"The Red Badge of Courage"

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane was a story about a man, Henry Fleming, who was a soldier during the Civil War who was hit in the head by a fellow soldier during battle who goes on to lie about his injury. He is thought of as a hero for having been hurt during battle.

Even thought there was a very short excerpt from the whole work in our literature book, I gathered that Crane’s philosophy is different from that of Emerson or Thoreau. The initial fact that brought me to this conclusion is the fact that our literature books listed this sort part of the book and Stephen Crane as a Naturalist instead of a Transcendentalist like Thoreau or Emerson. Another reason why I think that Crane’s writing and philosophy differs from Emerson and Thoreau is because in the short part that I read, it talked mainly about Fleming’s feelings instead of the natural surroundings. On the subject of Fleming’s feelings, they are described in a very animalistic sense; Crane even compares Fleming’s feelings to that of the “acute exacerbation of a pestered animal” (Crane 493). This approach to analyzing the feelings of Fleming exemplifies that is a Naturalist because Naturalists were influenced by Charles Darwin’s writing and how he said that people are just highly evolved mammals and nothing else (Sommers 1). Naturalists also believe that humans had no souls because since everyone thought that animals did not have souls and he Darwin believed people were just a high ordered mammal, we also had no soul (Sommers 1). This idea, to me, is very contradictory to the philosophies of Emerson because his major work, Self-Reliance is about having the inner strength and having one’s soul in tune nature. Another way to put the goal in self reliance is to determine what is “natural in the world as well as what is inspirational within the human soul” (Brugman 1). The main behind the Transcendentalists is that the only way to achieve “true knowledge” is to go commune with nature and to look within one’s soul (Quinn 1).

Brugman, Patricia. "Nature in 'Self-Reliance'." McClinton-Temple, Jennifer ed. Encyclopedia of
Themes in Literature. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2011. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

Sommers, Joseph Michael. "naturalism." In Maunder, Andrew.Facts On File Companion to the British Short Story. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.


Quinn, Edward. "Transcendentalism." A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Second Edition. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2006.Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.