On The Changes In Stephen Crane's Attitudes Towards Man

Despite his short life span, Stephen Crane, a rare genius in the history of American literature, peculiar, and mysterious, leaves readers a large number of remarkable literary works. As America experiencing the declining realism during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Crane freshened American literature by practicing a rising literary trend, naturalism. That is why he has been hailed as the forerunner of American naturalism. While most of his works, with the exception of The Red Badge of Courage, have not been involved in systematic study, and seldom have people endeavored to explore Crane's outlook from his works. Hence, considering the negligence of Crane's literary works and the blank of Crane's inner world, the writer of this dissertation intends to pay close attention to three of his representative works, chronologically Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage, and "The Open Boat", all of which cross Crane's entire literary career, probing into Crane's attitude towards man. Surprisingly, after careful and rigorous research, the writer of this paper finds out that the so-defined naturalistic master Stephen Crane explicitly undertakes a radical, even contradictory psychic change. Crane took a naturalistic view of man in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, thinking of man as barbarous and even beast-like. However, he began to be confident of man's capability of awakening and self-realization in The Red Badge of Courage. Showing his humanistic tendency and trusting in man's nature and virtues in his marked "The Open Boat", Crane sublimated his spirit and accomplished his ultimate changes.Crane deserves the carrier of naturalistic viewpoint because of his coherence of the naturalistic view of man in the early period of his eight-year literary career. But he gradually made a turn to humanism, deviating from his original track of naturalistic view of man. Seeing that Crane changes dramatically in attitudes, a clear catch of the drift of this great author's thought ought to be meaningful.