《紅色英勇勛章》中的象征

1、學號：紅色英勇勛章中的象征主義課 程 美國小說學 生 鄭智慧指導教師 姜濤 教授年 級 2010級專 業(yè) 英語語言文學學 院 西語學院Symbolism in The Red Badge of CourageHARBIN NORMAL UNIVERSITYCOURSE: American NovelsSTUDENT: ZHENG Zhi-huiTUTOR: JIANG Tao（Professor）GRADE: Grade 2010MAJOR: English Language and LiteratureCOLLEGE: Faculty of Western Languages and Lit

2、eratures May, 2010HARBIN NORMAL UNIVERSITYSymbolism in The Red Badge of Courage ZHENG Zhi-huiAbstract: In The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane used a lot of symbols to foil the terror of the war and the inhuman consequences of the war. At the same time, the symbols also give prominence to the iro

3、ny of heroism. This paper analyzed the image and the color Crane used in The Red Badge of Courage, expecting to present the significance of symbolism in this classic work.Key Words: The Red Badge of Courage; Symbolism; Image; Color1. IntroductionThe protagonist Henry Fleming is a youth with a romant

4、ic hero dream. He joined the army against his mothers will. However, when the battle was just begun, Fleming was scared to run away. Ironically, in this battle, Flemings army won. So he has had sense of shame and he was finding several reasons and excuses for his run away. Then he marched with a tro

5、op of injuries. A tattered man was deeply concerned about Henrys wound, but Fleming didnt know how to say because there was no wound at all. The youth desired a red badge symbolized courage. One day, accidentally, he met a tall soldier, Jim Conklin. And he witnessed the process of his death. After t

6、hat, Fleming confronted with a team of lamasters. When he expected to ask some information of the battle, he was hurt on the head by accident. When Fleming came back to his won troop, he was respected as a hero since his comrades in the arms thought that wound of Fleming was the result of fighting w

7、ith the enemy bravely. The second day, Fleming fought like a beast and he considered himself as a real hero. He thought that he was grown into a real man. Then he came back with his comrades to original camp. It seemed that there existed no battles at all.2. Symbolism in The Red Badge of Courage2.1

8、Introduction of SymbolismSymbolism, a hugely influential international movement integral to the development of modernism, began in the 1870s among a group of Parisian poets inspired by the earlier poet Charles Baudelaire and led by Stephane Mallarme. However, the remarkable development of symbolism

9、in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century is often attributed to the growth of idealism and to the artists revolt against the desert supremacy of positivistic and materialistic views of life. In other words, symbolism grew up and reached maturity as faith in progress faded, as libera

10、l optimism was struck blow after blow, both by developments in science and by great political events. Whitehead lists five major causes of the undermining of the “humanitarian ideal” fostered by eighteenth-century humanitarianism and the religious sense of the kinship of men: Humes criticism of the

11、doctrine of the soul; the breakdown of unmitigated competitive individualism as a practical working system; the scientific doctrine of the elimination of the unfit as the engine of progress; Galtonian and Mendelian doctrines of heredity; and the rejection of the Lamarckian doctrine that usage can ra

12、ise the standard of fitness.(Whitehead 43) To these five causes Joseph Wood Krutch, in his The Measure of Man, adds Freudian psychology and Marxist economics.(Krutch 43) It is the growing doubt, distrust and despair that give rise to symbolism, which might have set out to convert the blank, colorles

13、s geography of the scientific world into a moral geography, to wed mind to nature. Man dwells simultaneously in two worlds, an incorporeal world of the spirit and the corporeal world of matter moving in space and time. As men in the Renaissance said, man is the microcosm, partaking of the total cosm

14、os, from the most ethereal to the meanest and lowest. Insofar as man lives in the realm of spirit he is confronted with unchanging essences, eternal images. It is a world of art, of mind, of the ghostly forms known only by a ghost; it is thus in a sense a nonexistent world, a nothingness, as nominal

15、ists have held. To live in such a world may be a kind of deathunless the unchanging paradise of essences is the only true home of man. On the other hand, insofar as man lives in nature, he is immersed in the flux, in chaos, in the wild and elemental, the primitive, the amoral or pagan. This world in

16、 motion is destructive or an abyss, but it is also creative and alive and if it is hostile to the spirit, it is perhaps congenial to the life- and pleasure-affirming animal. Hence, idealists may affirm that spirit is all, materialists that matter is all, but whatever ones philosophy, the world man e

17、ncounters is, as experienced, a sort of embodied contradiction, a radical paradox. It is, and is not ideal; is, and is not corporeal. Instead, it is a world of normal love and pleasure, beneficent and it is also a world of pain and death, hostile, maleficent.Therefore, one finds symbolists refusing

18、to choose one extreme or the other and seeking some symbol of a healthy rapprochement or marriage of the ideal and the real in life. This choice of wholeness is found in an especially well-developed form in the satiric tradition-in the ridicule both of excessive intellectuality and of excessive corp

19、oreality. With its animating notion of proportion and its stress on the right balance of head and heart, satire tends implicitly to oppose the Christian ideal of etherealization as well as the naturalistic reduction of man to a pure corporeality of brute particles jostled and jostling according to i

20、mmutable law. Instead, it speaks for good sense, for a reality-principle, a recognition of the complexity of experience and the difficulty of achieving proportion. It says: “only connect.” This idea of proportion and connecting, uniting the opposed halves of the human personality and the contraries

21、in the world, takes the form, in symbolist literature, of a remarkable search for the symbols of unity of being. In Daniel J. Schneiders opinion, a literary symbol, as it is most frequently encountered, is nothing less than a term or phrase that, by virtue of its existence in a pattern of antithetic

22、al terms, absorbs a meaning larger than its ordinary meaninga meaning whose limits are defined by the whole pattern of terms of which the symbol is a part. The symbol assimilates meaning usually by a process of association or by the sort of negative or positive identifications to which Kenneth Burke

23、 has called attention. Furthermore, the symbol is not infinitely suggestibleonly finitely. Its meaning is limited by the central pattern of oppositions in which it participates and is always qualified by action, characterization and other elements of the work.(Schneider 23) Thus, the breeding of sym

24、bols is both a technique of composition and a technique of cognition: a means of understanding reality. In other words, any system of symbols is capable of presenting a vision of reality itself. Therefore, the symbolist is enabled by his method to comment on life without offering his comment as a fi

25、nal truth. His symbols are offered frankly as fictions in the realization that thought may never correspond to being, that whatever the abstractive intellect imposes upon reality may be falsea mere structure of ideas inadequate in the last analysis to the structure of things. In a word, symbolists t

26、ried to search for a literature that would reflect a deeper experience of existence than did realist or naturalist literature. To some extent, they were responding to limitations imposed by a materialistic reality governed by positivistic science. Their refusal to accept that science completely expl

27、ained reality led to a renewed search for God and for the world hidden by the material world.2.2 Literary Symbols in The Red Badge of Courage2.2.1 ImageIn The Red Badge of Courage, the sun is rarely represented objectively in its function as a light bearer. Generally speaking, when the sun appears o

28、r Crane calls attention to it, he does so for dramatic and symbolic purposes. There are approximately six instances of this.The first appearance of the sun is in the middle of Chapter II. It follows the pre-dawn striking of camp. The soldiers are tense, suspicious, excited and fearful. The inner deb

29、ate of the central figure, Henry Fleming, about his future conduct under fire has left him spiritually troubled and anxious. Therefore, to them all, the awesomeness of the enemy troops across the river is heightened by the fact that it is black night and the“red eyes” of the Confederates are still “

30、peering” threateningly at them. But a striking alteration of mood suddenly appears as a result of the daybreak. The “rushing yellow of the developing day” goes on behind their backs as they march: “When the sunrays at last struck full and mellowingly upon the earth, the youth saw that the landscape

31、was streaked with two long, thin, black columns.”(Kazin 14) The effect of this sunrise on the troops is a mellowing experience in that it reassures the men and raises their spirits. Gloom and tension of pre-dawn darkness give way to laughter, jest and even high jinks. In other words, the troops have

32、 been freed from the red eyes of the night along the opposite hillside. The days light assures the men that they have been singled out to attack from the rear instead of being possibly attacked themselves on the campsite.The second appearance of the sun occurs at the end of Chapter V. After the Nort

33、h has defeated the enemy charge, Henry has time to indulge “his usual machines of reflection,” which lead him to several surprising conclusions. One is that so far from fighting a private war, he has been a mere eddy in a huge current, which can be inferred from the following sentence: “l(fā)ighter mass

34、es protruding in points from the forestwere suggestive of unnumbered thousands Heretofore he had supposed that all the battle was directly under his nose.”(Kazin 36) Then, we are told that “As he gazed around him the youth felt a flash of astonishment at the blue, pure sky and the sun gleaming on th

35、e fields. It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment.”(Kazin 37) Here, the gleam of the sun is a synonym of indifference, of unconcern with human travail. The sun is grim and aloof, and for the first time, Henry becomes aware of the

36、 important truth that ones role in battle is neither noble nor ignoble, but merely of no importance.Therefore, individual shame is unimportant and cowardice needs redefinition. The sun appearing close to the end of the very next chapter VI is presented indirectly and rather briefly: “the general bea

37、med upon the earth like a sun.”(Kazin 43) Here, its benevolent beams match the generals feelings. He is excited and merry at the realization that his troops have withstood the second enemy charge. Hence, his reactions suggest to Henry the sun in its golden aspect instead of the perspective of irony.

38、However, “the red sun pasted in the sky like a wafer” at the end of Chapter IX is like no other sun in the book. Henry has stood by watching as his champion Jim Conklin danced his strange and horrible dance of death, and in a livid but almost inexpressible rage he gestures defiantly, presumably towa

39、rd the battlefield. The reason why the sun that now shines down seems red to Henry is that it is now the symbol of a celestial partisan, of an agent of mans misery and violent ends. At this moment, Henry no longer regards the sun as an unconcerned spectator to human action or a well-wishing one, but

40、 as a monster gorged on human flesh and blood.As Chapter XVII closes, Crane reintroduces the aloof, devilish sun of Chapter V. Now, as then, Henry finds the sermon in colors: “A cloud of dark smoke, as from smoldering ruins, went up toward the sun now bright and gay in the blue, enameled sky.”(Kazin

41、 96) Here, Crane seems content to leave the symbolic function of the sun implicit. The funereal signal of mortal anguish calls suppliantly to an orb gaudily bright in her tranquil background of blue, which is a symbol of frivolous unconcern even more impressive than in its similar appearance earlier

42、.In the final words of the novel, we are told that “Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.”(Kazin 131) This is the mellowing and comforting sun of Chapter II. The cruel battle is over and Henrys initiation is complete. Now, in his view, death is merely death

43、. With this intimate assurance to strengthen his spirit, he can now turn his thoughts to images of peace and tranquility. In other words, to Henry, every gray cloud indeed does have a golden lining, tiny as it may be.To conclude, in each instance, the color with which Crane invests the sun is relate

44、d to, and thus underscores, the overall mood of the characters on whom it looks down. Besides, these fairly varied suns are spaced almost precisely and thus in turn suggest that they are meant to provide a supplementary interpretation of the stages of the interior action of the story.2.2.2ColorCrane

45、s color plays an important part in his work. The most frequently used colors are red, blue, yellow, white, black, gray, brown, green. In fact, all these colors are imposed from an apparently physical and actually psychological angle.Red in literature is the color of fire, gold, and roses. It is also

46、 the color of blood and sometimes the color of the devil. (Ferber 169) Because it is the color of the sky, blue is traditionally the color of heaven, of hope, of constancy, of purity, of truth, of the ideal. In Christian color-symbolism blue belongs to the Virgin. The Greek word for“blue,” kuaneos m

47、eant “dark” in Homer and the other early poets. It was the color of mourning. Another Latin word, lividus, meant “l(fā)eaden” or “black and blue,” the color of a bruise and also the color of death. (Ferber 3133) Yellow may be a sign of disease as well as age, particularly jaundice. Metaphorically when o

48、ne is jaundiced one is jealous, envious, or bilious. In some countries during the Middle Ages traitors and heretics were made to wear yellow. Paintings of Judas often had him in yellow clothing. (Ferber 244245) In fact, The Red Badge of Courage and The Blue Hotel are companion pieces: studies of fea

49、r and courage and awareness in a naturalistic universe. To define the essence of reality as treacherous in that its fa ade conceals the inner hostility which emerges only when existence is threatened, Crane employs a blue exterior with a fire or simply red within in both works. The blue hotel “screa

50、ming and howling”“some red years”“fell with a yellow crash.” The color is primitive. Red is the most panicky and explosive of colors, the most primitive, as well as the most ambivalent, related equally to rage and love, battle and fire, joy and destruction. Anyway, red embodies a mind at stretch. To

51、 suggest that death is an inevitable consequence of this fire within, actually differing from life only as colors on the spectrum differ in degree not in kind, yellow is used to symbolize death in both.To represent miseducation, particularly in regard to Nature, green and brown have identical juncti

52、ons in both. To symbolize fear, white is used in both, though white in the novel is also linked with stoic calm or loveall three of which associations possess commonality in being opposites to the red of hostility and anger. Only black shows change: in the novel it is the equivalent of red, while in

53、 the story it is the oblivion of death, gray in the novel assuming approximately this significance.According to the tenth chapter of book 1 of Rabelaiss Gargantua, called “Concerning the significance of the colors white and blue,” white stands for joy, solace and gladness, because its opposite, blac

54、k, stands for grief, and because white dazzles the sight as exceeding joy dazzles the heart. Besides, Plato claimed that in picturing the gods white is most appropriate color. However, in Chapter 42 of Melvilles Moby Dick, Ishmael tells us “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all thing appa

55、lled me,” thus bring out the buried meaning of “appalled” as “made pale.” Then, he goes on to mention ghastlier associations, as in the polar bear, the white shark, albino men, the pallor of death, or leprosy, thus speculating that “by its indefiniteness white shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe” or it is “the visible absence of color”“a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.” In The Open Boat, the waves and the stars are all white, pale, suggesting indifference and coldness. Form the white waves the correspondent understands the fact