The Red Badge of the Running Back: Stephen Crane, Football and the Fictional Representation of the American Civil War

Abstract

The most famous fictional rendition of the American Civil War is Stephen Crane's masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Lacking any experience of warfare, Crane asserted he had gained his ‘sense of the rage of conflict on the football field’, college football being a popular sport in America in the 1890s. This claim has been discussed in some detail by Christian K. Messenger (in Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction, 1981) and Bill Brown (The Material Unconscious, 1996), and both scholars find Crane's use of the football trope either inappropriate or improper. It is my contention, however, that Crane's experience of football in the 1890s pervades his narrative use of the physical, tactical and rhetorical images of the sport to recreate successfully the sights and sounds of warfare, transforming a historically frightening, confusing and chaotic event into a structured and meaningful contemporary literary experience.

Notes

1. R.W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A biography (New York, 1986), p. 177.

2. William Dean Howells, review of The Red Badge of Courage, Harper's Weekly, 39 (26 Oct. 1895), p. 1013; George Wyndham, New Review, 14 (January 1896), pp. 30–40; reprinted in Donald Pizer, ed., Critical essays on Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (Boston, MA, 1990), pp. 23, 25.

3. Sydney Brooks, review of The Red Badge of Courage, Saturday Review, 81 (11 Jan. 1896), pp. 44–5; reprinted in Pizer, Critical essays, p. 31.

4. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrento, eds, The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, 2 vols (New York, 1994), vol. I, p. 28.

5. Harold Hungerford, ‘“That was at Chancellorsville”: The factual framework of The Red Badge of Courage’, American Literature, 34 (1963), pp. 520–31; James Nagel, Stephen Crane and literary impressionism (University Park, PA, 1980), esp. pp. 52–61, 87–92.

6. Lars Åhnebrink, The beginnings of naturalism in American fiction, Essays and studies on American literature, Vol. IX, ed. S.B. Liljegren (New York, 1961), pp. 89–103, 150–5; Charles C. Walcutt, American literary naturalism: A divided stream (Minneapolis, MN, 1956), pp. vii–viii, 66–7, 74–82.

7. Maxwell Geismar, Rebels and ancestors: The American novel 1890–1915 (New York, 1963; orig. pub. 1953), pp. 82–9; John E. Hart, ‘The Red Badge of Courage as myth and symbol’, University of Kansas Review, 19 (1953), pp. 249–56; Robert Shulman, ‘The Red Badge of Courage and social violence: Crane's myth of America’, Canadian Review of American Studies, 12 (1981), pp. 1–19.

8. Donald Pizer, ‘Crane and The Red Badge of Courage: A guide to criticism’, in Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, 4th Norton critical edition, ed. Donald Pizer and Eric Carl Link (New York and London, 2008), pp. 195–228.

9. Wertheim and Sorrento, The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, vol. I, p. 322.

10. John Berryman, Stephen Crane (New York, 1962; orig. pub. 1950), p. 78.

11. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, 4th Norton critical edition,. All further chapter and page references in the text (in parentheses) are to this edition.

12. Edwin H. Cady, Stephen Crane, rev. edn (Boston, MA, 1980), p. 82.

13. Christian K. Messenger, Sport and the spirit of play in American fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (New York, 1981), pp. 143, 144, 145 (emphases mine).

14. Christian K. Messenger, Sport and the spirit of play in American fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (New York, 1981), p. 146.

15. Bill Brown, The material unconscious: American amusement, Stephen Crane, and the economies of play (London and Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 127, 128.

16. Bill Brown, The material unconscious: American amusement, Stephen Crane, and the economies of play (London and Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 130, 131.

17. Linda H. Davis, Badge of courage: The life of Stephen Crane (Boston, MA and New York, 1998), p. 21; James B. Colvert, Stephen Crane (New York, 1984), p. 11.

18. Stanley Wertheim, reply to question on ‘Crane and Football’ on Stephen Crane Society website, available at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/crane/queries03.htm, accessed 25 Feb. 2008.

19. Stallman, Stephen Crane, pp. 28–9; Berryman, Stephen Crane, p. 22.

20. Berryman, Stephen Crane, pp. 31–2.

21. Edwin H. Cady, ‘Stephen Crane and the strenuous life’, English Literary History, 28 (4) (1961), pp. 379–80.

22. Berryman, Stephen Crane, p.71; Stephen Crane Society website.

23. Quoted in Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, eds, The Crane log: A documentary life of Stephen Crane 1871–1900 (New York, 1994), p. 3.

24. R.G. Vosburgh, ‘The darkest hour in the life of Stephen Crane’, Criterion, Feb, (1901), p. 26.

25. Allison Danzig, Oh, how they played the game: The early days of football and the heroes who made it great (New York, 1971), pp. 127–30.

26. Michael Oriard, Reading football: How the popular press created an American spectacle (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1993), pp. 57–141.

27. Michael Oriard, Reading football: How the popular press created an American spectacle (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1993), p. 200.

28. Richard Harding Davis, A year from a reporter's note-book (New York and London, 1898), p. 193.

29. John Seelye, War games: Richard Harding Davis and the new imperialism (Amherst, MA, 2003), p. 222.

30. Messenger, Sport and the spirit of play, p. 146.

31. Letter dated 5 Sept. 1856, in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ed., Harvard Memorial Biographies, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1867), vol. II, pp. 180–1.

32. William Tucker Washburn, Fair Harvard: A story of American college life (New York, 1869), pp. 2–13.

33. Mark Severance, Hammersmith: His Harvard days (New York and Boston, MA, 1887), pp. 57–8, 514.

34. Marilyn Boyer, ‘The treatment of the wound in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage’, Stephen Crane Studies, 12 (1) (2003), p. 10.

35. See for example the illustrations in Oriard, Reading football, pp. 77, 96, 148, 194, 196, 252, and in Michael Oriard, King football: Sport and spectacle in the golden age of radio and newsreels, movies and magazines, the weekly and the daily press (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 2001), pp. 172, 178; see also the photographs in John Sayle Watterson, College football: History, spectacle, controversy (Baltimore, MD, 2000), pp. 101, 104.

36. Bernard M. Corbett and Paul Simpson, The only game that matters: The Harvard/Yale rivalry (New York, 2004), p. 79.

37. Bernard M. Corbett and Paul Simpson, The only game that matters: The Harvard/Yale rivalry (New York, 2004), p. 37; Rose Bowl photograph in Danzig, Oh, how they played the game, pp. 128–9.

38. Frank Norris, Vandover and the brute (Lincoln, NE, 1978; orig. pub. 1914), p. 295.

39. F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘Princeton’ (1927), in Arthur Mizener, ed., Afternoon of an author (London, 1958), pp. 94–5.

40. Stephen Crane, ‘Harvard University against the Carlisle Indians’, New York Journal, 1 Nov. 1896, p. 5. In Fredson Bowers, ed., The University of Virginia edition of the works of Stephen Crane, vol. 8: Tales, Sketches, and Reports (Charlottesville, VA, 1973), pp. 669–72.

41. Stephen Crane, ‘How Princeton met Harvard at Cambridge’, New York Journal, 8 Nov. 1896, pp. 1–2. In Bowers, ed., The University of Virginia edition of the works of Stephen Crane, vol. 8: Tales, sketches, and reports, pp. 673–6.

42. Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (Oxford, 1984; orig. pub. 1897), p. xlii.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julian Meldon D'Arcy

Julian Meldon D'Arcy, University of Iceland, Reykjavik