Realism’s Racial Gaze and Stephen Crane’s The Monster: A Lacanian Reading

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Published: May 1, 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.16920
Keywords:
crane lacan psychoanalysis the monster realism
Sheldon George
Simmons College, Boston
Abstract
The article presents Stephen Crane’s The Monster as a realist text that conveys the inability of American society in the 1890s to define itself through use of stereotyped knowledge of racial others. It reads the character Henry Johnson, a black man whose face is “burned away” in a house-fire, leaving behind only a single winking eye, as a literary embodiment of the all-seeing Lacanian gaze that, through the returned look of the racial other, confronts realist America with its own lack. Henry destabilises fantasies of an insular white identity through his performative mimicry of white dress and mannerism. He allows the text to present race as grounded only in performance and a discourse of white superiority. The Monster refutes this discourse, suggesting it is sanction for a brutal monstrosity at the heart of America, one that the returned gaze of the scrutinising racial other now witnesses through the spectacle of America’s racist and imperialistic practices.
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Author Biography
Sheldon George, Simmons College, Boston

Sheldon George is Associate Professor of English at Simmons College in Boston Massachusetts. His article on Stephen Crane emerges out of courses he teaches on American literature and psychoanalytic theory. He has written a number of articles that employ psychoanalysis in investigations of race, including “Trauma and the Conservation of African-American Racial Identity” (Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society) and “Approaching the Thing of Slavery: A Lacanian Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved” (African American Review).

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