Games, Play, and Entertainments in Stephen Crane's "The Monster"

Abstract

GAMES, PLAY, AND ENTERTAINMENTS IN STEPHEN CRANE'S "THE MONSTER" Robert A. Morace* Of all the major works of Stephen Crane, "The Monster" is undoubtedly the least discussed and perhaps the least understood. That modern critics have, with too few exceptions, failed to deal significantly with this story is especially curious in light o(contemporaneous reactions to it. Joseph Conrad, for example, to whom Crane had apparently outlined "The Monster" on 28 November 1897,l wrote Crane early in the new year to say that "the damned story has been haunting me ever since. I think it must be fine. It's a subject for you."2 But another friend, Harold Frederic, worried about the effect of such a story on its author's popularity and advised him to get rid of it. Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the genteel Century Magazine, was similarly troubled, though for a quite different reason; as he explained to Crane's American agent, Paul Revere Reynolds, "we couldn't publish that thing with half the expectant mothers in America on our subscription list!"3 Reactions to the story once it was published were similarly divided. On the one side were Rupert Hughes, who saw it as further evidence of Crane's genius,4 and William Dean Howells, who called it "the greatest story ever written by an American."5 And on the other side was Julian Hawthorne, who condemned it as "an outrage on art and humanity."6 Years later one of Crane's admirers, Sanford Bennett (who had witnessed Frederic's reaction), re-read the story and discovered that its haunting effect derived from the simple line "he had no face."7 Yet as the pseudonymous M. Solomon has more recently pointed out, "The Monster" is no mere horror story,8 no mere potboiler , and of this Crane seems to have been well aware.9 Shortly after finishing "The Monster" in early September of 1897, Crane sent the story to McClure's, apparently believing that it was both long enough and good enough to wipe out the $500 he owed them.10 However, quick money was not Crane's only consideration in trying to place this story. Although in December of 1897 he did desperately order Reynolds to "sell 'The Monster'!", by 14 January •Robert A. Morace is an Assistant Professor of English at Daemen College. He has published a number of articles on late nineteenth-century and contemporary American writers. He is currently working on two books on John Gardner, a bibliography and a collection of critical essays. 66Robert A. Morace 1898 he had bartered with Robert McClure for its release (partly by substituting "Death and the Child").11 In his next letter to Reynolds—written more than a month before the 16 March 1898 date when Harper's finally agreed to purchase "The Monster"12—Crane's insistent clamor for money is muted; instead, here the emphasis is on the story as art, not as a merely salable commodity: "... It would be absurd to conjoin 'Death and the Child' with 'The Monster.' They don't fit. Now, 'The Blue Hotel' goes in neatly with 'The Monster' and together they make 32,000. Very little more is needed for a respectably sized $1.00 book. . . ."13 How do "The Blue Hotel" and "The Monster" "fit" together? One link between the stories is thematic: each deals with characters who fail to create that quasi-Christian community which in much of Crane's fiction is made the necessary precondition for man's continued existence in the midst of an indifferent natural world. A second link is structural: each story is intricately developed by means of a game metaphor. In "The Blue Hotel" it is the game of High-Five.14 In "The Monster" it is not any one game but, rather, a complex of metaphoric games, entertainments, and play-like behavior that underlies the meaning of the story and serves to unify its various parts. The game metaphor in "The Monster" has never been studied—in fact it went entirely unnoticed until 1972 when its importance was mentioned in essays by Max Westbrook and Charles W. Mayer. In "Whilomville: The Coherence of Radical Language...