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3. “Beauty Unmans Me”: Diminished Manhood and the Leisure Class in Norris and Wharton
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edge both to the cowboy and to the reader, ¤rmly establishes the emergence of the Easterner as an interpreter, in the artistic sense.24 The Easterner, in the concluding section, effectively revokes his former detachment. “As a matter of fact,” Cady writes, “the perspective of the Easterner is that of Christianity as interpreted by Tolstoi and no doubt mediated to Crane through Howells” (Works 5: 157). In this section, Crane clearly aligns the Easterner with his own complicity as an artist, as the author too has withheld this important information about Johnnie’s cheating. In his reunion with the cowboy, the Easterner is transformed from the “little silent man from the East” (143) into an aggressive and eloquent speaker. After the Easterner begins to defend the Swede, Crane writes, the cowboy “browbeat the Easterner and reduced him to rage” (170). Crane’s use of “rage,” as in “The Open Boat,” indicates a masculine response to the cowboy’s folly. Such scenes of an individual cursing his fate are common in Crane’s ¤ction, and the effect of each varies considerably . If this moment in “The Blue Hotel” parallels that in “The Open Boat,” it contrasts signi¤cantly with the deleted chapter 12 in Crane’s manuscript for The Red Badge of Courage, in which Henry’s childish exaggeration of his sufferings clearly demonstrates his sel¤sh inability to sympathize with his comrades and a shallow illogic typical of Crane’s more self-deluded characters . Here, however, the Easterner’s outburst reveals a concern for the Swede and a sense of communal responsibility that mitigates any temptation to read this passage ironically and transforms the Easterner from an ineffectual , even comic, character into a more complex, tormented spokesman for Crane’s humanistic values. In this rage, the Easterner articulates his insights into the death of the Swede: “We are all in it! . . . Every sin is the result of a collaboration” (170). The Easterner’s transformation from the meek outsider who responded to the Swede, “I don’t understand you,” to the impassioned orator who berates the simple-minded cowboy illustrates the development of the Easterner as an interpreter, but this development, of course, comes too late to help the Swede. The Easterner believes he has learned from experience, but at what cost? Recurring in these later Western stories is the notion that the West, far from being a primitive antidote to the civilized East, is in fact a plainly arti¤cial construction of Eastern myths and a re®ection of the capitalist expansionism at the heart of American ideology. No longer a mythical landscape of manly conquest, the West has become a vast real estate development . The violent mythos that encouraged and sustained its conquest must 82 / Crane’s Tales of Adventure now give way to encroaching civilization. Trading exaggerated stories of their town’s sordid reputation as a watering hole for outlaws and rowdies, the townspeople at the opening of “Twelve O’Clock” worry about their ability to sell their property to wealthy ¤nanciers. One man says, “‘That don’t do a town no good. Now, how would an eastern capiterlist’—(it was the town’s humor to be always gassing of phantom investors who were likely to come any moment and pay a thousand prices for everything)—‘how would an eastern capiterlist like that? Why, you couldn’t see ’im fer th’ dust on his trail” (Works 5: 171).25 Similarly, “Moonlight on the Snow” opens with a discussion of the dubious notoriety of the grimly named town of “War Post” and the need to improve the town’s image: “But ultimately it became known to War Post that the serene-browed angel of peace was in the vicinity. The angel was full of projects for taking comparatively useless bits of prairie and sawing them up into town lots, and making chaste and beautiful maps of his handiwork which shook the souls of people who had never been in the West. . . . And high in the air was the serene-browed angel of peace, with his endless gabble and his pretty maps” (179). In the interest of appealing to these unnamed and unseen Eastern developers, the town leaders, under the direction of Tom Larpent, a gambler and entrepreneur who “had been educated somewhere” (180), decide to adopt stricter laws to control the unruly cowpunchers and miscreants for whom the town is infamous. Crane writes that “since the main stipulation was virtue, War Post resolved to be virtuous. A great meeting...