police, who tips off Trescott to the rising communal outrage when Johnson/the monster returns to town, to Dr. Moser, who includes “a little history of each case” (501) in an envelope when Trescott volunteers to cover his rounds, the men who are not parodied by Crane, while often overshadowed by a more visible and muscular fraternity, are engaged in acts of communal service. It is as if Crane, in these rare moments without irony, seeks to suggest what communitarians continue to tell us: that “community and human relations … have … non-instrumental value, and are frequently constitutive of personal identity” (Flanagan 123). In “The Monster,” the latent ethos of masculine service and communal care—a barely glimpsed utopian possibility in the text which is all but invisible in recent studies of turn-of-the-century masculinity—is vindicated (however fleetingly) over of the manifest ones.

Furthermore, this ethos of communal commitment takes on greater significance in the context of Crane's own cultivation of a mutually supportive, literary community in England at the time of the text's composition. As Crane grew to feel he might be permanently exiled from Port Jervis, at one point complaining to his brother William that “so many of them in America … want to kill, bury and forget me purely out of unkindness and envy and—my unworthiness, if you choose” (Correspondence 1: 301), he sought to create what Harold Frederic referred to as a “community of comradeship” (qtd. 1: 339) in the countryside of Kent and East Sussex. At Ravensbrook and Brede Place, Crane frequently entertained Harold Frederic, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, and Henry James. He also offered generous emotional support when Joseph Conrad suffered from depression. Conrad reciprocated by attempting to find Crane a more lucrative publisher to alleviate his financial distress. Moreover, Crane was thoroughly invested in a scheme to write a play with Conrad, and he wrote an appreciation of Frederic's oeuvre upon the publication of Frederic's now forgotten Gloria Mundi (1898). Because of his efforts to extend the sentiments, sympathy, and trust typically associated with familial relations into a model of professional affiliation founded on mutual appreciation and personal admiration, Crane became the central person generating community among the various writers (and their families) living in his proximity in the English countryside (Delbanco 39-81).

Crane, however, never finally sustained in his art or his life the nurturing style of masculine sociability he increasingly sought. If the effacement of Johnson and the transformation of Trescott demonstrate the contingency of Whilomville, by marking its temporal and spatial limits and opening a horizon through which to imagine possibilities extending beyond those limits, the final scene of “The Monster” depicts Trescott and his wife as abject and alienated from Whilomville. With his practice faltering and his social standing eroded, Trescott, like his tearful wife, is numb, “mechanically count[ing]” (508) empty teacups while trying to console Grace Trescott after her Wednesday afternoon tea has been boycotted. Rather than any kind of affirmation at the evacuation of meaning from the sentimental trope of the teacup, the novella's final scene suggests only the oppressive power of a vigilant communal ethos which condemns and excludes Trescott for his emotive and humanitarian response to Johnson's injury. Similar to the process of racial objectification criticized in the novella, then, Crane's redescription of white masculine sociability also remains unfinished in the text. Perhaps not coincidentally, Crane's proposed dramatic collaboration with Conrad and the hoped for “community of comradeship” among Crane, Frederic, and their mistresses also never materialized. As the scheme to pull together the two households deteriorated, Frederic would write to Cora, Crane's partner, expressing his sense “that any effort to put” his routine and Crane's “side by side under one roof would necessarily come to grief.” Frederic even expresses the skepticism about community more commonly associated with the perspective of a realist when he states: “there would be the common bond of great and deep personal attachment between the two households, of course—but when it came to a test of strength between that and the divergent impetus of two wholly different sets of habits, I have seen too much of the world to doubt that the bond would be injured much more easily than the habits would be harmonized” (qtd. Correspondence 1: 339).

In a letter likely written in 1897 but published one month after his death in 1900, Crane makes a rare and often-cited statement of his aesthetic principle. He identifies a double movement as foundational to his art and comments on his way of disguising his moral purpose.

I have been careful not to let any theories or pet ideas of my own creep into my work. Preaching is fatal to art in literature. I try to give the readers a slice out of life; and if there is any moral or lesson in it, I do not try to point it out. I let the reader find it for himself. The result is more satisfactory to both reader and myself. As Emerson said, “There should be a long logic beneath the story, but it should be kept carefully out of sight.”

(1: 322-23)

“Preaching,” the rejected occupation of Crane's father as well as the sister discourse of the sentimental novel, is juxtaposed to and superseded by a realist-naturalist description of “literature” as a fraternal “art” of presenting “a slice of life.” The biographical residues of this passage, like the argument of this essay, suggest that Crane's aesthetic temperament was shaped by an original revolt against the moralizing genres and tropes for which “preaching” stands and which are replaced by the less decipherable (“I do try not point it out”) but “more satisfactory” representations of real “life.” In the end of the passage, however, Crane makes the equivocal return to quote Emerson, equivocal not least because of the moralizing idiom Emerson uses concerning what “should be” done.

While the nascent reconstitution of Trescott's white masculine subjectivity does not fully reclaim “that part of a man's inner self that sought expression through intimacy,” a part of male identity Rotundo suggests was “being squeezed to the margins of men's lives” (282) at the turn of the twentieth century, Trescott's emerging emotionalism in the novella's chiastic counternarrative, his sympathy with a racial outcast, his warmth toward his child and wife, and his commitment to voluntary above tribal affiliations are significant in a novella whose narrative also participates in the strenuous reorientation of the national culture away from “the female” and toward “the male.” Caught between a residual and nurturing masculine ethos that Crane tries to recuperate and the strenuous ethos of white masculinity ascendant in the culture, “The Monster” ultimately maintains a sense of the moral diversity of, and tensions within, turn-of-the-century constructions of Anglo-American masculinity.

Despite the real costs of Trescott's gratitude and care for Johnson/the monster, the novella also leads to a clear moral position, figured by Trescott, concerning what Crane believed “should be” done about the problem of Anglo-American masculine sociability. While the teacups latent with effeminized ritual are virtually excised from the text, the sentimentalist's validation of humanitarian commitment and social feeling is not. Communal indifference and strenuous individualism instead are repudiated. In the end, however much Trescott may assert “I'm not trying to teach them anything” (506), Crane, who practically paraphrases Trescott when he suggests he does “not try to point” out the lesson of his art, is trying to teach his “reader” something. Trescott offers one of Crane's best expressions of his own longing for a masculine ethos of social care and communal commitment. Still, Crane's final gesture to leave Trescott alienated yet circumscribed within the provincial white community suggests the author's own ultimate deprecation to, not his self, but his reader's judgment of his art and life. Notwithstanding his remarks to the contrary, nor his concurrent advocary of United States imperialism, Crane's concern throughout his novella is to represent, and to cultivate in his readers, a humane formation of judgment and care.

Notes

1. See Higham for his reorientation thesis about United States culture in the 1890s.

2. Cady's is a suggestive and artful discussion of Crane's “temptation toward” and divergence from “Rooseveltian neo-romanticism” (379). He locates irony, before care, as the cause of Crane's difference from the more zealous advocates of the strenuous life.

3. Many recent critics of “The Monster” have sharpened our understanding of the novella's stylistic and narrative complexity by identifying crucial tropes, metaphors, narrative techniques, and recurrent stylistic gestures as central features of Crane's writing. On the novella's narrative structure, see Warner. On Crane's use of the trope of prosopopoeia, see Mitchell. Also, Morace analyzes how the novella “is intricately developed by means of a game metaphor” (66). And even though he doesn't write specifically about “The Monster,” Bell reads Crane's cultivation of “a style that deliberately calls attention to itself” (132).

   This kind of attention to narrative, rhetoric, and style has resulted in a critical discourse about “The Monster” which often gives cursory attention to its historical and biographical contexts. More recently, Brown has analyzed the discourses and artifacts which surface in the novella's “material unconscious” from the turn-of-the-century recreational cultures of black-faced minstrelsy, freak shows, and photography. Also, Marshall reads the novella into a biographical context. The divergence of my work from Brown's and Marshall's demonstrates how, as Dimock suggests, even within a certain “slice of time” “context is not a fixture or a given” but a noisy “continuum” (1061, 1065).

4. The racial codes through which Crane illustrates the regional themes of communal ossification and personal limitation are common among a range of turn-of-the-century novels which take Northeastern town-life as their subject. For example, as with Judge Hagenthorpe and Martha Goodwin, Deborah Thayer in Mary Wilkins Freeman's Pembroke (1893) and the Methodist residents of Octavius in Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) dominate their emotional selves and have blighted, bellicose dispositions. The characters of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911) also are scarred by self-repression and impotency.

   On the largely Protestant code which characterized the mores of small communities in the 1870s and 1880s and the often violent reactions of these (white) communities in the 1890s against perceived threats, see Wiebe 1-75; Takaki 1-55, 253-89; and Lott 482.

5. “Weightlessness” is the term Jackson Lears uses to suggest the experience of dislocation felt by many citizens of the “new city” in the Gilded Age (32-46). On the distention of the “island community” during the Gilded Age, see Wiebe 11-75.

6. According to Harpham, the grotesque is “an energy which aborts” all “systems of decorum” by “moving the bottom to the top,” the marginal to the center (8, 74).

7. For instance, on his way to Cuba in 1898, Crane was described by another journalist as “one of the most unprepossessing figures that ever served as a nucleus for apocryphal romance; shambling, with hair too long, usually lacking a shave, sallow, destitute of small talk, critical if not fastidious, marked with ill-health—the very antithesis of the conquering male” (qtd. Berryman 177-78).

8. Brown speaks of the Whilomville stories in terms of “generic syncretism: the use of a dominant genre to record an emerging phenomenon that disrupts that genre's conceptual precondition” (170). Generic dissonance is more accurate for “The Monster,” however, wherein generic experimentations preclude any form from being dominant. See Glazener on the generic dissonance structuring the literary and periodical marketplace during the postbellum period.

9. Brown shows that Crane's father was an archetypal Methodist minister who advocated for the belief in “subordinating ‘all the emotions, passions, and appetites to the control of reason and conscience’” (28). In addition to Berryman and Brown, Wertheim and Sorrentino's The Crane Log is another useful source for biographical details about Crane.

10. In my characterization of Crane's use of and biographical connections to the imagery and heritage associated with antebellum domesticity and sentimentalism, I am allowing these cultural forms to be reduced to their dominant meanings, as they frequently were within the largely anti-feminist, masculinist, postbellum set of discourses about sociability and community that are my subject in this essay. I am aware, however, of the recent revisionary criticism that advocates for separating these terms from each other and recharacterizes their multifarious cultural work, and the cultural work of nineteenth-century women, as more pervasively public than formerly acknowledged. In fact, my larger claim for Crane's paradoxical revaluing of an ethos of communal care among postbellum men gains resonance in relation to this recent scholarship. On the itinerant cultural power of domesticity, see especially Romero. And on the need to reconstruct “a long, broad view of sentimentality” (72), one which takes into account “the transatlantic and philosophical antecedents of the form” (69), see Howard's “What is Sentimentality?”; see also Camfield 22-59.

11. Bederman 8; see also Brown; Kaplan “Romancing” and “Black”; Townsend; and Rotundo.

12. This scene of children imitating manly actions in “The Monster” is similar to the boyhood war games depicted in the opening scene of Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, making evident the connection between Crane and Stone, both sensational impressionists, obsessed with war and patriotism, and intent upon implicating the structures of domestic life in the agendas of United States militarism.

13. Harpham notes that in the cave art of Paleolithic man “‘the horse is the chief masculine sign’” (60); see also Lott 482.

14. In addition to Berryman's speculative reading, Marshall argues more recently that Henry Johnson is a benign transmutation of Robert Lewis, a black rapist who was lynched in front of William Crane's house in Port Jervis in 1892.

15. In his Cuban journalism, Crane was capable of deploying this contrasting racial logic without making a critique of it. He includes patently racist counter-points in several articles, in one case contrasting the “strong figures,” “bronze faces,” and “linen suits” of Anglo-American soldiers to Cuban soldiers who appear to him as “hard-bitten, under-sized … negroes” dressed in clownish costumes (Uncollected Writings 336, 340).

16. My reading of the effacement of Johnson/the monster and Crane's use of the racial grotesque is influenced by Cassuto's argument for “viewing the colonial relation in terms of the encounter with the grotesque” (xvi). According to Cassuto, the process of racial objectification, as represented throughout nineteenth-century American literature and as an integral part of the antebellum American projects of Indian removal and the attempt to justify slavery, entailed huge imaginative efforts by the dominant (white) group to see “nonwhites as non-people” (xiii). He demonstrates that the attempt of the (white) colonizer to personify or objectify the (non-white) colonized is internally problematized in the antebellum period by a deeply anthropomorphic tendency in human perception, which simultaneously prevents ideological closure in the objectifying process and produces “unarticulated ambivalence” (16) or the deep anxiety of the racial grotesque (xiii-xix, 1-29).

17. Bell is responding to arguments made by Howard in Form and History.

18. On social Darwinism's active discourse about black mortality, see Mizruchi, 269-302.

19. Warner has argued that the “uncanny experience” of reading the novella results from Crane's sophisticated creation of “two stories” (87), one heroic and one problematic, which develop simultaneously and undercut one another. Whereas Warner suggests that the contrariness of the narrative dismantles “our mechanism of valuation” (77) and demonstrates the text's ethical ambivalence, I posit that Crane's two stories actually lead to a clear ethical position about the sociable values imputed to different styles of masculinity. In addition, Brown argues that “The Monster” presents a “counterdramaturgy” (218) figured by Johnson/the monster which frustrates the evocation of sociological reality also evident in the text. He sees the contrary narrative, however, as becoming surreally modernist (239-245), whereas I emphasize its recuperation of aspects from a sentimental or humanitarian legacy despite its modernist moments.

20. Katz identifies the song in an editor's note to “The Monster” (483).

21. On William Crane's attempt to prevent a black man's lynching in Port Jervis and the similarities between his actions and Trescott's on behalf of Johnson, see Marshall 212-24.

22. On the representation of emotion, personal injury and psychic pain in literary realism, see Travis.

23. My understanding of the temporal dimensions of the figure of chiasmus is influenced by Caruth (50-51).

24. This formulation is influenced by Said's discussion of Conrad's dating of imperialism (19-31).

I want to thank Anne E. Fernald for her keen intellect, careful reading of my writing and sustaining friendship. Thanks also to Michael T. Gilmore, John Burt, Wai Chee Dimock, and an anonymous reader at Arizona Quarterly for their cleareyed, helpful responses to earlier versions of this essay.

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