MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

According to critics such as Elaine Marshall, Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1899) was “imaginatively” inspired by the lynching of Robert Lewis, an African American accused of raping a white woman in Port Jarvis in 1891 (Marshall 206). This case illustrates what anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. claims was the widespread rationalization of lynching on the basis of character assassinations of the black “suspects” and on the white community’s feelings about these suspects, rather than on the often scanty evidence. It was the white community’s feelings that created the pernicious social atmosphere for a lynching. While there is little resemblance between the actual lynching of Robert Lewis and the discrimination of Henry Johnson’s in Crane’s “The Monster,” the later case is similarly the result of the white community’s unfounded feelings and perceptions of Henry as a threat. I agree with critics who see this story as imaginatively referencing a lynching. Moreover I argue that despite it’s own complicity in racist rhetoric, Crane’s story provides an incisive case study about the workings of racism, giving a behind the scenes exposé of how personal racism becomes public racist acts. I argue that the text’s critique of racism rests largely on its manipulation of affective atmosphere, by establishing a continuum between the “comically” awkward atmospheres of Minstrelsy with the unbearable awkwardness of racially prejudiced conversations.