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How It Feels to Be without a Face: Race and the Reorientation of Sympathy in the 1890s

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From: Novel
Date: 20060401
Author:Hiro, Molly

What does it feel like to lack a face? Halfway through Stephen Crane's "The Monster," the town barber, Reifsnyder, muses over this question, contemplating the fate of the story's central figure. Crane's 1898 story first narrates a terrible accident in which a black servant, Henry Johnson, is badl y burned and disfigured while saving his employer's young son from their burning house, and then dramatizes the effect the now-monstrous Henry has on the small town he inhabits. The barbershop scene in which Reifsnyder tries to imagine Henry's interior state, like many of the story's scenes, centers ...

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