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4 Newell and Crane Keeping close to a Personal Honesty of Vision While artists Kemble and loeb were rendering illustrations for realist narratives treating “race,” artist Peter newell rendered surreal, fantasy imagery for children’s literature and innovative fictions. newell’s work appeared in Harper ’s, Scribner’s, and the Saturday Evening Post, and he often wrote poetry to accompany his imagery. newell depicted “monsters” and beasts, anthropomorphic figures of bedtime stories, or multiple-panel cartoons that often supplied humor on the back pages of monthly numbers. newell’s The Topsys and Turvys broke ground in 1894 with work one could view right-side up or upside down. The Hole Book (1908) featured a hole in the middle of its pages, as if, in flipping through the book, one followed a speeding bullet along its path. The Slant Book (1910) assumed an appropriate, trapezoidal form, as the trajectory of the narrative followed a baby carriage down a steep hill. it is unsurprising , then, that newell illustrated a 1901 edition of lewis carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), as a propitious combination of innovative illustrator and classic, fantasy fiction. it is surprising, though, that newell’s fantasy surrealism would accompany the work of stephen crane, known for the verisimilitude of unflinching, naturalist narratives.1 crane’s novella The Monster first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in august 1898, accompanied by ample, if incongruous, imagery from newell. twenty-four chapters of crane’s narrative detail the life of an african american servant, whom a house fire renders scarified and “faceless ,” and a white boy, whom the servant saves from that fire. twelve illustrations from newell adhere to crane’s story line but never directly depict the servant’s scarified face. crane’s story follows the town doctor, who is the servant ’s employer and the rescued boy’s father, as the town ostracizes the doctor for his compassion for the faceless “freak.” newell’s illustrations follow suit but avoid depicting the doctor’s dejected face as much as they evade depict- newell and crane 109 ing the servant’s absent, burned-away face. a story about people’s efforts to look away from a disfigured face appeared with images that also encouraged looking away. readers originally received verbal as well as visual prompts on what to picture and not to picture in engaging with crane’s work. subsequent readers not only look away from crane’s character but also disregard newell’s art. after The Monster and Other Stories (1899), paperbacks and anthologies omit newell’s illustrations.2 They erase the novella’s original, visual dimension; keep modern audiences from re-creating the original audience ’s experience with verbal and visual art; and skew critical debates in crane’s favor, away from newell’s contributions. Realism, Writing, Disfiguration , from michael Fried, compares the representational realism of crane and the painter Thomas eakins, though lesser-known artists, newell among them, literally shared the page with crane.3 disability studies, especially fromrosemary Garland Thomson and susan schweik, read the faceless servant’s “race” as coincident with, even compounded by, the social construction of his disability , though the era’s press would also have depicted his complexion and physical state as he “performed” his disability in the story and within visual art’s iconography.4 more recent studies seek the historical original for crane’s character—a lynching victim, a disfigured civil servant from crane’s hometown , or even the elephant man—though they tend to neglect crane’s venue in bringing such figures to light.5 since critics seldom couple The Monster’s scarification and ostracism with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’s whimsy and invention, newell, the illustrator assigned to both works, deserves his place in these critical histories of crane’s work. The combination—more accurately , the disjunction—of newell and crane is too striking to continue to be ignored.6 This chapter works to recuperate newell’s original place in critical interpretations of The Monster. crane, for his part, knew what visual artists like newell could accomplish on magazines pages. He knew readers were likely to encounter The Monster, his literary meditation on the act of looking, in the context of visual illustrations, which, in themselves, encouraged a kind of vision . crane had suffered cruelly, he felt, at the hands of editors, who frequently failed to appreciate writers’ and illustrators’ arts alike. He offered The Monster , first to McClure’s syndicate and then to Harper’s, “disfigured” his story...

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