Amongst monsters

During this morning's class discussion of Stephen Crane's The Monster, students compared the novella to works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, and Stephen King. One student saw a precursor of Cormac McCarthy's prose in Crane's description of a fire in a lab full of colorful chemicals that burst into horrifying beauty, with flames resembling flowers and panthers and fairies until

Suddenly the glass splintered and a ruby-red snakelike thing poured its thick length out upon the top of the old desk. It coiled and hesitated, and then began to swim a langourous way down the mahogany slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down into Johnson's upturned face.

And thus evil enters the bucolic garden.

I've read The Monster perhaps a dozen times but never taught it, and after seeing my students' responses today, I wonder why this slight novella is never anthologized. Year after year I teach Crane's story "The Open Boat" because it's in the Norton anthology and provides a good introduction to naturalism as a literary movement. It's almost too obvious: four guys in a boat subject to forces outside their control! Look how small and insignificant they feel in the face of indifferent nature! Why, they don't even have names! Etc.

The Monster is longer than "The Open Boat" but not by much, and the plot moves at a much more brisk pace. Granted, "The Open Boat" struggles to recreate for the reader the deadly boredom of being stuck in a small boat on the open sea for many hours, which means that for long stretches nothing much is happening: "They sat together in the same seat, and each rowed an oar. Then the oiler took both oars; then the correspondent took both oars; then the oiler; then the correspondent. They rowed and they rowed." Again, etc.

This morning's discussion of The Monster was so engrossing that we got out of class late. There's so much more to say! The Monster defies easy categorization, starting out as in the William Dean Howells light-of-common-day realistic mode but later entering gothic and naturalistic and impressionistic territory, all while remaining entirely believable. It's a slice of small-town life at the turn of the twentieth century and a philosophical exploration of the problem of pain and the responsibility for evil, but unlike the gothic novels it echoes, The Monster offers no hope of resolution. The monster is not destroyed (and indeed may not be a monster at all!) and the evil is not vanquished, which means it's still out there--or possibly in here.

The Monster is not without its flaws; for instance, Crane's treatment of race tends toward the patronizing and stereotypical. I admire "The Open Boat," but few students share my enthusiasm so the discussion can be slow and grim. The Monster, on the other hand, lets loose ideas so monstrous they can't be contained in one hour's discussion but keep coming back begging to be fed.

And to be read! The University of Virginia's electronic text is available here. Go ahead--feed the monster!