Stephen Crane – The Natural World
Stephen Crane is one of the most celebrated authors in the United States. He created masterpieces as detailed and realistic as they were recognizable. He was skilled in many types of description, such as his masterful depiction of street life apparent in Maggie: Girl of the Streets, as well as describing battle in The Red Badge of Courage so realistically that veterans thought that he had to have had battle experience. However, perhaps his greatest type of description was his unparalleled skill in depicting nature and the natural world, as well as the animals that inhabit it. In varying ways, Crane employed figures of speech to portray nature as she is: powerful, irreducible, empty of any interactive capability; he also explored the human tendency to personify nature. With regard to animals, Crane possessed a piercing ability to empathize with pets and farm animals, as well as wild animals, and portrays both pets’ thoughts, and the effect of wild animals, with deftness.
Crane especially liked to use figures of speech to describe nature. One prime example would be “The Blue Hotel”, a tale, whose characters battle a fierce Nebraska snowstorm. Holed up in the hotel, the characters hear something beating on the walls “like a spirit tapping” (8, Blue). This is an example of Crane using a simile to help describe nature. However, he also used metaphors help describe the natural environment. One example of this is when he describes flakes of snow being swept southwards with “the speed of bullets” (28, Blue), and when he likened the Earth to a “whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb” (39, Blue). The Earth isn’t really completely like that, but when one reads this, they get a sense of how chaotic and bleak the winter in Nebraska can be. In “The Dark Brown Dog”, one of Crane’s New York stories, when a child beats the dog, he uses personification: the dog doesn’t try to “look to be a martyr” (5, Dark). The dog cannot look like a martyr in the sense that we can, but in using that metaphor, we can imagine how the dog related to his owner, and we can gain a better understanding of the intended tone for that particular scene.
As mentioned, Crane used personification to aid his depictions of nature. The waves in his masterpiece, “The Open Boat”, had a type of “terrible grace” (2, Open) to their movements. Here, he used personification to help readers better visualize the waves, and the ocean on which this story takes place. Also, another example of this was when a wave “moved forward, huge, furious, implacable” (25, Open). The wave isn’t really furious, but personifying it like that helps visualize the moment, as well as aids us to see the wave. Similarly, he wrote that a wave “fairly swallowed the dingey” (25, Open). The wave didn’t really swallow the boat – it doesn’t have a mouth. However, it helps to show how and where the boat went, and reveals just how large the wave was in comparison to the boat.
Crane also possessed an uncanny ability to portray the thoughts and intentions of domesticated animals. He portrayed the dog in his story “The Dark Brown Dog” as being humble, forgiving, and loyal. He fully expressed the extent of dog’s “devotion to the child” (Dark, 6), as being “a sublime thing” (Dark, 6). Here we can imagine how Crane related to an animal’s thoughts, intentions, and feelings.
In The Third Violet, a love story set in upstate New York, and later in Manhattan, Crane has ample opportunity to paint the portraits of pets and farm animals. A beautiful young lady, Ms. Fanhall, flirting with a painter, Will Hawker, meets a team of oxen lumbering through a meadow as she stands talking to the oxen driver’s son. She inquires about the beasts as Crane gives these adjectives: “humble, submissive, and toilsome” (57, Third).
Ms. Fanhill and the painter’s father, Mr. Hawker, then get into a philosophical discussion about the animals; they discuss their wellbeing, as well as their happiness amidst unending toil. Ms. Fanhill and old man Hawker are “meditating” (61) on the oxen, and asking questions like “are they happy?” (61): these could be Crane’s thoughts towards animals, embedded in his fiction. When Hollenden (a friend of Hawker’s) and Ms. Fanhill see Stanley, the Hawker family dog, running by, they both praise him, and discuss at length Hawker’s treatment of the dog. As mentioned, deep kinship between man and beast also occurs in “The Dark Brown Dog”, when the child befriends a dog. The child and the dog become very close, with the child “championing” the dog. This perhaps shows Crane’s feelings about animal and human relationships, and their meaning.
Crane was also extremely skillful in writing about wild animals. He could both describe their physical looks to the last hair, as well as relate them to the story, making them a valuable asset in his writing career. One example is the seagulls from his short story, “The Open Boat”. He describes them so masterfully that they seem to be not in the book, amongst the pages, but trying to land on your head. For example, he describes one that flew “parallel to the boat and did not circle, but made short sidelong jumps in the air in chicken-like fashion. His black eyes were wistfully fixed upon the captain’s head”. It seems quite easy to see that bird in your head, making those odd-looking hops, just … looking at you. However, Crane also used wild animals to tie into the story, frequently using them as portents to show when something might happen. For example, the same gulls in “The Open Boat” struck the crew as “as being somehow grewsome (sic) and ominous”. Soon after this, the dingey sinks. Crane both describes wild animals very well, and uses them skillfully to foreshadow other events.
Stephen Crane is immortalized by his work. His personification of nature, his describing nature with expert constructions and his nimble (and sometimes creative) use of words, his understanding of and the describing of domesticated animals skillfully, and both describing wild animals and using them as portents – all these methods bring us his fin de siècle world, encompassing its raw natural beauty and its harsh social conditions, lensed through animals.