1. Whilomville and Port Jervis
Stephen Crane
wrote fourteen stories set in Whilomville, a town based on Port Jervis, New
York, where the author had lived for five years of his childhood and where he
later was a frequent visitor. His father
had been minister of the Methodist Church there and his brother William Howe
Crane was later a leading lawyer and judge who held local political
office. I happen to live only a short
distance from Port Jervis where the church and William Crane’s home are yet
standing. Like Stephen Crane I have
rambled in the woods of Sullivan County and at Twin Lakes, a short distance across
the state line in Pennsylvania.
“The Monster” was
published in The Monster and other stories in 1899, while the other Whilomville
Stories appeared as a collection in 1900.
“The Monster” differs radically in theme and style from the volume that
followed. The other Whilomville stories
are, for the most part, nostalgic pictures of a semi-rural childhood
reminiscent of Tom Sawyer very likely written with income rather than
art in the author’s mind. “The Monster”
is altogether different. Much longer and
less likely to appeal to popular taste, it has more in common with “The Blue
Hotel” in its engagement with violence and social prejudice, its harsh
incidents, and bleak conclusion.
Port Jervis has
not always been comfortable with its association with Crane. When he was writing Crane’s willfully
bohemian lifestyle offended many. His
sympathetic story of Maggie: a Girl of the Streets was bad enough, but
his involvement with social outcasts was not limited to fiction. He generated scandal by defending in court a
prostitute named Dora Clark with whom he was acquainted. Later he began living with Cora Taylor who
had operated a brothel in Jacksonville, Florida called the Hotel de Dream.
Small towns are,
yet today, conventionally regarded as secure and conventional havens where
people look out for each other in a bucolic setting. In the early parts of “The Monster” Crane plays
against this expectation with mild satire tinged with affection. The churches of Whilomville compete over
which can produce “the greatest din” with their bells and the various fire
companies each boast of enthusiastic partisans. [1] The young men “affected” dislike for the corny
town band, but they attended its concerts because the young women were sure to be there (though
they seem to have been more interested in observing each other than interacting
with the boys). The youth make cynical
remarks such as saying that the band sounds like the reservoir water pump
because such wit was “fashionable.” The
band’s leader seeks to imitate “the mannerisms of the great musicians.” For their part, the women, both young and
old, prefer gossiping to music.
The reader might
regard such faults as more endearing than blameworthy, but, with the
catastrophe that befalls Henry Johnson, Crane’s criticism of the townspeople
turns fierce. Eventually cruel sentiment
against the “monster” leads to an effective boycott of Dr. Trescott‘s
practice. Scholars have suggested
several disfigured people in Port Jervis whose experience may have served as
Crane’s model, but they have recalled as well that the town was the site of one
of the few lynchings of African-Americans in New York, that of Robert Lewis in
1892. [2] To the extent that Crane’s
story reminded people of Lewis’s death, it would have been unwelcome to many of
the townspeople.
Crane’s
reputation for an irregular life combined with his condemnation of
Whilomville’s provincial mindset and what was taken by some as a reference to a
dark incident in town history led to animosity against him from the time of his
publications until recently.
Port Jervis’
suspicions about Crane endured for decades.
A monument to the Civil War dead had been erected in 1886 in a small park in the center
of town called Orange Square. Though no
evidence exists, Crane is said to have gathered material for The Red Badge
of Courage in conversations with veterans on park benches there. Called Orange Square as late as 1933 the name
was at some point changed to Stephen Crane Memorial Park. By 1983 this name had come to irritate some
local citizens, including the commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars who was
under the impression that the famous novel, often assigned to high school
students, celebrated a cowardly deserter and that “Stephen Crane did a
disservice to the many honorable veterans when he wrote The Red Badge of
Courage.” [3] The park was renamed
Veterans Memorial Park.
2. Men and Women in
Whilomville
Racism, clearly
an issue in “The Monster,” has attracted considerable commentary, but the story
also encodes information about the relations of the sexes in Whilomsville. The town is portrayed as no less patriarchal
than most societies. “’My father says’” the reader is told, “was a
very formidable phrase.” Mrs. Page
wishes to hold a birthday party for her daughter, but cannot proceed until her
husband has casually consented: “Oh, let her have it.” Later, the decisive actions – putting Johnson
in jail, cautioning Trescott about the town’s animosity – are performed by men.
Yet the women’s
attitude is the basis for the town’s heartless rejection of the unfortunate Johnson. Mrs. Page is a principal organizer of
opposition to Dr. Trescott after her daughter’s party is disturbed by the
“monster’s” approach. The other women
all but unanimously greet the problem as
a welcome occasion for malicious talk.
Before they can discuss the issue Carrie Dungen felt choked by “an
overplus of information”; she had “a great deal of grist.” When the ladies do get together her eyes are “shining
with delight” at the opportunity, confident in the knowledge that “everyone
says” what she thinks. In the Black
community, Johnson’s placement at the Williams home is disturbed by the wife’s
inability to receive callers, and Johnson’s onetime fiancée Bella Farragut
rejects the injured man with horror.
Finally, in the sad conclusion, Mrs. Trescott is dismayed that no one
will attend her teas due to her husband’s attempts to help the injured man.
Not quite all the
women, however, agree. Martha Goodwin is
a notable exception, the town’s nonconformist.
Unmarried due to her intended having died of smallpox, she is thrown for
support on her married sister who exploits her labor. Yet this marginalized figure is “a woman of
great mind” who has developed “adamantine opinions” on world affairs and many
public questions. Due to her outsider
status the other ladies “all were required to disbelieve any theory for which Martha fought.” The sole woman not bound by local conventions,
she is the only one to express wholehearted support for Dr. Trescott.
The dialectic of
gender relations is thus sketched in some complexity. While the women of the town are in the end
subject to patriarchal rule, they are nonetheless able to exert considerable
influence on social decisions. The
persecution of the doctor and Henry Johnson is in fact led by the women who respond
with an all-but-unanimous voice in support of Carrie Dungen. The reader must suppose even the virtuous Dr.
Trescott will be moved by the tears of his uncomplaining wife in the concluding
scene. The eccentric Martha Goodwin stands
alone, but her example suggests a wild card, the possibility of independent thinking, whether foolish or wise,
free of social coercion, that allows for new ideas and for change.
3. Modernity and
Whilomville
The philosophical
preference for a rural setting is a classical trope since antiquity but with
Romanticism, it became a commonplace.
Not only in Wordsworth and Burns but earlier in Cowper and Gray, poets
assume the corruption of the city and oppose it to the unspoiled beauty of
areas that remained wild or were devoted to farming. Such regions were associated with communities
in which people’s relations with each other were characterized by mutual
support and straightforward honesty.
Though stories
like Maggie proved that Crane was well aware of the horrors on the
underside of urban life, in “The Monster” he is questioning the ideal of
innocence associated with small town America as Mark Twain had done in the
devastating portraits of small towns in Huckleberry Finn and as, a few
decades later, Sherwood Anderson would do in Winesburg Ohio and Edgar
Lee Masters in Spoon River Anthology.
Crane accents the
drama of his scene by depicting Whilomville in the process of modernization. The disastrous fire that precipitates the
crisis is foreshadowed in the recent renovations of the streetcars [4] and
electric street lamps. The “shimmering
blue of the electric arc lamps” and the “shrill” calls of the trams conveying
“both warnings and simple noise” mark modernization and, perhaps, a loss of
innocence and a vague foreboding. If
small town America had ever been an Eden, its prelapsarian innocence was
lost. The very name Crane invented
suggests that the town’s time has passed. and the action of the story occurs in
a belated space, already looking back to mythic happy days gone by while a once
benign provincial conformity turns to heartless cruelty.
1. I was surprised
when I moved to Goshen, New York, twenty-four miles from Port Jervis to find
that this village of less than five thousand inhabitants had no less than four
different fire companies, all made up of volunteers, each of which puts on a
proud display at area parades.
2. The so-called
“Elephant Man” Joseph Merrick was at the time a sort of celebrity and may have
also played a role in Crane’s inspiration.
Though Lewis is sometimes named as the only Black lynching victim in New
York history, Robert Mulliner had been hanged by a mob in Newburgh in
1863. Other incidents of New York mob
violence, including the cases of Paulo Boleta, Charles Kelsey, and George Smith
were against white people.
3. Charles Larocca,
“Stephen Crane’s Inspiration,” American Heritage 42:3 (May/June
1991).
4. Though unmentioned
in the story, the yards for intercity rail lines provided the basis of Port
Jervis’ economy for many years. The tram
lines of The Port Jervis Electric Street Railway Co. had been in operation for
only a year when “The Monster” was published.
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