Henry Fleming joins the Union army with visions of glory and honor. Once he joins the 304^th regiment Henry becomes concerned with his courage and wonders if he will run once he sees battle. When Henry does see combat he stands his ground during the first wave of battle but then becomes overwhelmed and runs when the second attacks. Henry wonders through the woods trying to convince himself that he did the right thing. Eventually he joins a group of wounded soldiers. His friend, Jim Conklin, was among them and eventually Jim and another tattered man, whom Henry meets, die of their wounds. Soon Henry wonders near the battlefield again and is wounded by a retreating soldier. Henry is taken back to his regiment and is taken care of by his friend Wilson. The next day Henry fights with amazing energy and courage. During the next battle his regiment is successful in taking the enemy’s position. The novel ends with Henry feeling ashamed of his past actions, but assured that he has overcome his fears and has a solid since of courage and manhood.

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage over glorifies the experience of war. Crane himself had not yet seen a battle when he wrote this book. Crane reportedly confessed to Hamilin Garland that "his knowledge of Battle had been gained on the football field, ‘the psychology is the same. The opposite team is an enemy tribe!’" Although most veterans would agree that battle is not like football at all. The Red Badge of Courage does not even contain any historical background of the Civil War. "Crane Divorces the Civil War from its historical context by conspicuously avoiding the political, military, and geographical coordinates…The novel reduces both history and the historical novel to what its main character describes as ‘crimson blotches on the page of the past.’" (Kaplan 78) Crane’s main character, who is in the middle of the war, cannot even let go of his fanciful ideas about war. "Henry Fleming’s inner aspirations are composed of ideas in the popular books he reads and clichés that circulated around him. Henry imagines himself most often as a medieval knight, who in his late-nineteenth-century manifestation combines violent adventure with primitive virility." (Kaplan 87) There is not even a true enemy. Indeed, the novel represents more verbal expressions of hostility and physical acts of violence between members of the Union army than against enemy troops, who remain invisible on the battlefield. We see an officer beating a frightened recruit, for example; a fellow soldier wounds Henry; and he engages in hand-to-hand combat only with the corpse of the Union color bearer who refuses to loosen his grip on the flag. "In the Red Badge of Courage, Crane Renders the enemy invisible on the battlefield of the Civil War and by making the soldier’s identity more contingent on an audience than on conflict with the foe." (Kaplan 104) Crane uses his artistic license to recreate a war to suit his needs and wants for The Red Badge of Courage. He created an unrealistic war full of glory and honor to produce this novel.

"Crane sought to revive those aristocratic and chivalric values repressed by the routinization of industrial life...toward the celebration of youth, combativeness, and muscularity." (Kaplan 81) Crane viewed the battlefield of the Civil War as a testing ground for the virility and courage of the individual soldier, independent of any broader national aim. (Kaplan 80) In reality war is fought "in the trenches" so-to-speak. War is not courageous and adventurous, but vile and unpleasant for all involved. Crane over glorifies the army as a whole; he compares it to a machine with mesmerizing power. Henry finds himself driven back to the battle to observe "the immense and terrible machine," for "its complexities and powers, its grim processes, fascinated him. He must go close and see it produce corpses." (Crane 93) "Although Henry resents the machinery of war and the powerlessness it entails and envisions himself as a primitive warrior to escape from this machine, his atavistic fantasies, rather than offering him an escape, entrench him more solidly in the machinery of the army." (Kaplan 90)

Henry, a soldier, enters into the army with visions of glory and honor. Henry’s fantasies have been shaped by his knowledge of fairy tales and mythology, and he is thus misled about what war will actually be like. "Before he enlisted he had not thought that he might be fearful, and as he imagined it, war carried no threats to life or other significant dangers." (Gibson 21) He also wants the glory that he associates with war. "In seeing his circumstance as that of the hero of myth and fairytale, Henry half-consciously believes that he is about to embark upon an adventure during which he will encounter hostile forces that he, by strength of will and arm, will overcome and hence be transformed into a hero." (Gibson 21) Had Henry never seen battle, he may have this view of war. However, Henry continues to have this view throughout his war experience. "Throughout the narrative Henry draws a comparisons indicating that he thinks of himself as such a hero." (Gibson 22) Henry also keeps referring to himself as a knight throughout the novel. From The Red Badge of Courage: "he has slept and, awakening, found himself a knight." In reality soldiers, once they have been in battle, do not see themselves as chivalric and glorified. This ties in with Henry’s hopes that the battle will thrust him beyond the mundane commercial world and into the realm of primitive impulse. And Crane writes a novel that fulfills these hopes and expectations. He resurrects the image of the medieval warrior and over glorifies war beyond all reality. Of course, I myself have not been in battle. There is always the possibility that Tim O’Brien, a Vietnam War writer, and the news media and movies such as Platoon are the ones who incorrectly portray war, and Stephen Crane, although lacking in any war experience, writes a true description of war.

Battles and Leaders of the Civil War was a very popular book in the 1890’s and was used by Crane as his source for The Red Badge of Courage. Kipling’s The Light that Failed (1891), with its double focus o the bohemian artist in Europe and the imperial battlefields of the orient, exerted a strong influence on American naturalists including Stephen Crane (Kaplan 82). A novel about the Civil war, The Song of the Rappahannock, a book that rewrites The Red Badge of Courage by explicitly claiming the recruits did not act like Crane’s hero. This novel, by Seymour Dodd presents, like Crane’s, presents a Civil War that contains no "civil war" at all but a war that creates internal conflicts. Another novel, written around the same time as The Red Badge of Courage, is Edward Bellamy’s war novel, Looking Backward (1888). Other popular war novels include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and all other books associated with this website.

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. New York: The Modern Library, 1993.

Gibson, Donald B. The Red Badge of Courage Redefining the Hero. Boston: Twayne

Publishers, 1988.

Kaplan, Amy. "The Spectacle of War in Crane’s Revision of History." New Essays on