Undercover Explorations of the "Other Half," or the Writer as Class Transvestite

Abstract

ON A RAINY WINTER NIGHT, in depression year of 1894, Stephen Crane went forth dressed in rags and tatters ... to try to eat as tramp may eat, and sleep as wanderers sleep. His experiences in Bowery that night provided basis for sketch 'An Experiment in Misery, which confronted readers of NePw York Press with an unusual journalistic message: Much of what they thought they knew about lower-class life was invalid. You can tell nothing of it unless you are in that condition yourself, he wrote, It is idle to speculate about it from ... [a] distance.2 The sketch's fictionalized account of one middle-class youth's disguised journey into lower classes attempts to bridge this distance, providing Crane's readers with study of class subjectivity in transformation. For what Crane wishes to show is not other half lives but how misery, as class-specific social force, shapes perception. Working toward this end, he carefully depicts youth's representative change through gradual movement into lower-class social body. Walking along streets dressed in an aged suit (862), youth is completely plastered with yells of 'bum' and 'hobo,' and cast into a state of profound dejection (283). Later, in lodging house, he feels alteration deepen as his liver turn[s] white from unspeakable odors that assail him like malignant diseases with wings (287). This misery does produce desired sociological reward: During long night, youth stays awake watching the forms of men ... lying in death-like silence or heaving and snoring with