In April 1960, civil rights worker Len Holt appealed to members of the civil rights movement to“go to jail by the hundreds and thousands.” In doing so, he argued, “the hearts of those who would maintain the old order will be inundated with the guilt necessary to bring about change.”[1] Holt, along with such pacifist-oriented leaders as John Lewis and Bayard Rustin, strongly believed that the Movement should adopt a policy of jail-no-bail. Instead of fearing prison, they should embrace it; instead of accepting bail they should remain imprisoned for the duration of their sentence. Following in the tradition of pacifist teachings, the Movement had already accepted the idea that one had a moral responsibility to challenge immoral laws. Holt’s speech revisited these teachings in order to remind the student movement that posting bail was an act of cooperation with the southern power structure, if they were serious about using non-violent direct action, they must remain in jail.

The significance of jail-no-bail for the Movement, however, went much further than merely an act of noncooperation. For over a century, the southern white power structure had used the criminal justice system as a form of racial control, designed to enforce the colour line and punish any challenges to the racial status quo. The southern jail, more than any other institution, symbolised the power that whites had over the African American community. Mostterrifying of all were the occasions when lynch mobs effectively became an extension of the criminal justice system, taking the accused from the prison cell to impose their own judgment.[2] Although lynching had largely disappeared by 1960, the use of prison to force conformity to the colour line had not. To challenge segregation from a prison cell—the place where black met white, impotence met power, and occasionally, life met death—was not only a refusal to cooperate with immoral laws, it was a challenge to the white power structure, a statement that their conventional methods of control were no longer effective. During the years that followed the sit-in campaigns, the simple act of allowing oneself to be arrested and jailedevolved to become a highly symbolic gesture and a well-established tactic of the Movement. The traditional perspective of imprisonment as a shameful experience was inverted and turned from something to be deeply feared, to a source of pride and a platform for protest.[3]

Attitudes towards and the philosophy behind jail-no-bail continued to change and develop throughout the history of the Movement. One crucial stage of this development took place during the summer of 1961, with the imprisonment of Freedom Riders in Jackson, Mississippi. This work will focus upon jail-no-bail during the Freedom Ride on two levels: firstly, the experiences of the imprisoned protesters and, secondly, the cross-organisational effort of the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee to direct the pressure of mass imprisonments where it would be most influential. Although only a relatively small number of people would be imprisoned during the Ride, it was a watershed in the history of jail-no-bail. Whilst Movement members had talked about jail-no-bail for over a year, the Riders were the first to succeed in placing pressure upon segregationist forces through mass jailings. In doing so, the Rides expanded jail-no-bail from being a symbolic act of protest, to an elaborate strategy to capture media attention and a practical attempt to make segregation so costly as to force the white power structure to reconsider the practice.

I

During the early months of 1961, the term ‘jail-in’ was increasingly used in discussion over how the Movement should respond to arrest and imprisonment. This reflected a vision held by certain elements of the Movement—most noticeably within the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—of the imprisonment of protesters on such a grand scale that they would, quite literally, ‘fill the jails’. This development reflected a rising awareness that jail-no-bail could serve tactical as well as moral purposes: they could place pressure on local and federal authorities, avoid the costly need to raise bail bonds and attract media attention. Conscious that jail-no-bail had, so far, been more talked about than acted upon, CORE launched its first jail-in, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on the anniversary of the Greensboro sit-in. Arrested for sitting-in at a McCrory’s lunch counter, the ten protesters were sentenced to $100 fine or thirty days on the chaingang—all but one elected to serve the sentence. SNCC soon acted in support of the jail-in, sending four workers to join the imprisoned nine and issuing a call for others to follow. The jail-in, however, went no further.[4]

The Rock Hill jails may not have been filled, the campaign, however, set an important precedent, establishing both the positive benefits of imprisonment and the need for a determined organising effort outside the prison walls. It would only be months later—when CORE decided to test compliance with the 1960 Boynton decision prohibiting segregation of terminal facilities on interstate travel—that the imprisonment of hundreds of Freedom Riders in Jackson brought the opportunity to put such lessons into practice.

II

Inspiration for the Freedom Ride came from the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, during which CORE had sought to test compliance with the Morgan v. Virginia ruling against the segregationof seating on interstate travel. CORE’s Gordon Carey saw the new Boynton decision as an opportunity to launch a similar campaign and spread non-violent resistance across the South.[5] The ‘Freedom Ride’, as it was soon dubbed, was enthusiastically approved by the CORE Council. Following along the lines of the Journey, an interracial group of thirteen individuals would travel on buses by day, challenging segregation at every stop and addressing mass meetings on a night.

Unlike the 1947 campaign, which restricted its itinerary to the border South, CORE would venture into the Deep South, including Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. During the Journey, participants had posted bail on all but one of the six occasions when arrests had been made. The one exception had been in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where three pacifists within the group had served twenty-two day sentences on a chain gang. One of the men, Bayard Rustin, later detailed his prison experiences in a pamphlet, Twenty-two Days on the Chain Gang.[6]Inspired by Rustin’s eloquent justification of his actions and emboldened by the Rock Hill jail-in, CORE resolved to “[f]ill up the jails, as Gandhi did in India, fill them to bursting if we ha[ve] to.”[7]

On May 4, twenty-two Freedom Riders quietly left Washington DC. There is no need to recount the events of the following ten days here. Suffice to say that, as the Riders approached the Deep South, the violence and harassment became ever more extreme.

On May 14, as the Ride approached Birmingham, Alabama, one bus was firebombed just outside of Anniston; on arrival in Birmingham, the second group of Riders were attacked by members of the Klan. Exhausted and war-weary, CORE resolved to abandon the Ride and made plans to fly to New Orleans ready to attend a planned rally on May 17. It was only with the intervention of the Nashville SNCC group that the Ride continued.

Plans to persist with the Ride were met with determined resistance from both federal and state governments. On May 23, after a riot in Montgomery, Alabama, and numerous political u-turns, the Riders finally boarded a bus and, under an armed escort, headed for Jackson, Mississippi. One of the twelve Riders later described how “behind all those escorts I felt likethe President of the U.S. touring Russia.”[8] Director of CORE, James Farmer, and Lucretia Collins were the first to alight from the bus—as they approached the white rest rooms, a Jackson policeman stepped forward and arrested them.[9]

Despite Robert Kennedy’s hopes that the Riders would leave Jackson, a second bus arrived only a short time after the first and further arrests were made. Farmer, now imprisoned in the county jail, realised that Mississippi had presented them with an opportunity to fill her jails and sent word to CORE national office that they should keep sending Riders to Jackson.

Much more than for the Riders who followed, arrest for these first twenty-seven protesters was especially stressful. “I remember one…young lady, who just started pulling her hair out. I mean, screaming and stuff like that. Like, ‘I’m supposed to be dead,’ recalled Dave Dennis,“…we had psyched ourselves to the extent of dying, that this was going to be it. And when it didn’t happen…we all went through some psychological…problems…because we had not expected to survive this.[10]Unlike the sit-ins, where most protesters were at least aware of support from their community or organisation, these early Freedom Riders were completely isolated. This was particularly intense for the two white men and four black women who werearrested that day: prison segregation meant that they were also isolated from the black men, who made up the majority of the group and included all of the older, more experienced activists.[11]

On May 26, the twenty-seven Riders were brought to trial. Judge James Spencer found the accused guilty of breaching the peace and sentenced them to $200 fine and a sixty daysuspended sentence. At the trial, all twenty-seven abided by their pledge to refuse bail and remain in jail for 39 days, the longest one could stay in jail and still have the right to appeal the conviction.[12] The same day, the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee, consisting of representatives from SNCC, CORE and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), held its first meeting. The Committee outlined its aim to pressure Attorney General Kennedyto issue on order establishing the rights of interstate travellers through the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). This would be attained by filling the “jails of Montgomery and Jackson in order to keep a sharp image of the issues before the public.”[13] The realisationthat Mississippi would continue to imprison the Freedom Riders marked a new phase in the campaign—it had become, in Farmer’s words, “a different and far grander thing than we had intended.”[14]

Interestingly, the day before CORE, SNCC and SCLC came together to secure the success of the Rides, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples (NAACP) had issued an official position on the project. The NAACP had been at the forefront of defending African Americans from the brutality and injustices of the southern prison for half a century; as a national civil rights organisation, it struggled to appreciate that imprisonment could be anything other than a social stigma. Nevertheless, keen to maintain relations with the growing non-violent Movement, the organisation had silenced its many objections to jail-no-bail. As early as June 1960, however, as the call for jail-no-bail intensified, the NAACP had found it increasingly difficult to reconcile itself to this philosophical clash. The memorandum; which pledged firm support for the Rides, called for federal protection and rejected any demand for a moratorium on arrests; was a clear attempt by the NAACP to bridge the growing gulf between itself and the proponents of jail-no-bail. Such efforts, however, were almost instantly damaged when it was reported in Jet that Thurgood Marshall had made a speech attacking CORE for not defending in court its members arrested as a result of the Rides. CORE had responded to this “low blow” by stating it was yet another example of “how the NAACP attempts to embarrass other groups in the civil rights field.” Despite a damage-limitation effort by Marshall, who claimed that the speech had merely constituted a statement of theNAACP’s pragmatic objections to the idea that “you can test a law and get it thrown out by staying in jail,” the organisation increasingly opposed any campaign that sought to secure the mass imprisonment of protesters.[15]

The arrival of nine Riders in Jackson on May 28 and a further seventeen the following day forced Governor Barnett to confront the possibility of imprisoning protesters en masse. With the Jackson City Jail already overflowing, twenty-two of the prisoners were moved to the county farm who were soon joined by other Riders who continued to flow into Jackson. The prospect of hundreds of civil rights prisoners left Barnett with the deepest fear that any violence against the Riders would bring hundreds more to Mississippi and possibly lead to federal intervention. Such fear was heightened by news reports that Reverend C.T. Vivian had been beaten with a blackjack by Superintendent Max Thomas for refusing to say ‘sir’ to hiscaptors. Fearing federal intervention, Mississippi authorities paid lip-service to complaints of brutality by suspending Thomas whilst the case was investigated. Thomas quietly returned to work after Sheriff Gilfoy concluded he had acted in self-defence.[16]

Meanwhile, the attempt to fill Montgomery’s jails had collapsed. At least fifteen Riders were arrested and imprisoned in Montgomery during the first week of the Rides, including Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth and Wyatt T. Walker. The Montgomery arrests, however, had failed to gain the same press attention as those in Jackson, whilst the relatively violence-freeJackson must have seemed a more attractive destination than the previously riot-torn Montgomery. On June 2, four black Freedom Riders, part of a group travelling to Jackson, used the white waiting room at the Trailways station in Montgomery without arrest.[17] From then on, all efforts were concentrated upon Jackson.

As early as June 4, the Jackson Daily News was reporting that some prisoners might be moved to Parchman Farm, the notorious state penitentiary.[18] On June 15, the first of many groups of Riders made the 130 mile journey to ‘little Alcatraz’. News of the intended transfer,leaked to them by a black trustee—“[t]hey’re going to try to whip your ass”—sent a wave of fear amongst the prisoners: most believed that the beating of C.T. Vivian was only the first of many.[19]

Fear was running high as the group of men caught their first glimpse of Parchman, “the mostfabled state prison in the South.” “[W]hen we arrived [at Parchman],” recalled Dion T. Diamond, “there was an outer ring of barbed wire, steel-meshed fence; ten feet further within…a fence…that…was electrically charged, inside of that was a brick wall.”[20] Upon leaving the paddy wagon, the Riders were forced to strip and then given uniforms, the smallest going to the largest of the men, and vice versa.

Accounts by civil rights workers of their imprisonment abound with stories of both sympatheticprisoners and how they were able to convert hostile prisoners to understand their actions; such accounts, however, belie the fact that they were also in genuine danger from someprisoners.[21] One white convict recalled that “we wanted to kick their asses,” whilst a black prisoner spoke of how “we [the black convicts] were really pretty ignorant about things back then and weren’t especially fond of them [the freedom riders.]”[22] Desperate to avoid both violence and any conversions to the Riders’ views, Barnett ordered the Riders isolated in themaximum security unit, with some placed on death row. Ironically, in the very heart of Mississippi’s white power structure, the Freedom Riders brought integration to Parchman, when black and white prisoners were housed in the same cell block for the first time.[23]

Whilst violence was clearly feared and all knew of someone who had been injured, the majority of prisoners did escape such an experience. What was typical, however, was the ongoing harassment of prisoners. Restricted in their ability to ‘punish’ the Riders, the guards resorted to more covert forms of brutality against the civil rights activists. “They knew many of us were chain smokers,” James Farmer recalled, “…they wouldn’t allow any cigarettes in, andthe guards would walk down the corridors blowing cigarette smoke into our cells…And they knew most of these were college students. They wouldn’t allow any books in, no books whatever.”[24] In particular, the persistent singing of freedom songs by the detainees caused many confrontations with the prison guards. Punishments consisted of taking away mattresses, leaving the Riders to sleep on cold, hard metal beds. On one occasion, a number of the men refused to give up their mattresses—guards dragged them the length of the prison on their mattresses and used wrist breakers before they were finally able to detach the men. During the day, the windows were closed and the men left to swelter in the heat. On a night,the men were soaked with fire hoses and then fans would be turned on. “I didn’t know Mississippi could get that cold,” one of the men commented, “[a]lmost everybody came down with a cold.”[25]

The desire to fill Jackson’s jails meant that the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee was forced to search for an ever-increasing number of volunteers.[26] The difficulty of such a task should not be underestimated: persuading individuals—who often had little or no experience of civil rights protest—to enter a southern jail for thirty-nine days was far from simple. The first arrestees tended to be predominantly African American, male and southern, making up 62% of the first arrests. Conscious that the success of the Rides depended upon attracting the attention of both the media and the federal government, the Committee aimed its recruitingefforts at both black and white volunteers from outside the South. By July, they had been largely successful, with the month’s arrestees comprising 47% from outside the South, including a Dutch, Belgian, Canadian and Austrian.[27]

With the Committee concentrating upon the volume of volunteers, there were occasions when less then suitable people were accepted onto the Ride.[28] Despite extensive training in the principles of non-violence prior to joining the Rides, many were not prepared for what lay ahead of them. It was common for new arrivals to swear to be in prison “‘until hell freezes over’” yet, after a couple of days of imprisonment, would ask CORE to bail them out. In the majority of cases, CORE refused, reminding them of their pledge to stay in jail for thirty-nine days.

The stresses of prison life, particularly for those least prepared, took their toll upon the Freedom Riders. The division between those committed to non-violence as a philosophy and those who merely saw it as a tactic was as evident in the jails as anywhere else. Arguments regularly broke out over any number of issues: religious worship, hunger strikes, philosophy, even the level of noise in the cell. One of the greatest trials a civil rights worker had to face in jail, however, was the psychological pressure of the threat of violence. Of course, this is not to suggest that the threat of violence was anything but omnipresent in the Movement experience, the stress of this for the Riders, however, was intensified. As the first large group of protesters to be imprisoned in Mississippi, the state was expected to maintain its reputation as the most racist in the Union. With whole days to dwell on what could happen to them, tempers often became frayed. On a number of occasions, fistfights broke out when one person aggravated those who were fasting by noisily slurping their food. Yet, simultaneously, this close contact was crucial to maintaining the prisoners’ commitment to the Movement. For so long, a key element of the threat of prison was the fear that one would be forgotten,ignored, and left at the complete mercy of the prison authorities. The jailing of protesters en masse helped to alleviate much of this fear by creating a support network, a sense of community amongst the protesters.[29]

Although most Riders appear to have wanted to be bailed out of prison at some point in their ordeal, the majority did stay for the full thirty-nine days. For many, the experience was transformative. Around half of the jailed Riders were black, three quarters of these were men—as African American men were most commonly the victim of unjust convictions, many found imprisonment a liberating experience. Having survived prison, they felt that they could survive anything. For the northern white students, the jail experience gave them an opportunity to taste the kind of life African Americans were forced to live every day. Thirty-nine days in prison “is nothing compared to the lifetime of suffering and embarrassment that twenty million Americans must face because their skin is black,” wrote one white student to Farmer.[30] Whilst only a small number of white northerners were imprisoned during the Rides, their experiences often had a much wider impact on the white population. One of the few ‘luxuries’ allowed the Riders was the freedom to write home to their parents and friends:these, often highly emotional, letters communicated the plight of the southern African Americans in a very personal manner. On occasion, they also seem to have inspired parents to publicise events in the South by circulating copies of letters and holding fund-raising events.[31]

Regardless of race or gender, imprisonment created a shared experience and common purposeamongst the Freedom Riders. “The feeling of people coming out of jail was one that they had triumphed, that they had achieved,” C.T. Vivian noted, “[n]on-violence had been proven in that respect.”[32] The levelling nature of jail was an important asset to the Movement, enabling both black and white to make a genuine sacrifice.

Interestingly, the women amongst the Riders escaped the worst of the treatment, although the conditions they were forced to live in varied very little from those the men lived in. It wasnot until a large number of women (although they only ever comprised one quarter of the total number jailed) went on a hunger strike, demanding that they receive the same treatment as the men, that some were transferred to Parchman.[33] The reason for this difference intreatment appears to be largely due to fear of bad publicity—the authorities no doubt felt that reports of women being beaten would be even more damaging than news of violence against men.[34]

It was during the Freedom Rides that CORE and SNCC learnt that local support was often a vital ingredient in the success of a jail-in. The small gifts of food and blankets that locals brought to the jail helped maintain the morale of the jailed, encouraging them to maintain their commitment to the Movement. In Jackson, it was a group of local African American women named Womenpower Unlimited that provided the main body of this support. Thegroup, established by Claire Collins Harvey, evolved into an interracial network of threehundred women, who brought supplies to the jail and relayed information to the families of imprisoned Riders.[35] In particular, the womens’ regular delivery of food to prisons was generally the only source of edible food available to the jailed Riders.[36] In responding to the needs of the Movement when nobody else would, these women not only helped to ensure the continuation of the Freedom Rides, they also defied gender roles.

By July, it was reported that the Hinds County representative, Russell Davis, would ask the state legislature to cover the cost of jailing the Riders. Allen Thompson, Mayor of Jackson,estimated that the protests had cost the city of Jackson $250 000. It is also believed that the Rides meant that the planned dispensation of an ‘auto-use tax’ in Jackson that summer had to be abandoned.[37] Certainly, the cost of jailing and prosecuting the 328 Riders in Jacksonplaced a heavy burden on the city’s finances; it seems unlikely, however, that the Riders ever came close to forcing the Jackson authorities to stop arresting those who challenged segregation merely on account of financial pressure.[38] Whilst the Mississippi authorities were an important target of the Rides, the most important target was the federal government. Despite a high degree of hostility from Robert Kennedy, the Rides did indeed succeed in securing a ruling from the ICC against the segregation of travel facilities.

None of the 328 Riders remained in jail for any longer than thirty-nine days, a fact that must have helped ease the financial burden of imprisoning the Riders. Such a practice moved jail-no-bail away from its original philosophy of non-violent resistance towards a strategy to undermine all aspects of segregation. One important consequence of bailing out protesters was that CORE still had to find bail money for all the jailed Riders—by July, this had already amounted to $138 000. On August 4, the Mississippi authorities ordered all 196 persons so far bailed from jail to return to Jackson within ten days for their appeal to be heard. All but six did so, at which point the authorities announced they would be tried two at a time. The majority returned home, again at CORE’s expense. No doubt in the hope of bankrupting CORE, the Mississippi court responded to the appeals by doubling the prison sentence to four months and tripling the fine to $1 500. Prevented from abandoning the appeals and with Mississippibond companies’ refusal to supply any more money, CORE was left close to financial ruin. The situation was only resolved when the $372 000 in fines and bail was cleared by a loan from the NAACP Legal Defence Fund.[39]

III

The Freedom Ride was seen as the greatest success of jail-no-bail to date, bringing the strategy to life and proving that it could work. The Rides brought the first jailing en masse of an interracial group and, in doing so, placed financial pressure on the state authorities, forced the federal government to act to prevent violence and made a moral statement about racism. The early accusations of brutality against imprisoned Riders brought widespread coverage from the national media and, whilst the overall lack of violence in Jackson meant most news reporters departed relatively quickly, the experience brought important lessons in how to attract media attention. One thing the jailings largely failed to do, however, was change the ‘hearts and minds’ of the South. Whilst many left Parchman with a devout belief in the power of non-violence, others observed that it was the federal government’s need to preserve order, and not the moral strength of the Riders’ actions, that had forced the ICC to issue a ruling against the segregation of travel facilities.

Possibly the greatest legacy of the Freedom Ride, however, was the lesson it brought in the practicalities of using prison as a platform for racial protest. The reality of the Freedom Rides was that jail-no-bail was never truly a part of the project. In fact, what the Movement called jail-no-bail was actually much closer to the NAACP’s strategy than most would admit. Marshall had indeed been correct when he said one can not “get [a law] thrown out by staying in jail”: it was for this reason that the Riders had all accepted bail after thirty-nine days in order to challenge their conviction in court. Yet, this was not the end of jail-no-bail, it was merely a turning point. The Freedom Rides brought the lesson that in order to attain its true potential, jail-no-bail would have to move away from its strict pacifist ideals and become a more sophisticated, flexible response to segregationist resistance. Whilst jail-no-bail remained many things to many people, its greatest successes came when organisers realised that, on occasion, strategy had to prevail over morality.

University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Notes

[1] ‘Jail not Bail’, Southern Patriot, 8:5 (May 1960), 4.

[2] The relationship between the lynch mob and the criminal justice system was both complex and irregular: many sheriffs sought to keep their charges away from the mob by stowing them away in ‘mob-safe’ jails. There were sufficient cases across the South when sheriffs made no attempt to resist the mob, however, for a clear link to exist between the criminal justice system and extralegal violence in the minds of black and white alike. See Neil McMillen, Dark Journey. Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 224-253.

[3] It is important to remember that the civil rights prison experience—and its impact—was determined by numerous factors: race, gender, philosophy to name but a few. Nevertheless, as soon as a protester was imprisoned as a result of their involvement with the Movement, both black and white alike could rightly claim to have experienced prison as a form of racial control.

[4] On the Rock Hill jail-in see, Thomas Gaither, Jailed-In (New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1961); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE. A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 116-122; Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound. A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990), 29-31; Clayborne Carson, In Struggle. SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 32-34.

[5] Catherine Barnes, Journey from Jim Crow. The Desegregation of Southern Transport (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 157-175. James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Penguin Group, 1985), 195-214. Meier and Rudwick, CORE, 135-158.

[6] ‘Four Anti-Jimcrow Bus Riders Get Maximum Under State Law’, no date. CORE news release. Reel 44, CORE papers, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (hereafter CORE.) Bayard Rustin, Twenty-two Days on the Chain Gang, Fellowship of Reconciliation pamphlet, 1949. Box 2, Fellowship of Reconciliation papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore University, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

[7]At CORE orientation sessions, participants pledged to accept imprisonment over bail. Jim Peck, Special Freedom Ride edition of the CORE-lator, 89 (May 1961). Howell Raines (ed.), My Soul is Rested. The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South (New York: Penguin, 1977), 109.

[8] John Dittmer, Local People. The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 90. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement (London: MacMillan, 1988), 456-459.

[9] Leslie W. Dunbar, ‘Freedom Ride’, New South, 16:7-8 (July-August 1961), 9.

[10] Dave Dennis interviewed by Worth Long. Circle archives, Southern Regional Council, Atlanta, Georgia.

[11] List of Freedom Rider arrests, May 24-May 28 1961. File 2-144, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi (hereafter cited as MSSC-MDAH.)

[12] The following day, five of the Riders—including all but one of the black female prisoners—left prison on bond to assist a legal challenge to the arrests. List of Freedom Rider arrests, May 24-May 28 1961. ‘Five Riders Post Bond, 22 Others Still in Jail’, Jackson Daily News (hereafter JDN), May 28 1961, 1.

[13] ‘Report of Meeting’, Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee, May 26 1961. Part 2, reel 3, Southern Christian Leadership Conference papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia (hereafter SCLC).

[14] Branch, Parting the Waters, 139.

[15]Memorandum to Officers of All Branches, Youth Councils and College Chapters, State Conferences from Roy Wilkins, May 25 1961. Part 21, reel 12, National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia (hereafter NAACP.) Telegram to John Johnson from Thurgood Marshall, May 19 1961. Part 21, reel 12, NAACP. Message clarifying the position of the NAACP regarding the ‘Freedom Rides.’ June 14 1961. Part 21, reel 12, NAACP. By December 1961, the NAACP National Office had adopted an unofficial policy of “bail-not-jail” and assumed an increasingly bitter tone when requests for legal assistance came from imprisoned protesters who had refused bail.

[16] ‘Boss of Prison Reinstated’, JDN, June 2 1961, 1.

[17] ‘US Judge Curbs “Ride” Promoters’, JDN, June 2 1961, 1.

[18]See David M. Oshinsky, Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996); William Banks Taylor, Down on Parchman Farm. The Great Prison in the Mississippi Delta (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999).

[19] ‘Riders May Take a Ride’, JDN, June 4 1961, 3. ‘Riders Taken to Parchman’, JDN, June 15 1961, 1. Frank Holloway, ‘Travel Notes from a Deep South Tourist’, New South, 16:7-8 (July-August 1961), 3-8.

[20] Dion T. Diamond interview, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Howard University, Washington DC.

[21] See for example, James Farmer, ‘Jailed in Mississippi’, CORE-lator, 91 (August 1961), 1.

[22] Taylor, Down on Parchman Farm, 171.

[23] Barnett actually visited the Riders in Parchman himself, see Raines, My Soul is Rested, 128. ‘Jailed Freedom Riders Visited’, CORE-lator, 90 (June 1961), 1.

[24] Raines, My Soul is Rested, 127. Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer (eds.), Voices of Freedom. An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 95-96. The one exception to this was in Jackson City Jail, where the small numbers of prisoners there were allowed cigarettes, books and a much greater level of freedom of movement.

[25] Ibid., 94-95; Peter B. Levy (ed.), Let Freedom Ring. A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 81.

[26] ‘Report of Meeting’, May 26 1961. Letter from Wyatt T. Walker appealing for volunteers, June 1 1961. Part 2, reel 3, SCLC.

[27] List of arrested Freedom Riders, May 24-28 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, commonly known as ‘Freedom Riders’, July 6 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, commonly known as ‘Freedom Riders’, July 9 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, commonly known as ‘Freedom Riders’, July 16 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, commonly known as ‘Freedom Riders’, July 21 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, commonly known as ‘Freedom Riders’, July 23 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, commonly known as ‘Freedom Riders’, July 24 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, commonly known as ‘Freedom Riders’, July 29 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, commonly known as ‘Freedom Riders’, July 30 1961. All in file 2-144, MSSC-MDAH.

[28] Prison authorities sought out such Riders in the hope that they would ‘defect’ and agree to make damaging statements against the Movement. This apparently only happened in the case of Rev. Richard Gleason, who denounced the Riders when he was told he was sharing a cell with a Rider who had been dishonourably discharged from the US army, ‘Rider Denounces Unsavoury Chums’, JDN, June 5 1961, 1.

[29] ‘Jailed Freedom Riders Visited’, CORE-lator; Branch, Parting the Waters, 484-485; Meier and Rudwick, CORE, 140-142.

[30] Ibid., 140.

[31] See letter from Miriam Feingold to her parents, July 2 1961. Letter from Miriam Feingold to her parents, July 9 1961. Reel 1, Miriam Feingold papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.

[32] Hampton and Fayer (eds.) Voices of Freedom, 96.

[33] Arrest records for the month of July, show that a total of eleven groups of Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson, containing a total of 107 protesters. Of these, 37% were black men; 38% were white men; 16% were white women; whilst the remaining 9% were black women. Persons arrested in Jackson, July 6 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, July 9 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, July 16, 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, July 21 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, July 23 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, July 24 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, July 29 1961; Persons arrested in Jackson, July 30 1961.

[34] This apparent reluctance to brutalise women was far from typical of the Movement’s experiences. In the summer of 1963, June Johnson, Annelle Ponder, Euvester Simpson, Rosemary Freeman, Fannie Lou Hamer and James West were all badly beaten in Winona jail, Mississippi. Although the Winona jail beating was one of the most brutal examples of violence against women, it was far from an isolated event. See Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom. The Organising Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 270-271

[35] Dittmer, Local People, 98.

[36] Generally, those in Parchman did not have the benefit of daily gifts of food, on account of the prison being 130 miles away from Jackson. On his visit to Parchman, Governor Barnett told Farmer, “‘we want you to stay in there and rot…We got to feed you…But we can make that food so damn unpalatable that you can’t eat it.’” This was generally achieved by loading the food with so much salt it was inedible, although glass and cleaning powder were also added on occasion. See Raines, My Soul is Rested, 127, 128.

[37] Just how much financial pressure the Riders created is difficult to estimate: whilst the figure of $250 000 could have been inflated to encourage further hostility towards the Riders, Mayor Thompson actually opposed Davis’s actions, stating that Jackson did not want any such help. He appears to have resented the implication that Jackson could not deal with challenges to segregation by itself. ‘State Will Be Asked To Pay Rider Costs’, JDN, July 14 1961, 1. ‘Davis Still to Ask Help on ‘Rider’ Burden’, JDN, July 15 1961, 1. William M. Kunstler with Sheila Isenberg, My Life as a Radical Lawyer (New York: Carol Publishing, 1994), 102-104

[38] Such a view was expressed by Rev. Ed. King, who argued that, whilst the Freedom Rides were costly to Jackson, the Riders never came close to undermining the determination to imprison the Riders. Interview with Rev. Edwin King, Jackson, Mississippi, March 20, 2000. Recording in author’s possession.

[39] ‘Minutes of the Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee’, August 3 1961. Part 2, reel 3, SCLC. Farmer Lay Bare the Heart, 211-212. In October 1963, the vast majority of this bail money was still being held by the Mississippi courts. Letter from Carl Rachlin to Norman Dorsen, October 15 1963, Reel 10, CORE.

Issue 2, Autumn 2001 article 2

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 2, Autumn 2001

Parody, Sincerity and the Martial Ideal in the Literary Impressionism of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage

John Fagg
© John Fagg. All Rights Reserved

Sitting in camp awaiting his first taste of battle, Henry Fleming, the youth in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, considers the type of warfare he is likely to encounter during his involvement in the American Civil War:

He had long despaired of witnessing a Greek-like struggle. Such would be no more, he had said. Men were better, or, more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or, else, firm finance held in check the passions.[1]

This formula is repeated three pages later. Punctuated less tentatively and not directly attributed to Henry, the repetition and apparent affirmation grant it the status of a statement significant to the nature of the narrative about to unfold. The statement contains two incommensurable views of what a Civil War battlefield may contain. Either, war holds true to a martial ideal unchanged since Ancient times, as battle is a transhistorical condition; or, in accordance with the beliefs that the youth espouses but secretly wishes to be dissuaded of, warfare has been rationalised and civilised, tamed by education and brought under theinfluence of capitalist economics. Amy Kaplan relates the notion of war as a “Greek-like struggle” to the complex cultural response to conditions of “overcivilisation”, emasculation andreification identified by the historian Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace.[2] Lears claims that in the 1890s masculinity underwent a process of redefinition with appeal to earlier images of heroism and valour especially to Ancient and Medieval mythology.[3] Kaplan reads The Red Badge of Courage as an attempt to “reinterpret the war through the cultural lenses and political concerns of the late nineteenth century”, arguing that any participation in this mythological discourse is mediated by the parodic or ironic mode that “provides a central narrative strategy in all of Crane’s writing” (Kaplan, 78, 84).

Kaplan acknowledges that her historicised reading stands in opposition to “most critical approaches” which are predicated on the “illegibility of history in Crane’s war novel” (Kaplan, 78). Such an approach was taken by Joseph Conrad, who explained the apparent lack of historical grounding by claiming that Crane was an artist who “dealt with what isenduring”,thus casting the novel in terms of universal themes and fundamental truths. This radical interpretative divergence is registered in the direct opposition between Conrad’s assertion that Henry Fleming stands as “the symbol of all untested men”[4] and Kaplan’s claim that Crane’s narrative deconstructs the figuration of war as a “crucible for the test of individual manhood” (Kaplan, 81). Writing more than sixty years apart, the dichotomy between these two writers can, in part, be explained by the vastly different types of ideological assumption they make about literature, but the possibility of such polarised readings must also be attributed to the fundamentally ambiguous nature of Crane’s work. The source of much of this ambiguity is the particular set of stylistic traits that grant the novel its unique status and that have commonly been termed “Literary Impressionism”.

In Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism, James Nagel charts early critical responses in which Crane’s Impressionism was widely seen as a practice that produced fragmented, episodic prose distinguished by its focus on “sensory imagery” intended to “[record] the impressions of the characters”.[5] Emphasis was placed on the striking use of colour and the creation of a uniquely visual literary style. The critical debate outlined by Nagel progresses from these claims to more complex discussions of the relationship between the author and the protagonist, which are produced by the reliance on the sensory in Crane’s work. Crane’s narrative voice typically operates within a perceptual field in which “the apprehension of reality is limited to empirical data interpreted by a single human intelligence” (Nagel, 19). Thus, when “[t]he youth’s ears were filled cups…incapable of hearing more” (98) the narrator is similarly unable to access any further information about the sounds of the battlefield. A more complex situation arises with the inclusion of value-laden utterances such as the description of the soldiers fighting in heated battle as “the slaves toiling in the temple of this god” (31). This metaphor must obviously have been produced at a level other than that of the immediate sense perception of the soldier in battle, but to attribute it directly to Crane breaks the narrative frame and produces an overly simplistic account of authorial positioning in the novel.

The primacy of the visual, as a privileged and contested medium, forms the basis of the stylistic comparison that can be made between Impressionist approaches to literature and painting. R.W. Stallman’s characterisation of Crane’s work as “prose pointillism”, wherein “disconnected images…coalesce” to form a “configured whole” (Nagel, 8), suggests thepossibility of an analogous relationship at the level of critical terminology. Perhaps more illuminating is a consideration of the underlying ethos that informed both Impressionisms. Discussing Manet, T.J. Clark discerns a “new course” in the history of art that can be described as “a kind of scepticism, or at least unsureness, as to the nature of representation in art”.[6] Nagel makes a similar point about Monet, suggesting that his work elucidates the “fundamental ideology [that] reality is a matter of perception; it is unstable, ever changing, elusive, inscrutable” (Nagel, 13). Reality is all these things in The Red Badge of Courage. Fundamental doubts about what is being perceived and by whom, produced by the ambiguous position of the narrator, cast Henry’s apprehension of reality as the central theme of the text.

By apparently taking abstract visuality and the perceptual processes of the protagonist as its core thematic, Literary Impressionism lends itself to dehistoricised readings such as Conrad’s interpretation of The Red Badge of Courage. Fredric Jameson’s “Romance and Reification” seeks to reconnect Conrad’s own Impressionistic novel Lord Jim to the mode of production of nineteenth century capitalism in which it was written.[7] The interpretative method and the slogan “Always Historicize” (Jameson, 9), if not the overtly Marxist framework, of Jameson’s close reading of Conrad have paved the way for the subsequent rehistoricisation of other Impressionistic literature. For Jameson, it is a necessity of history that Conrad’s literary production relates to the conditions in which it was created. In opposition to vulgar or reductive Marxisms, the relationship postulated is not simply allegoric but instead deeply complex and subtle, working at the level of “the content of the form”. Conrad’s stylistic and narrative strategies are read as a reaction to the reifying conditions of capitalist society. Rejecting the possibility of a literary practice abstracted from the realm of concrete history through its focus on visual sense datum, Jameson recasts Conrad in the context of a historicised sensorium. The progress of rationalistic capitalism can be seen to have fragmented traditional forms of labour organisation and social structure. Jameson mediates between this critique of capitalism’s impact on society and a conception of the individual consciousness where the once unified psyche is split into semi-autonomous units. The “non-instrumental or archaic functions” such as vision, which do not contribute to the essentially quantifiable processes of means/ends rationalism or abstracted scientific enquiry, aretherefore deprivileged (Jameson, 228). Thus, Conrad’s elevation of individual sense perception can be seen either as a result of the “release in perceptual energy” produced by the deperceptualisation of science, or as a denial of capitalist, rationalist modernity.8

The relationship between Conrad and Crane operates at a number of levels and can be introduced through their creation of contemporary spheres of ‘romantic’ action. Jameson begins his discussion of Lord Jim by stating that “the privileged place of the strategy of containment in Conrad is the sea” (Jameson, 210). The sea, the Orient, and specifically the isolated state of Patusan are all spaces ‘outside’ the dominant condition of late nineteenth century capitalism, in which outmoded codes of feudal culture may still be seen to operate. This enables Conrad to produce a romance of the individual, transforming Jim into a more or less conventional romantic protagonist. In a mode analogous to Conrad’s deprivileging of thesea, Theodore Roosevelt placed warfare in opposition to “the base spirit of gain and greed”, whilst William James described war as “the romance of history”, the sphere of life that “rescues society from ‘industrialism unlimited’”.9 In this context it is clear that war could, for Crane, have served a similar function to that of the sea in Conrad. Such strategies of containment isolate the narrative from the mode of production enabling both authors to engage with the themes of courage, cowardice and the testing of young men’s bravery in the crucible of heated action untroubled by the reifying conditions of industrial society.

Just as Jameson goes on to demonstrate ways in which Conrad’s romantic sphere is permeated by the language of economics and empire, Kaplan finds issues of rationalisation and mechanisation, class struggle and urban conflict, and the heightened militarism and imperialism of 1890s America inscribed within Crane’s Civil War narrative. Where, for Jameson, Conrad’s attempt to cling to feudal modes of power, organisation and representation is undermined by the inevitable influence of contemporary concerns, Kaplan takes Crane to be a willing participant in modernity who produces “a book about social change, about the transition not only from internecine to international conflict or from preindustrialised to mechanical warfare but also from traditional to modern modes of representation” (Kaplan, 78-79). Oral storytelling and various forms of narrative are rejected by the text, to be replaced by modes of visual display and spectatorship which are seen as a more appropriate means of interpreting what Kaplan believes to be a modernised realm of warfare. Henry’s rejection of the “tattered soldier”, who attempts to comprehend the war through anecdotes about his rural neighbours, symbolises this stratification of discourse. In equating the visual and the modern, Kaplan appeals to a chain of ideas that link modernity to urbanisation, and urban life to a specific set of looking relations. In order to navigate an environment devoid of the personal intimacy and shared history of the agrarian epoch, the citizens of the modern city were required to make rapid evaluations based on a predominantly visual discourse. The image represents a modern immediacy and mass legibility that the anecdotes of the tattered soldier lack.

Operating within the same critical parameters as Kaplan, Bill Brown’s rehistoricisation of The Red Badge of Courage offers, within the context of “American Amusement…and the Economics of Play”, an alternative approach to the privileged status of the image. Brown argues that, during the 1890s, recreation began to “assume a pivotal importance in the way Americans conceive and experience their daily lives and public selves”creating a discourse of leisure that shapes the way Henry Fleming sees and is seen (Brown, 4). Broadly, this means that roles on the battlefield are figured through concepts of audience and performance informed by the modern sports event. The implicit relationship between athlete and soldier locates Henry Fleming within “an American tradition of the visualized, objectified, commodified male body” (Brown, 24). Brown suggests that the image, and specifically the photographic image, becomes the dominant and authentic mode of communicating information in the 1890s, pointing to the new prevalence of photojournalism and what he terms scopophilia on the part of the American people.

In slightly different ways, both Kaplan and Brown equate the elevation of the visual image with thematic shifts towards a recognition of warfare as a modernised and rationalised process. War photography and mass media coverage are cited as forming a discourse of ‘battle as spectacle’ that Crane’s text anticipates and participates in. However, neither critic fully explores the implications of Crane’s Impressionism in this context, taking it to be a highly visual medium, without considering the doubts about representation and the problems of distance that the practice engenders. The instability of Crane’s Impressionistic practice is nowhere more apparent than the moment in the text when the act of looking becomes utterly dominant. In Chapter 23 of The Red Badge of Courage, thematic and stylistic attention to the visual converges as Henry, now the regimental standard bearer, becomes “deeply absorbed as a spectator”(99). Crane renders Henry’s impressions of the battle in a surfeit of metaphoric images that, through allusions to mythical discourse and the anti-rationalist method of their construction, unsettle the association of Crane’s acutely visual prose with the visual bias of turn-of-the-century culture. Metaphor in Chapter 23 offers a counter-discourse that makesappeal to what may, in Raymond Williams’ terms, be described as Henry’s “residual” conception of war as “Greek-like struggle”. The visual thus becomes a site of tension between “residual” forms and the cultural “dominant” of rationalised industrial production.10

The narrative movement of Chapter 23 is not one of linear progression through space or time. Although events do unfold in a temporal sequence, the organising structure is that of a panorama or cinematic pan, revolving around the fixed point that Henry, the uninhibited witness, has become. Crane’s movement from image to image is determined not by a desire to impart the significant events of the battle but by the apparently arbitrary calling of Henry’s senses. The second paragraph begins: “Off a short way, he saw two regiments fighting a little separate battle with two other regiments”, whilst the third opens: “In another direction, he saw a magnificent brigade” (97). The repetition of “saw” emphasises the sense that it is the peculiarity of the separate battle and the magnificence of the brigade, the appeal these scenes present to the spectator, that make them relevant. The significant status of the visual is inscribed within the text by a sequence of figurations of the impenetrability of the outwardly perceivable surface. Once the initial spectacle of the magnificent brigade has been registered, it passes into the woods and “out of sight” (97). The rationally conceived purpose of engagement with the enemy is rendered only in the abstract and “unspeakable” noise of battle. This figuration of obscuring screens extends beyond the line of trees to the later description of the “smoke-wall” that the regiment’s rifle fire produces (99).

The visual logic that determines the movement of the text can also be witnessed in the autonomous image generation of Crane’s descriptive language. Figural constructions appear to take on a life of their own, forming a visual surface that peels away from its literal referents:

Once, the youth saw a spray of light forms go in hound-like leaps towards the waving blue lines. There was much howling and presently it went away with a vast mouthful of prisoners. Again, he saw a blue wave dash with such thunderous force against a grey obstruction that it seemed to clear the earth of it and leave nothing but trampled sod.(98)

In this passage the first line alludes to the image of the sea crashing against the shore through the words “spray” and “waving”. However, in both cases, Crane refuses to elevate the discourse beyond the literal, as “waving blue lines” could simply be the uniforms of the unevenly formed front row of the regiment, while “spray of light forms” suggests just enough of a sense of individual bodies to resist reference to drops of water. The resisted bifurcation prompts the appearance, two sentences later, of a more fully realised image of the sea, when Henry sees “a blue line dash with such thunderous force against a grey obstruction” (which isn’t quite a rock). The unrequited image, rather than the action of the battle, appears to generate the new metaphor. Interposed between the hint of a “sea” metaphor and themetaphor itself is the image of a hound “howling” and lunging at its prey. A hound takes a bite at the sea and comes up with a mouth full not with water or flesh but “prisoners”. In this switch from vehicle to tenor, as in the reference to “trampled sod”, the figural is unceremoniously displaced by the literal.11

A further example of the autonomy of the image comes in Crane’s assertion of the visual moment over the logical sequence. The complete action of a rifle being fired can be taken as mimetic, at a micro-level, of the well-made plot. It has ‘a beginning’ in the act of aiming and pulling the trigger, ‘a middle’ in the trajectory of the bullet and ‘an end’ at the point of impact and the potential wound or fatality it inflicts. Crane takes the spectacular visual moment in this sequence, “the flashing points of red and yellow” (99), the sight and sound that are in fact an incidental by-product of the deadly causal chain, and allows them to stand for the whole action. The synecdoche is repeated so frequently in the novel that the act of shootingto kill becomes drastically abstracted. The rejection of linear progression, and of the rationality implicit in a plot driven narrative, can here, as in Jameson’s exploration of the “aleatory” in Conrad, be taken as an act of resistance.12

Images feed one another, overlap and resurface, in a process that autonomises visuality, casting its figural rendering as an end in itself. This autonomy is affirmed by the oft-cited power of Crane’s figurations. The description of exploding shells as “strange warflowers” (30), or the moment when Henry’s regiment “let drive their flock of bullets” (99), hold such poetic force that they dominate and transcend the events they are intended to represent. Citing Crane’s simile “the red sun was pasted in the sky like a fierce wafer” (46), Kaplan claims that the narrator’s visual representations “freeze the action of the battle [and] call attention…to his own power to sketch the scene with bravado” (Kaplan, 97). A dichotomy exists between the dominant conception of modern warfare as a rationalised process fully contained within the means/ends logic of nineteenth century capitalism, and residual notions of individuality, strenuosity and heroism. Kaplan recognises that “Crane’s language becomes enmeshed in the rhetoric of strenuosity” but fails to recognise the fundamental nature of this engagement, instead characterising the ultimate relationship as one of parody (Kaplan, 88). In Chapter 23, where protagonist and narrator see battle most clearly, it appears that Crane’s narrative mode does not merely engage the terms of the residual, but is governed by it.

If the poetic image becomes its own progenitor and an end in itself in Crane’s text, then this elevation of figural language renders problematic Bill Brown’s discussion of Crane’s style as one that attains to the photo-realistic and Amy Kaplan’s identification of an emergent form of war reportage in The Red Badge of Courage. Brown describes the way that photojournalism became vital to perceptions of the Civil War, both at the time and in the decades that followed. This process, and the mechanics of the photographic process, are “narratively inscribed” within the text. Retreating troops carry “an appalling imprint” on their faces and we are told that “[Henry’s] mind took a mechanical but firm impression, so that, afterward, everything was pictured and explained to him, save why he himself was there” (Brown, 43). Brown reaches the conclusion that, “photography, both as a mechanical process and as a set of views, plays such a crucial part in the novel because photography literalizes reification whilst compensating for it” (Brown, 155). The photographic and photojournalistic are methods for rationalising the process of warfare, pinning it down to the images of specific battlefields or corpses that Crane’s romantic and mystic figurations elide. Likewise, by defining The Red Badge of Courage as “a paradigm of the modern American war novel” and characterising it within the traditions of newspaper journalism and war reportage, Amy Kaplan associates the narrative with forms that, whatever their true status, adopt stylistic practices designed to create a sense of truth preservation and objectivity.

This categorisation may be evaluated in terms of James Nagel’s identification of two distinct approaches present in Impressionism:

Depending on emphasise, an Impressionistic writer can modulate his fiction between the “objective” stance of presenting sensations at the instant of reception…and the “subjective” stance of recording the internalization of sensory perception. (Nagel, 22)

If the autonomous figural sphere identified in Chapter 23 is placed alongside the photographic and journalistic tropes identified by Kaplan and Brown, Crane’s form can be seen as one of vacillation between the dominant, rationalised account of warfare, and the residual, romantic one. Regardless of whether one strain is ultimately dominant over the other, the displacement of the objective mode in Chapter 23 supports Jameson’s argument that, while apparently predicated on a pseudo-scientific predisposition towards the empirical, Literary Impressionism is profoundly anti-positivistic. While Jameson does not deny, and in fact actively asserts, the claim that Impressionism is intrinsically bound to modernisation in all its forms, the relationship is, for him, an inversion of the ‘mechanistic’ analogy made by Brown. Conrad’s “will to style” is, as a “socially symbolic act” an evasion or denial, of reification, not an acceptance of dominant conditions (Jameson, 225). If Crane’s martial containment strategy is to be read in the same light as Conrad’s maritime sphere of romance, then his stylistic Impressionism must, like Conrad’s, be seen to embrace earlier forms as least as much as it reacts against them.

The closing paragraphs of Chapter 23 describe the weakening of the regiment in the face of enemy fire:

Others fell down about the feet of their companions. Some of the wounded crawled out and away, but many lay still, their bodies twisted into impossible shapes. (100)

This appears to be an attempt to reassert the physical realities of the conflict over the abstracted images of battle that have displaced them during the course of the chapter. Henry witnesses the end product of the rifle fire, not simply its dramatic by-product. Despite this shift of attention, a fully realised connection between the spectacular means of battle, its sights and sounds and ferocity, and its logical end, the corpse, is evaded and thwarted. In these closing paragraphs, engagement with the dead body is limited to the identification of its form, its shape that is deemed to be “impossible”. This epithet may be intended to convey the horror, carnage and mutilation the human body is subjected to in war, but it also communicates a sense of the incomprehensibility of death and the inability of the individual sensorium to understand the implications of a corpse.

At this point it is useful to return to T.J. Clark’s discussion of the doubts over representation expressed in French Impressionist painting. With reference to Cezanne, Clark claims that,

[t]he task of representation comes to be twofold: to demonstrate the fixity and substance of the world out there, but also to admit that the seer does not know – most probably cannot know – how his own sight makes objects possible. (Clark, 17)

Both projects can be located in Crane’s literary style. The dead and wounded are vividly described (especially the “orderly-serjeant” shot through the cheeks) leaving no doubt as to their existence as part of the world ‘out there’, but the second task is also undertaken, as exemplified in the problem of the “impossible” corpses. The problematisation of perception is, in the work of Impressionist painters and writers alike, a matter of distance and perspective. For Clark, this relationship is exemplified in Camille Pissarro’s Coin de village, effet d’hiver (1877) where he finds that on close inspection “the pattern of brushstrokes which Pissarro uses on the right-hand side of the Coin de village…is very near no pattern at all” (Clark, 20). At close range the marks on the canvas bear little or no relation to the trees and houses they represent, instead forming a random, abstract pattern. It is only when the viewer steps back from the painting that the image takes shape. The limited epistemology of Crane’s narrative strategy appears to allow for no move analogous to this step back to the optimum position. Within Henry’s consciousness, the illogical form of the stricken body and the wider question of what war is, are consistently viewed at a distance that creates abstraction. The perceptual object is held either at a range so close that the individual moment is decontextualised, or rendered as “one of those great affairs of the earth”(3), a sweep so broad that all detail is obscured. Kaplan seeks to attribute to Crane a “realistic” perception of war as a sphere engaged in, rather than separate from, the processes of modernity. If such a position exists within the novel, the platform from which it is voiced must be founded on the distance between narrator and character.

In Impressionistic texts the relationship between author and protagonist is vital to the ideological implications of the narrative. As James Nagel states, “[i]mplicit in art based on the confluence of sensation with secondary interpretation is a necessary distinction between reality as perceived and reality itself” (Nagel, 23). Both Lord Jim and Henry Fleming demonstrate the condition, that Jameson terms “bovarysme” in honour of Gustave Flaubert’s pioneering literary diagnosis, in which the afflicted party displays an over-developed romantic consciousness as a result of early and pernicious influences out of step with their social conditions. For Emma Bovary, it is the “refuse of the lending libraries”, the novels about “loveand lovers [and] damsels in distress swooning in lonely lodges” with which she “soiled her hands” when in the convent, whilst for Jim, the culpable medium is “light holiday literature” that trades in the sea as a setting for heroic acts.13

In the opening paragraph of Chapter 23 the reader is told that “[Henry] smiled briefly when he saw men dodge and duck at the long screechings of shells that were thrown in giant handfuls over them” (97). The animistic recasting of the shells as beings capable of screeching, a sound which is elsewhere described as being “like a storm-banshee” (23), and the allusion to “giant” hands both transport Henry’s experience beyond the sphere of men and machines to engage with a mythical trope of war as the province of the supernatural. This imagery once again affirms the desire to witness Greek-like struggle, and to conceptualise war in terms of Ancient and Medieval legend. Whilst the Flaubertian model of bovarysme is relatively stable in its juxtaposition of the romantic ‘represented thought’ of the protagonist with the realist ‘narrative sentences’ of the author, Conrad and Crane display a more ambiguous engagement. According to Jameson, Conrad’s position is differentiated from that of Flaubert by “his own mesmerization by such images and such daydreaming” (Jameson, 213).

To locate Crane between Flaubert’s detachment and Conrad’s mesmerisation, it is necessary to explore the effect of ironic distance in his narrative. Does the allusion to giants come from Stephen Crane’s authorial perspective, his rendering of what Henry perceives, or the direct reporting of Henry’s thoughts? The first reading would confirm Crane’s mesmerisation and finds support throughout the sphere of Crane’s image-making. In his figural discourse, Crane appears to embrace the mythical conception of war where armies crash against each other like forces of nature, and men and machines take on supernatural properties. However, the second and third possibilities imply a narrative style that creates sufficient distance between Fleming and Crane to allow for an ironic deflation of Henry’s pretensions in the mode of Flaubert. This interpretation appears to be justified by the image of giant hands as, in the following paragraph, war is immediately refigured in the less grandiose terms of a sporting encounter:

[Henry] saw two regiments fighting a little separate battle with two other regiments… They were blazing as if upon a wager, giving and taking tremendous blows…slugging each other as if at a matched game. (97)

In this description, Crane adopts the language of spectacle and amusement that Bill Brown identifies as recurring traits throughout his writing. In doing so he fixes the account in the cultural terms of his own period, asserts the status of his concerns as a writer in the 1890s and undermines Henry’s earlier, mythical conception of the conflict. This is rationalised warfare in which the true horror is the fact that war is just like everyday life, permeated by modern conditions, rather than utterly alien to them. Crane goes on to describe the battlefield as a “pitiless monotony of conflicts” (97), thereby making explicit the reifying potential of the modernised martial environment he previously alluded to.

If the position identified here goes unchallenged, it can be argued that Crane’s irony functions to create a monologic text in which the author’s sceptical take on ‘the crucible of war’ is dominant over the protagonist’s romantic vision. But, as has already been suggested, infigural ‘narrative sentences’ written from what can only be the author’s point of view, the discourse of feudal valour and romantic images of warfare can be detected, thus creating an apparently dialogic encounter.14 The model of the monologic or dialogic text, developed by Bakhtin in his analysis of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic form may be brought to the question ofhierarchical positioning in Crane’s text. Bakhtin cites Flaubert as a practitioner of the “polished and monolithic” monologic novel where heterogeneous content “is subordinated to the unity of a personal style and tone permeating it through and through”.15 Madame Bovary is the product of the ironic or parodying mode in which the author exists on an epistemologically dominant plane to that of the characters. Kaplan propagates this view of The Red Badge of Courage, arguing that Crane, informed by an understanding of war that Henry lacks, is aloof from, and at times critical of, the martial ethos and mythological discourse of war. However, by privileging this discourse within the figural language of his text, Crane maintains an effective dialogue between Henry and the narrator, between the battlefield of the 1860s and that of the 1890s, and between conceptions of war as a space of feudal valour or a sphere of rationalised action.

In the context of the 1890s, the development of an autonomous visual surface can be seen as a challenge to dominant constructs of war as reified and mechanical. Similarly, the rejection of means/ends rationalism at the level of plot and narrative movement attests to the author’s desire to escape the ‘Taylorised’ cultural of modernity. The refusal to create a consistent distancing strategy between narrator and protagonist fuels the belief that Crane intended his protagonist’s voice to emerge, on a least some occasions, as an uncontested force within the novel, thus asserting the legitimacy of Henry’s ideological standpoint. This does necessarily make The Red Badge of Courage an act of revolt against the dominant social order of the 1890s as, explicit in Raymond Williams definition of “the residual”, is a recognition that such forms may have been “wholly or largely incorporated into the dominant culture” (Williams, 122). (Indeed a romantic conception of warfare may be seen to have aided a rationalised one as it encouraged young men such as Henry to enlist.) It does, however, call into question the deprivileging of elements of the novel outside the historical frame of the 1890s that occurs in Kaplan’s essay. The imbalance in Kaplan’s work may be attributed to “the tendency of much contemporary theory to rewrite selected texts from the past in terms of its own aesthetic” (Jameson, 17), that Fredric Jameson identifies as a pitfall of non-Marxist attempts at historicisation. Kaplan’s desire to read The Red Badge of Courage as “a narrative structure engaged in producing the spectacle of modern warfare” (Kaplan, 106), leads her to exclude the residual elements of earlier forms that inevitably exist on a battlefield containing both mortar-fire and the hand to hand combat of the bayonet charge.

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1999) 3. All citations hereafter are bracketed within the text.

[2] Amy Kaplan, ‘The Spectacle of War in Crane’s Revision of History’, New Essays on The Red Badge of Courage, ed. Lee Clark Mitchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Hereafter cited as Kaplan.

[3] Lears’ argues that a mode of anti-modern resistance developed in American culture at the turn of the century. Corporate capitalism was found to be depersonalising and unfulfilling and so craftsmanship, Medievalism, Orientalism, violent fantasy and the martial ideal were all elevated as alternative spheres in which Americans could gain spiritual replenishment and “regenerate a lost intensity of feeling.” T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981) 142.

[4] Joseph Conrad, ‘His War Book’, in Stephen Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Bassam (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1967) 123-126.

[5] James Nagel, Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980) 5. Hereafter cited as Nagel.

[6] T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985) 10. Hereafter cited as Clark.

[7] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1996). Hereafter cited as Jameson.

[8] “In the case of sight, it ought to be possible to understand how the deperceptualisation of the sciences – the break with such perceptual pseudosciences as alchemy, for example, the Cartesian distinction between primary and secondary senses, and the geometrization of science more generally, which substitutes ideal quantities for physically perceivable objects of study – is accompanied by a release in perceptual energies.” Jameson, 229.

[9] Quoted in Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 1996) 129. Hereafter cited as Brown.

[10] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 121-127. Hereafter cited as Williams.

[11] The terminology and approach used in the handling of metaphor stem from I.A. Richards’ analysis. Rather than individual words taking on “metaphorical meanings”, the utterance as a whole can be split into a primary and secondary sentence (one about a dog, the other about a regiment) that function simultaneously. By oscillating between the two sentences (or failing to sustain the metaphor), Crane creates a linguistic hybrid. I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965) 96-97.

[12] Jameson reads the generation of narrative through coincidence and accident, as a means by which Conrad is able to assert a “yarn-spinning” style that marks “the vain attempt to conjure back the old unit of the literary institution”. Jameson, 219-224.

[13] Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) 50. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) 47.

[14] The use of the terms “narrative sentence” and “represented thought” and the subsequent discussion of Crane in relation to Bakhtin are prompted by Christine Brooke-Rose’s analysis of irony in The Red Badge of Courage. Christine Brooke-Rose, “Ill Logics of Irony”, New Essays on The Red Badge of Courage, ed. Lee Clark Mitchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

[15] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) 15.

Issue 2, Autumn 2001 article 1

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 2, Autumn 2001

Private Properties, Public Nuisance: Arthur Mervyn and The Rise and Fall of a Republican Machine

An amalgam of gothic tale, historical romance and picaresque adventure, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; Or Memoirs of the Year 1793, was published in 1799, with a second part following in 1800. Its plot is notoriously complex but goes something like this: Arthur Mervyn, struck by yellow fever on the streets of Philadelphia, is taken in by the benevolent Dr Stevens. When Mervyn is later accused of being an accomplice to embezzler, Thomas Welbeck, he tells his life story to Dr Stevens in order to clear his name: according to the tale he tells, Arthur is a country youth who was driven from home by a cruel stepmother, fleeced of his slender fortune on the road to Philadelphia and robbed of his belongings on arrival. Deciding that city life was not for him, he determined to return to the countryside, but before he had a chance to leave, was offered shelter by Welbeck, a wealthy and mysterious stranger, who lived with his daughter, Clemenza, and took Arthur into his service as a copyist. Discovering that Clemenza was in fact Welbeck’s unfortunate mistress, and Welbeck himself an embezzler, forger and murderer, Mervyn left for the country, took work on the Hadwin farm and fell in love with young Eliza Hadwin. Returning to plague-stricken Philadelphia purely to ascertain the fate of Hadwin’s beloved nephew, Arthur contracted the fever himself, and was found in this state by Dr. Stevens.

Part II of the text sees Arthur exonerated from suspicion, restored to health, and returning to the Hadwin farm, where he finds Eliza is the sole survivor of the plague. After several false starts, he successfully deposits her in a safe-house, rescues Clemenza from the brothel where Welbeck has left her, then sets about redressing Welbeck’s other wrongs. His tireless philanthropy earns him the love and respect of affluent widow, Ascha Fielding, and their marriage is imminent at the end of the novel. It need only be added that Arthur’s version ofevents does not always tally with the evidence, Arthur himself would appear to benefit most from his own ‘benevolent activities,’ and many readers find his meteoric rise to success suspicious to say the least.[1]

For Philadelphian doctor, Benjamin Rush, writing in 1778, ‘Virtue, Virtue alone […] is the basis of a Republic,’ and every citizen should ‘be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property.’[2] By 1793, the year in which Arthur Mervyn arrives in the city, Rush’s self-sacrificing concept of republican virtue was under attack and on the wane. In Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790’s, Joyce Appleby explains that in ‘the context of classical republican thought, virtue meant civic virtue, the quality that enabled men to rise above private interests in order to act for the good of the whole.’ But by the end of the eighteenth century, argues Appleby, ‘virtue more often referredto a private quality, a man’s capacity to look out for himself and his dependants—almost the opposite of classical virtue.’[3] In Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, Linda Kerber also demonstrates the privatization of republican values, describing the way in which republican values went indoors, unworkable within a competitivemarket economy but supposedly safeguarded by a generation of ‘Republican Mothers,’ called upon to infuse their sons with the same republican values that their husbands seemed so ready to ignore.[4] This paper will argue that Arthur Mervyn strenuously resists the privatization of republican values, exposing the impurity of the domestic sphere and the precariousness of private property. It will suggest that Mervyn prises open the bolted door of the domestic sphere and foists his philanthropic attentions upon reluctant beneficiaries in order to forge for himself a positive self-image and a place in the public eye. And turning to the final chapters of the text, where Arthur abandons his public in order to take on the private role of husband, I shall argue that an early retirement from public life sees Arthur confronting the collapse of the self he has worked so hard to construct.

Following his uninvited entry into Mrs. Wentworth’s home, where he has ‘opened doors without warning, and traversed passages without being noticed,’[5] Arthur concedes that ‘propriety has certainly not been observed,’ (552) though he willfully stands his ground when she orders him out. Denied an audience at the Villars brothel, he snoops around anyway and makes such a nuisance of himself that he ends up being shot in the head by an infuriated inhabitant of the house. When he makes an unexpected call on the Maurice family, the door is once again shut in his face, but Arthur lifts the latch and ventures in regardless, deaf to the distress of Miss Maurice, who orders her servants to turn him out, and ‘burst[s] into tears of rage’ when he just won’t go. (574) On this occasion, he is permitted at last to perform his mission, and returns a forty thousand-dollar legacy to its rightful owner. The rightful owner, however, is ungrateful, avaricious and rude, and Arthur leaves the house dejected, disappointed that where he had hoped to ‘witness the tears of gratitude’ he had found ‘Nothing but sordidness, stupidity, and illiberal suspicion.’ (577) The pattern is often repeated: desperate to get his foot in the door, Arthur forgoes propriety in his quest to win access to private property, but once inside, reality falls short of his extravagant expectations.

Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds has argued convincingly that Arthur Mervyn figures the hero’s ‘quest’for ‘the stasis of home,’ a quest that ends successfully as Arthur falls in love with the wealthy Ascha Fielding and ‘turn[s] his fantasies of property into actual investments through the practice of benevolence.’[6] Certainly, we see Mervyn in search of both a home and a property, craving a sense of belonging as well as of ownership, but I would argue that the text repeatedly undermines the ‘fantasies’ of private property. It questions both the purity of the home—the sacrosanct sphere of early republican discourse, where ‘Republican mothers’inspired their sons with a love of virtue—and the stability of property, held up by many as the more secure and prestigious alternative to the ‘portable wealth’ (280) and paper currency that was flooding the United States in the economically volatile 1790s.[7]

The Man at Home, a series of loose-knit sketches, written and published by Brown in 1788, anticipates Arthur Mervyn in its representation of precarious private properties. Narrated by an elderly gentleman who has endorsed a note for an absconder, and is hiding out in order to avoid the confiscation of his property, this so-called man at home is not at home at all. Reluctant to air his dirty laundry in public, he has retired to the obscurity of the suburbs and is actually writing from a rented room in the home of his washerwoman. A steadfast believer in‘the sacredness of property,’ the narrator has only agreed to endorse an old friend’s note because ‘His bottom is a sound one,’ his property comprised not just of ‘floating planks’ but also of ‘houses and acres,’ too.[8] Such faith in property, however, proves unfounded: the friend fails to repay the debt and the man at home, having spent a life ‘labour[ing] not for riches, but security,’ is now forced to seek asylum in a room that is ‘twelve feet square.’ Even this refuge proves unable to protect, for the final installment of the series sees the man at home on the move again, this time on his way to the city jail, accompanied by the sheriff who has tracked him down and smoked him out.

In Arthur Mervyn, the series of dispossessions that punctuate the narrative likewise work to establish a sense of uncertain and insecure proprietorship. Arthur forfeits his father’s ‘hundred acres’ when Sawny Mervyn remarries, and Sawny in turn is defrauded of his land by a self-serving second wife; Clemenza Lodi loses her inheritance to the scheming Welbeck; Eliza Hadwin loses her family farm to a boorish and morally suspect uncle. In an episode that recalls the fugitive Man at Home, Arthur’s first night in Philadelphia finds him in hiding and in somebody else’s house, holed up in Thetford’s bedroom closet, having been tricked into entering the chamber by a mischievous new acquaintance. Arthur hopes that he may ‘be enabled to profit’ from the conversation he overhears; instead, he succeeds in losing his only pair of shoes. Finally managing to escape from his ‘perilous asylum,’ the gullible country youth is palpably relieved to find himself back on ‘public ground,’ ‘disengaged […] from the perilous precincts of private property.’ (266,270)

During the course of the novel, a dispossessed and itinerant Arthur Mervyn takes shelter under various roofs, precarious asylums that promise shelter but peddle disease, disseminating infection even while administering relief. Taken in by Welbeck, Arthur not only shelters in his benefactor’s mansion, he is taken in by the stranger’s plausible exterior, drawn into his fraudulent schemes and rendered a reluctant accomplice in the morally repugnant murder of Watson. Entering a deserted house in search of Wallace, with the yellow fever raging all around, Arthur inhales the ‘poisonous and subtle fluid’ of the plague, (360) is knocked unconscious by a plunderer’s blow to his head, and narrowly escapes being buried alive by a pair of over-zealous corpse collectors. Interestingly, Arthur’s decision to shelter in this house overnight stems less from a desire to protect himself and more from a decision to protect the empty property, for a neighbour informs him that:

This house has no one to defend it. It was purchased and furnished by the last possessor, but the whole family, including mistress, children and servants, were cut off in a single week. Perhaps no one in America can claim the property. Meanwhile plunderers are numerous and active. […] To night, nothing can be done towards rendering it secure, but staying in it. Art thou willing to remain here till the morrow? (368)

Ever ready to defend the helpless, even when the victim is made of bricks and mortar, the gallant Arthur rises to the challenge and decides to stay. The house that provides him with ‘a roof over [his] head’ (370) but has already contaminated him with the yellow fever, thus turns out to be perilous in two senses: it is both dangerous and itself endangered, a deadly receptacle that simultaneously falls ‘prey’ to unscrupulous intruders. With houses like this to contend with, there is little wonder that Arthur feels uneasy when indoors and more secure when on the streets. A restless figure, repeatedly opening windows and pacing the floorboards, Arthur stews in Welbeck’s mansion, agonizing over the probity of his host, until, ‘oppressed’ by ‘the scorching influence of the atmosphere,’ he finally takes refuge outside, in the cooling bath of the courtyard. (295) Whenever there is any thinking to be done, any decisions to be made, Arthur heads for the fields, removing himself from private property and placing himself ‘in the public way.’ (370) In fact, our very first glimpse of Arthur sees him doubled over in the street, a fever-stricken figure who refuses to ‘go into the house’ with Dr. Stevens, determined to remain outdoors, and convinced that he ‘shall breathe with more freedom here than elsewhere.’ (234-5)

Though Arthur is constantly on the move—most at home when he is on the road, striding off down the path of righteousness to rescue those in need—his imagination dwells at length upon the ‘temporary asylum[s]’ (253) that he passes through, figuring them most often as synecdochic ‘roofs:’ when Sawny Mervyn remarries, Arthur wonders ‘at the folly that detained [him] so long under this roof.’ (249-50) Once in the city, he marvels at the miracle that has placed him ‘under this roof’ with Welbeck, (278) but before long can think of no fate worse that ‘that of abiding under the same roof with a wretch spotted with so many crimes.’ (402) While Arthur is afforded relief ‘under this roof,’ (426) Clemenza is received elsewhere by a brothel keeper ‘under an accursed roof.’ (534) Mervyn quite literally seeks asylum beneath a roof when he hides himself above ‘the ceiling of the third story’ of Welbeck’s mansion, in ‘a narrow and darksome nook, formed by the angle of the roof.’ (423) The synecdochic roof does not merely evoke the image of a refuge, a shelter from the elements above; it is a figure of speech that deconstructs the concept of a home with four walls; it dismantles the isolationist ideal of a pure and tightly sealed domestic sphere, one that could bar intrusion from without. For Arthur is anxious to turn the inside out, to open up the private sphere to public view and public use. ‘Loudly condemned’ as a child, for interfering ‘publicly’ with his father’s ‘social enjoyments,’ dissuading Sawny from drinking the liquor that ‘changed him into a maniac,’ Arthur’s own experience of ‘domestic retirement[ ]’ has taught him that too much privacy can be dangerous, concealing the ugly truth of dysfunctional families, degenerate morals and drunken fathers. (539-40) Nor is he alone in this desire to throw open the home: discussing the fate of the ruined Clemenza, Dr. Stevens wonders ‘Who will open his house to the fugitive?’ (430) before eagerly throwing open his own doors to the refugee, as indeed he did for Arthur, too. While a stint at the doctor’s cures Arthur of his fever and restores Clemenza’s blighted reputation, Stevens’ open-house policy also nourishes his own spiritual well being, making for a healthy home life, a happy marriage, and a clear conscience.

Opening one’s home to the public is not a policy that all are advised to adopt, however. Mrs. Wentworth refuses shelter to Clemenza lest she damage her own reputation, and until Ascha Fielding takes in Eliza towards the end of Part II, it would seem that only men have the prerogative to transform a private home into a public house, to play the part of the benevolent citizen. Even when Ascha does decide to shelter Eliza she does so not in the role of dutiful citizen, but—most emphatically—in the strictly domestic capacity of a surrogate-sister: ‘I will not be a nominal sister,’ she insists. ‘I will not be a sister by halves. All the right of that relation will I have, or none.’ (600) The open house assumes a darker aspect still where the dysfunctional Villars family is concerned: this rural home sees the prostitution of three sisters by their mother, a grotesque parody of the Republican Mother, who believes that opening for business all hours of day and night is the only way in which she can ensure the survival of her family and ‘secure to herself and her daughters the benefits of independence.’ (429) In the defensive, anxious atmosphere of 1790s America, where politicians were obsessed with maintaining both national purity and independence, determined to resist the prostitution of American principles to debauched European powers, the image of the flourishing brothel will have seemed especially sinister.

While Benjamin Rush believed that as long as the rising generation received a ‘proper’ education, it would be ‘possible to convert men into republican machines,’[9] Fisher Ames wascharacteristically skeptical, arguing that the idealistic lessons of republicanism were destined to fall upon deaf ears: ‘The republic is a creature of fiction,’ he declared in an essay called ‘The Dangers of American Liberty.’ ‘It is everybody in the fancy, but nobody in the heart.’[10] This certainly appeared to be the case in the summer of 1793, as Philadelphia grappled with the most devastating yellow fever epidemic in American history. With terror taking hold of the populace, the struggle for self-preservation became paramount and the evasion of public responsibility all too evident.

On a national level, what S. S. K. B. Wood sententiously referred to as the ‘Colossian fabric’ of the United States, speedily came undone in the face of the plague.[11] Mathew Carey’s Short Account of the Malignant Fever, which ran to three editions in 1793 alone, recalls how Philadelphian ‘citizens were proscribed in several cities and towns—hunted up like felons in some—debarred admittance and turned back in others.’[12] State and city boundaries that had seemed subsumed by, or at least secondary to, the concept of a United States of America, were now transformed into fractious borders, lines not to be crossed, emblems of a nationdivided by fear. Within the city of Philadelphia itself, the avatars of public responsibility had quickly disappeared to their rural retreats, leaving behind just three ‘Guardians of the poor’ and a city in chaos.[13] The visibly decreasing circles of public duty, reflecting Philadelphia’s shrinking sense of collective responsibility, were mirrored on a local level, too, as manyfamilies immured themselves within the four walls of their homes, ‘and debarred themselves from all communication with the rest of mankind.’ (346) Carey’s Account shudders at the ‘total dissolution of the bonds of society,’[14] while Arthur explains that ‘Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature,’ ‘Wives were deserted by husbands,’ children by their parents. (346) Patriotic ties, community ties, familial ties: nation, city, family: all three tiers of the social fabric began to unravel as yellow fever took hold of Philadelphia. Yet Arthur Mervyn, mocked by neighbours for his expertise with a pair of knitting needles, makes it his business to re-knit the beleaguered city and rekindle a sense of collective responsibility.

As Part I progresses, and Arthur’s autobiographical yarn expands, so too does his sense of responsibility, encompassing the ever increasing circles of mother, friends, fellow Philadelphians, and ultimately the foreigner and stranger, Clemenza Lodi. As a child, Arthur’s ‘duty to [his] mother’ (542) leads him to play the role of his father’s ‘monitor;’ once in Philadelphia, his sense of duty towards Welbeck prevents him from leaving town before apprising his patron of Thetford’s treachery. Soon after, concerned for the nephew of his latest benefactor, Mervyn returns to the city in search of the youth, where, like a well-oiled republican machine, he reels off pat the republican concept of civic virtue, concluding that ‘life is a trivial sacrifice in the cause of duty.’ (379) Faced with the terrors of the yellow fever and the social turmoil of Philadelphia, Arthur now decides to offer his services as the governor of the infamous Bush Hill Hospital, reasoning that, ‘A dispassionate and honest zeal in the cause of duty and humanity may be of eminent utility. Am I not endowed with this zeal?’ (389) As public officers flee the town and the ‘province of duty’ (401) has all but shrunk to nothing in the struggle to save oneself, Arthur reanimates William Penn’s founding image of Philadelphia as a philanthropic City of Brotherly Love. Hearing stifled sobs from within a locked room, the earnest youth demands admittance, declaring the sufferer, ‘a brother in calamity, whom it was my duty to succour and cherish to the utmost of my power.’ (398)

Yet when the door does finally open, the scene that follows makes a mockery of Arthur’s good intentions, revealing none other than a furious Welbeck, the swindler and seducer who will soon leave Arthur for dead in the same house, and can’t quite believe that his protégé has managed to track him down. ‘Is there no means of evading your pursuit?’ (404), he demands, and no wonder that he’s eager to avoid Arthur’s fraternal attentions: less of a private detective and more of a public nuisance, Arthur is plagued by obstacles and beset by quixotic blunders as he repeatedly misreads situations, mis-handles rescues, and leaves a trail of devastation in his wake. Arriving at Welbeck’s mansion just in time to bury the murdered corpse of Watson, barging into the brothel to rescue Clemenza only to witness the death of her baby, turning up instead of a long awaited fiancé at the Hadwin’s farmhouse andprecipitating the death of the lovelorn Susan, Arthur is described by Patrick Brancaccio as a ‘meddlesome, self-righteous bungler who comes close to destroying himself and everyone in his path.’[15] Re-enacting time and again his own sudden arrival on the Philadelphia scene, his overnight metamorphosis from ‘a rustic lad into a fine gentleman,’(437) Brown’s benevolent upstart specializes in sudden arrivals and vanishing acts,[16] ‘starting up before’ Watson’s widow ‘as if from the pores of the ground,’ and leaving her ‘in a swoon upon the floor.’ (570-1) Welbeck proves extremely perceptive when he comments upon his protégé’s ‘untimely destiny.’ (406) Arthur’s arrivals are as ‘untimely’ as his own republican principles, and as they accumulate, they appear as comical as they are catastrophic, burlesquing the benevolent ideal which underpinned republican ideology, and was supposed to cement a socially, racially and geographically disparate Union.

The bungled benevolence of this New World Arthurian hero may be amusing to readers, but Arthur Mervyn takes himself very seriously indeed, and if Part I attests to Arthur’s widening sense of public responsibility, Part II follows his quest to win a wider public for his tale. At first, Arthur relates events—and with great reluctance—just to Stevens and his wife, huddled round the fireplace in their home. Fearing for his lodger’s reputation, though, Stevens reflects at the start of Part II that ‘The story which he told to me he must tell to the world;’ (457) the doctor need fear nothing on this score: before long, Mervyn is telling his tale in parlours and drawing rooms across Pennsylvania. He assures an up-state lawyer that ‘I am anxious to publish the truth,’ (583) and true to his word relates that, ‘before the end of my second interview’ with Fanny Maurice and Mrs. Watson, these women were ‘mistresses of every momentous incident of my life, and of the whole chain of my feelings and opinions, in relation to every subject.’ (584) As the garrulous Mervyn admits, ‘Any one who could listen found me willing to talk.’ (590) Replacing Dr. Stevens as narrator, Arthur moves from experienced raconteur to amateur author, putting the finishing touches to his own, emphatically public, history, a ‘written narrative’ that is ready for publication, designed to be read by ‘those who have no previous knowledge’ of the characters involved. (604) Arthur’s acts of benevolence may have landed him his own private property, courtesy of Ascha Fielding, but more crucially still for Arthur’s self-image, they have also earned him a coveted place in the public eye and amass market for the tale he loves to tell.

Read against the backdrop of 1790s Philadelphia, a city bewitched by the ‘arts of gain’[17] but plagued by ‘twisted financial dealings,’[18] Arthur’s determination to play the public-spirited citizen invests him with a puzzling ‘singularity’ that turns out to be a popular topic of discussion in the text. According to Mrs. Wentworth, he possesses a ‘most singular deportment,’ Miss Villars is likewise bewildered by his ‘most singular conduct,’ and even his future wife declares that his ‘language is so singular’ it defies comprehension. Arthur himself remarks that ‘The constitution of my mind is doubtless singular and perverse.’ (555; 519; 527; 297) The pointed repetition of the word ‘singular’ is significant: not only does it draw attention to the unusualness of Arthur’s old-fashioned republican ideals, it connects Arthur’s single-minded benevolence with his burgeoning sense of identity, subtly pinpointing a process of individuation that culminates in chapter sixteen of Part II, with the introduction of Arthur himself as narrator and the start of a narrative told in the first person singular.

For somebody who claims that ‘the road of [his] duty was too plain to be mistaken,’ (535) Arthur seems to take a lot of wrong turns, repeatedly finding himself in awkward corners and under suspicion, beset by diversions and all too easily side-tracked, but nevertheless, in Arthur’s mind, the straight and narrow road of public service form the basis of his self-construction. His perception of his own inviolable ‘bosom,’ a self-reliant ‘centre not to be shaken or removed,’ (512) is founded upon his sense of collective responsibility, and as Arthur’s ‘benevolent activity’ picks up pace in Part II, he grows in confidence and composure, climbing out of his shell and coming into his own. Impressed by the self-determined and single-minded Arthur that emerges in Part II, it is easy for readers to forget the impressionable and disorientated Arthur of Part I, the gullible runaway who goes in search of a surrogate father and eagerly adopts the clothes and deportment that Welbeck desires, imagining life as the stranger’s son-in-law and even trailing him into the bowels of the house to bury a still-warm corpse, following ‘in his foot-steps […] because it was agreeable to him and because I knew not whither else to direct my steps.’ (332) As an adolescent Arthur Mervyn self-consciously strives to outgrow his ‘childlike immaturity,’ and to define both himself and his place in the ‘busy haunts of men,’ (493-4) his reasons for becoming a doctor display most clearly his association of public-service with self-construction, of public-image with self-worth:

‘I now set about carrying my plan of life into effect. I began with ardent zeal and unwearied diligence the career of medical study. […] My mind gladly expanded itself, as it were, for the reception of new ideas. My curiosity grew more eager, in proportion as it was supplied with food, and every day added strength to the conviction that I was no insignificant and worthless being; that I was destined to be something in this scene of existence, and might sometime lay claim to the gratitude and homage of my fellow-men.’ (589)

For Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James, the purchase of a property is what makes a man more than a ‘cipher;’ he avers that a man who has ‘become a freeholder […] is now an American,’ and ‘for the first time in his life, counts for something.’[19] For Arthur Mervyn, however, dispossessed of his patrimonial property and unenamoured with the plough, it is civic service and the stamp of public approval that authenticate his sense of self, investing him with significance and validating his worth.

It is Arthur’s disinterested commitment to Eliza Hadwin’s welfare which leads an astonished Ascha Fielding to exclaim that ‘your character, without doubt, is all your own.’ (599) Ruling out marriage with his ‘dear country girl,’ (590) Arthur is self-consciously renouncing obscurity and the private, ‘conjugal pleasures’ of a life ‘in the woods,’ and is choosing instead a life in the public eye, arguing for ‘the propriety of my engaging in the cares of the world, before I sit down in retirement and ease.’ (498, 497) But this turns out to be another ‘propriety’ that Arthur fails to observe, for a premature retirement from the cares of the world is precisely what he chooses when he falls in love with Ascha Fielding, not only his future wife, but also his surrogate ‘mamma’. One by one, Arthur’s outside interests disappear from sight. Clemenza enters the Stevens household and is not so much as mentioned again, while the doting Eliza is asked to ‘withdraw’ from Arthur’s presence, dismissed from the scene and from the narrative with a decisive ‘farewel.’ (604) The medical vocation which was to secure Mervyn the ‘dignity’ of ‘popular opinion,’ while enabling him to lighten ‘the distresses of [his] neighbours,’ is quietly abandoned, and Arthur’s decision to emigrate anticipates his retirement from America itself. (431) Yet settling down with a wife proves to be the most unsettling of experiences, and in the final chapters of the text, as Arthur turns away from public service and towards the private affairs of his heart, his narrative betrays an unprecedented anxiety.

When Arthur carries the cares of the world upon his shoulders, he sees ‘nothing in the world before [him] but sunshine and prosperity;’ (512) when his only care is for himself, he begins to show signs of a troubled and fractured identity. Gone are the brisk and purposeful walks along the road of duty, to the homes of Hadwin, Curling and Villars; instead he sleepwalks ‘without design’ through the city streets, (628) and roams aimlessly and feverishly through a savage landscape:

I left this spot and wandered upward through embarrassed and obscure paths, starting forward or checking my pace, according as my wayward meditations governed me. Shall I describe my thoughts?—Impossible! It was certainly a temporary loss of reason; nothing less than madness could lead me into such devious tracts, drag me down to so hopeless, helpless, panickful a depth, and drag me down so suddenly; lay waste, as at a signal, all my flourishing structures, and reduce them in a moment to a scene of confusion and horror. …

I rent a passage through the thicket, and struggled upward till I reached the edge of a considerable precipice; I laid me down at my length upon the rock, whose cold and hard surface I pressed with my bared and throbbing breast. I leaned over the edge; fixed my eyes upon the water and wept—plentifully; but why?

May this be my heart’s last beat, if I can tell why. (633)

Distinctions between topographical and psychological landscapes dissolve as Mervyn loses both his way and his mind in the wilderness of rural Pennsylvania. In this climactic scene, Arthur has exchanged his place in the public eye for ‘obscure paths’ and ‘devious tracts;’ his ‘steadfast’ purposes (512) have been supplanted by ‘wayward meditations;’ dragged down to ‘so hopeless, helpless, panickful a depth,’ he can only watch in dismay as the ‘flourishing structures’ of his promising career in philanthropy are pulled down before his eyes. Arthur had ‘struggled upward’ from poverty and rural obscurity to earn himself esteem and reputation in the public eye; he had reached the pinnacle of personal fulfilment and public approbation, but as is so often the case in American fiction of this era, the pinnacle is also a precipice. On the brink of proposing to Ascha Fielding, Arthur also teeters on the edge of self-possession and self-dissolution; leaning ‘over the edge’ of the precipice he is reassured by the ‘cold and hard surface’ of the stone but is simultaneously transfixed by the flowing water far below. Even as he cleaves to the rock-solid reality of the age-old stone, Arthur sees his tears engulfed by water: holding fast to a physical certainty only serves to emphasise his own fragility and the frightening uncertainty of his future. In a violent and macabre nightmare, the somnambulistic Arthur experiences once again the shattering of his increasingly brittle self-image. In reality, the lovesick Arthur knocks on Ascha’s door in the dead of night, receives no reply, and sleepwalks back to Stevens’ house. In his dream, however, Arthur enters into Ascha’s house only to be confronted by her former husband and fatally injured by a knife-wound to the heart. Going indoors turns out to be a deadly mistake, for Ascha’s home is where the heart is stabbed, and Arthur discovers that his ‘bosom’ is no longer the unshakeable centre he once believed it to be.

The ‘temporary loss of reason’ which Arthur experiences before proposing marriage to Ascha is followed by a more thorough-going loss of independent identity once she has agreed to the union. Arthur admits that he is ‘wax in her hand,’ and has ‘scarcely a separate or independent existence’ from his ‘mamma,’(620) always assuming the ‘form’ that she desires. Union with Ascha signals both a loss of independence and a loss of certainty for Arthur, who suddenly finds himself beset with ‘unworthy terrors’ and ‘ominous misgiving[s].’ (636) While an earlier Arthur could place unbounded confidence in himself and his virtue, the Mervyn who narrates the closing chapters knows ‘not where to place confidence.’ (636) During the course of the narrative, the reader’s faith in Arthur Mervyn is repeatedly undermined as contradictions and occlusions in his story emerge; even Dr Stevens has moments of wavering faith in his protégé, but when Arthur Mervyn loses faith in Arthur Mervyn, both narrator and his narrative fall apart.

Envisaging his marital ‘household’ in the closing paragraphs of the book, Arthur explains that ‘Fidelity and skill and pure morals, should be sought out, and enticed, by generous recompenses, into our domestic service.’ (637) Nowhere do we see more clearly histransformation from public benefactor to private homeowner. Arthur’s outward-looking ideals of ‘civic virtue’ have been exchanged for the individualistic ideals of furthering one’s own ‘private interests,’[20] and he is left to wax lyrical on the importance of hiring honest household staff. As I have suggested, however, crossing the boundary from public servant to private master proves a dangerous undertaking for Arthur Mervyn. Private property threatens to be just as perilous as it was on that first fateful night in the city, and going home can dislocate one’s self.

University College, London

Notes

[1] See Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 240, for an eloquent—and humorous—summation of contradictory reader responses to Arthur Mervyn.

[2] ‘Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic’, in Essays, Literary, Moral, and Philosophical (Philadelphia: Thomas and Samuel F. Bradford, 1798), 10-11.

[3] Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790’s (New York and London: New York University Press, 1984), 14-15.

[4] See Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 228-231; 265-288, for Kerber’s discussion of the ‘Republican Mother.’ See also Jan Lewis, ‘The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic’, William and Mary Quarterly, 44:4 (October, 1987), 689-721.

[5] Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; Or Memoirs of the Year 1793, in Three Gothic Novels (New York: Library of America, 1998), 551. Hereafter referred to in parentheses in the text.

[6] Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, ‘Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown’s Economics of Virtue’, Studies in the Humanities, 18:2 (1991), 168; 170.

[7] See Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 76-79, for an analysis of the economic problems faced by many Americans at this time.

[8] Charles Brockden Brown, The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. by Harry R. Warfel (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1943), 95; 29.

[9] Rush, 14.

[10] ‘The Dangers of American Liberty’, American Political writing During the Founding Era, ed. by Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, 2 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983), II, 1313.

[11] Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood, Dorval; Or, The Speculator (Portsmouth: Ledger Press, 1801), 16.

[12] Mathew Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1794; 4^th edn), 58.

[13] Carey, 20.

[14] Carey, 23.

[15] Patrick Brancaccio, ‘Studied Ambiguities: Arthur Mervyn and the Problem of the Unreliable Narrator,’ American Literature, 42 (March 1970), 22.

[16] As for Arthur’s vanishing acts, they are just as ill-timed: leaving home in the middle of the night, he leaves the way clear for his step-mother to fleece his father of the family farm; he deserts the Hadwins without warning in the middle of the fever epidemic, and disappears from the Stevens’ house at precisely the time when he is most required to prove his innocence. Having appeared before Widow Watson, he vanishes ‘with the same celerity’ (AM, 571), and embodies a frightening mobility, a now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t kind of mentality that typified the volatility of the 1790s.

[17] Elihu Hubbard Smith, quoted in Edwin G. Burrows & Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York to 1898 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 377.

[18] Tompkins, 73.

[19] J. Hector St John De Crevecoeur, Letters From an American Farmer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 58.

[20] Appleby, 14.

Issue 2, Autumn 2001 contents

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 10, Spring 2007: Contents

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 10, Spring 2007

Contents

Issue 11, Autumn 2007: Contents

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 11, Autumn 2007

Contents

Issue 12, Spring 2008: Contents

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 12, Spring 2008

Contents

Issue 13, Autumn 2008: Contents

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 13, Autumn 2008

Contents

Issue 14, Spring 2009: Contents

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 14, Spring 2009

Contents

Issue 15, Autumn 2009: Contents

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 15, Autumn 2009

Contents

Issue 2, Autumn 2001 article 3

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 2, Autumn 2001

Jail-no-Bail Comes of Age: the Freedom Rides and the Use of Prison as a Platform for Racial Protest

I

II

III

University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Notes

Issue 2, Autumn 2001 article 2

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 2, Autumn 2001

Parody, Sincerity and the Martial Ideal in the Literary Impressionism of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage

University of Nottingham

Notes

Issue 2, Autumn 2001 article 1

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 2, Autumn 2001

Private Properties, Public Nuisance: Arthur Mervyn and The Rise and Fall of a Republican Machine

University College, London

Notes

Issue 2, Autumn 2001 contents

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 2, Autumn 2001

Contents

Dis/Trusting the Institution(s) of Literature

Postgraduate Opportunities with History Lab

CFP: HOTCUS Winter Symposium, 2025: The United States and World War II: Impacts and Legacies at Home and Abroad. University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham – February 21, 2025