The Red Badge :: essays research papers

The Red Badge of Courage The Red Badge of Courage is now universally recognized as a masterpiece, although when it first appeared in book form in 1896 (two months later in England than in the United States) it provoked mixed reactions. The English critics, in fact, brought it to the attention of the American public, which had generally ignored it. Those early readers who approved saw in it a "true and complete picture of war," a book which "thrusts aside romantic machinery" in favor of dramatic action and photographic revelation. Its critics attacked it for what they considered its utter lack of literary form - its "absurd similes," "bad grammar," and "violent straining after effect." Edward Garnett, however, praised its "perfect mastery of form," and Conrad, who had known Crane, said in 1926 that The Red Badge of Courage was a "spontaneous piece of work which seems to spurt and flow like a tapped stream from the depths of the writer's being," and he found it "virile and full of gentle sympathy! " while it was happily marred by no "declamatory sentiments." Throughout the first four decades of the century the book was variously praised and condemned for its naturalism or "animalism," its realism and its extraordinary style. V. S. Pritchett, writing in 1946, may be said to represent the prevailing opinion when he declares that Crane's "verisimilitude," his grasp of "human feelings," and his "dramatic scenes and portraits" give The Red Badge of Courage a place in the literature of war. It is only in the forties that serious literary analysis of the book begins. It had of course long been recognized that novels such as Zola's La Debacle and Tolstoy's Sevastopol and War and Peace had had some influence on Crane, and that he had made use of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (which had first appeared serially in the Century Magazine) as well as accounts of particular campaigns; his brother William, for one thing, was an expert on the strategy of the Battle of Chancellorsville, and there are many parallels with this battle to be found in The Red Badge. But scholars like Pratt, Webster, Osborn, and Stallman began to call attention to the possible role played by less significant factors, like Crane's personal acquaintance with General Van Petten, an instructor at Claverack College, who might have provided him with a first-hand account of the Battle of Antietam.