Abstract
The article presents Stephen Crane’s The Monster as a realist text that conveys the inability of American society in the 1890s to define itself through use of stereotyped knowledge of racial others. It reads the character Henry Johnson, a black man whose face is “burned away” in a house-fire, leaving behind only a single winking eye, as a literary embodiment of the all-seeing Lacanian gaze that, through the returned look of the racial other, confronts realist America with its own lack. Henry destabilises fantasies of an insular white identity through his performative mimicry of white dress and mannerism. He allows the text to present race as grounded only in performance and a discourse of white superiority. The Monster refutes this discourse, suggesting it is sanction for a brutal monstrosity at the heart of America, one that the returned gaze of the scrutinising racial other now witnesses through the spectacle of America’s racist and imperialistic practices.
Highlights
Stephen Crane’s novella The Monster begins with a little boy’s game of role playing
We are told, “could do no reparation” (190). His play acting and Dr Trescott’s punishment for its ruinous effects obliquely introduce us to the anxiety over identity performance that centres the text; turning to his son, Trescott warns, “you had better not play train any more” (191). This warning from Trescott is in keeping with the time-period’s literary rejection of pretence; what we find in the late 1800s is a heightened focus upon social reality that, in the literary realm, marked a renunciation of the maudlin emotionality of sentimental texts and a mocking of conspicuous consumption
Crane’s text charts in its Post-Reconstruction literary world a social displacement of dominant racial norms established in slavery. It presents a world in which racial identity is a social performance, enacted by both black and white characters, and a threat to any renderings of a national identity underpinned by notions of a discrete white self
Summary
Realism’s Racial Gaze and Stephen Crane’s The Monster: A Lacanian Reading. Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, 0(3), 56-68.
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