Approaching Masculinities In Stephen Crane’s Works

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) has been acknowledged as one of "the most ostensibly masculinist realists" in the 19th century American literature. This is true of the macho ethos revealed in his novels, short stories, news sketches, and poetry, which arouses critics’interest in the subjects of courage, heroism and manhood in his writings, and his male narrative techniques. Some researches are conducted with the attention to the masculinity crisis in the American society at the end of the 19th century. However, scant critical attention is paid to Crane’s dynamical representation of and his own view on the masculinity crisis in his own times. This dissertation will examine how middle-class white masculinity is represented and woven in Crane’s work around discourses of class, gender and race, with the purpose to reveal the relation of Crane’s writings to the historical and ideological context in the 1890s’American society.This study is intended to give a cultural critique of four of Crane’s writings, the slum novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, the news sketch An Experiment with Misery, the war classic The Red Badge of Courage, and one of the Whilomville tales "The Monster". Undertaken in accordance with gender studies, benefiting from the gender studies visions on the relation between identity and social positioning marks such as class, gender and race, along with the illustrations of subjectivity and male discourses in post-structuralism and a recent trend of masculinity studies, the dissertation places Crane in the reciprocal communication between masculinity and discourses of class, gender and race of the American society in the 1890s, in order to discuss Crane’s imaginations of the middle-class white masculinity, to explore the mutual influence between masculinity and the construction of American national identity. The study argues that Crane represents and responds to the masculinity crisis through the depiction of the visual activities between the middle-class and the underclass, the middle-class white men’s psychological desire to regenerate masculinity, and the ethical perplex of the Anglo-Saxons in their encounter with the threats from the racial others, hence the three chapters of the main body of the dissertation.Chapter One analyzes how the mutual impact of class stratum and masculinity is displayed in Crane’s slum novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets and his news sketch An Experiment with Misery. In line with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and his account of "body", this chapter holds that the two works, particularly by ways of "gaze" between different classes, exhibit, on the one hand, how traditional femininity is destroyed in the underclass heroine’s misinterpreting the contextual meaning of middle class masculinity; on the other hand, how middle class man transgresses the boundaries between masculinities in different classes and in his gaze of the underclass male bodies, learning the causes of masculinity differences based on class gaps, from which the anxiety about the middle class masculinity crisis is exposed. By this means, Crane models a community structure characteristic of gender roles, apart from his observations on the features of American class communication and class construction in the masculinity crisis.Chapter Two examines Crane’s dynamical echo to the 1890s’American ideology of reconstructing masculinity in his war classic The Red Badge of Courage. Set against the collective memory of the Civil War and the reunion discourse in the United States at the end of the 19th century, this chapter elaborates the representation of desiring masculinity in the story, from the perspective of Deleuzian concepts of "becoming" and "desire production". It shows that the story charts three tactics to produce masculinity: production in repetition and difference, production in primitive accumulation and a schizophrenic becoming, which reflects the agency of the masculinity ideology in the rehabilitation of the national identity in the post-Reconstruction era in American history, whereby Crane pinpoints the dominant ideology under his surveillance.Chapter Three discusses the relation between masculinity and race in the visibility politics delineated in one of Crane’s Whilomville tales "The Monster", complying with Levinas’s illustration on "alterity" and "face". It points out that the story reveals two patterns of white men’s masculinity politics in their construction of the racial and ethical relations in the representation of the tension and confrontations between racial masculinities, from which Crane displays how racial power and racial ideology work together in the rebuilding of white masculinity and the American national identity. Moreover, Crane expresses his own reflection on the role of white masculinity discourse and the black masculinity in fashioning American national identity.To conclude, Crane’s work resounds with fears about increasing class mobility, ambivalent struggles with the dissolution of masculinity, and preoccupations with the threat posed by the teeming masses of ethnic and racial others. In this way, Crane manifests, from a male’s view, that masculinity works as a cultural power intervening American social and historical development with the operation of discourses of class, gender and race. Inscribing his work with the historical marking of masculinity in the plane of the 1890s’ American society, Crane articulates his own inspection and introspection on the dominant masculinity ideology, by way of portraying the collision of nostalgic tendency with potential future, the antagonism in the agitated anxieties and embittered conflicts in his works. This kind of depiction also implies Crane’s own ambivalence towards the competition between the residue and the emergent ideologies in his contemporaneous culture. In so doing, Crane unfolds in his work the process for the powerless modern self, controlled by masculinity crisis in the industrial transformation, to endeavor to seek out vitality and vigor in order to be identified in the gender-change surroundings. His unique representation of masculinity discourse, in some degree, reveals the cultural characteristics, the identification and the sense of social crisis in the transformational American society at the end of the 19th century.