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Stephen Crane |
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Critics of Crane's work are far from giving unanimous consent to the proposition that he is a major author, or even a successful writer. His work has been described as florid and overwritten, his attitudes assailed as immature and unformed, and his treatment of women decried by GENDER critics as uncomprehending and/or dismissive. Among those who proceed on the assumption that his achievements make him worthy of attention, there is a good deal of stress on the FORMALIST approach to his fiction, as commentators disagree even on the issue of just what kind of writer Crane is—an impressionist, a realist, a romantic, a naturalist, or some combination of two or more of these categories.
PSYCHOLOGICAL criticism—of both the author and his characters—receives a fair amount of play, especially in connection with The Red Badge of Courage, SOCIOLOGICAL criticism in connection with Maggie, and HISTORICAL criticism with both of these novels. Given the interest that Crane's personality excites, there has also been a certain amount of emphasis on BIOGRAPHICAL criticism, with Christopher Benfey organizing his recent biography around the thesis that Crane lived out the central episodes of his life after he had written about them.
"The Heart" exemplifies the essence of Crane's best poetry—a bare scene, one or two characters, a brief description or exchange, and the larger implications left unstated, to be supplied in the reader's engagement with the poem. The ending of "The Heart" may sound familiar even upon a first reading; Joyce Carol Oates used its last two lines as the title of one of her novels.
"The Open Boat" grew directly out of an incident in Crane's life. On assignment for the Hearst newspapers, he sailed from Jacksonville, Florida, on the steamer Commodore, which was heading for Cuba with a shipment of contraband arms intended for Cuban insurgents against Spanish rule. The ship went down on January 2, 1897, fifteen miles off the Florida coast. When everyone else had gotten off safely on the lifeboats, Crane and three other men embarked in a dinghy. After nearly thirty hours at sea, they arrived at Daytona. In addition to the short story, Crane wrote a factual account of this experience, which appeared in the New York Press on January 4, 1897. A comparison of the two accounts will serve to clarify the different strategies employed in two very different kinds of writing, the one seeking to provide a clear account of the BIOGRAPHICAL facts of the matter, the other using description, pattern, and other FORMALIST aspects of the writer's art to convey the larger PSYCHOLOGICAL meanings of the experience and its effects on those involved.
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