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Disabling fictions: race, history, and ideology in Crane's "The Monster." (Stephen Crane)(Fictions of Reform)

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From: Studies in American Fiction
Date: 19980322
Author:McMurray, Price

Stephen Crane's novella "The Monster" portrays the African American struggle. The story tells of a black man whose face is destroyed in a laboratory fire and who becomes a social outcast, but the central debate in the book examines black extinction and white philanthropy. The 1892 lynching of Robert Lewis in Port Jervis, New York, Crane's home town, and the 1896 court case of Plessy v. Ferguson provided a social context for the novella.

The critical history of Stephen Crane's story of a black man who becomes a social outcast after his face is destroyed in a laboratory fire is divided ...

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