Awkwardly Unsettling Minstrel Realism and Lynch Mentality in Crane’s “The Monster”

In Stephen Crane’s novella “The Monster” (1899), the residents of a small northern town in the 1890s turn against Henry Johnson, a black coachman, after he becomes defaced and ultimately demented due to a house fire. His enforced isolation and eventual banishment result from the white community’s unfounded fear that this black man has become an aberrant “monster” due to his physical and cognitive disabilities. The eminent Judge Hagenthorpe, the novella’s main antagonist, claims Henry is only kept alive by the misplaced charity of the town’s respected physician, Dr. Trescott. The white community’s fear of Henry’s disabilities seems at first to be a reversal of their enjoyment of his former role as a minstrel “coon” (13). “The Monster” juxtaposes and likens white characters’ racist enjoyment of the behaviorally “awkward” Henry (15) as a minstrel “coon,” to the affective awkwardness of white discussions about how to dispose of the horribly defaced black man. Crane pairs an extreme caricature of black abjection, Henry Johnson, with his critique of negrophobia to show his audience the distortions of the white gaze. Moreover, references to science, particularly to scientific racism, inform the novella’s minstrel realism and the representation of most white characters’ reactions to Henry. In the novella the then culturally acceptable racism of minstrel humor, contemporaneous science, and white parlor conversations lead to a public manifestation of violence that clearly evokes a lynching. Without promoting racial equality, Crane’s story nevertheless portrays white negrophobia as irrational and deadly.

Crane’s deployment of “minstrel realism” in “The Monster” follows the rationale of minstrel humor to its logical, horrifying endpoint. If the humor of blackface minstrelsy rests on an underlying racist assumption that blackness is a disability that makes African Americans animalistic, subhuman, and other, what happens when you strip the humoristic tropes but leave the abject subhuman “monster”? Crane’s story answers that question by critiquing what I call white American lynch mentality, a mindset composed of the white public’s normative affective responses to blackness— or negrophobia— in late nineteenth-century America. Negrophobia, a term coined by novelist James Baldwin, describes white Americans’ anti-black prejudice that leads to lynching (Weisenburger 3, 7–9). This term aptly describes white characters’ affective awkwardness toward and prejudice against the black coachman, Henry, in “The Monster.” In this novella Crane’s deployment of minstrel realism is not merely at the expense of black characters. Rather, the story pointedly criticizes white fear of black people, their awkward “negrophobia,” and especially how nineteenth-century white American society felt and used this fear as a justification for lynching.

Interpreting this story as an allegorical critique of lynch mentality during the 1890s, this essay construes the novella’s suggestions of euthanasia and banishment as symbolic of lynching. Although there is no actual outdoor lynching in “The Monster,” Judge Hagenthorpe implicitly suggests to Dr. Trescott, during an uncomfortably awkward dinner conversation, that Henry should be euthanized. This awkward dinner conversation is one of the novella’s best examples of affective realism; Crane’s realistic evocation of Judge Hagenthorpe and Dr. Trescott’s affective awkwardness as they discuss Henry’s fate is key to the novella’s criticism of the habitual complicity of respectable citizens with lynching in the US.

This analysis of awkwardness in “The Monster” is two-pronged, mainly examining the affective awkwardness of white characters through the lens of affect theory, but also acknowledging another, minstrel-inspired use of the term “awkward.” In the novella, the word “awkward” is used as a label for the over-animated behavior of black characters. This analysis of both kinds of awkwardness is built upon psychologist Joshua Clegg’s analysis of awkwardness as a set of feelings––such as “anxiety, tension, or uncertainty”––arising from taboo-breaking during an interaction (268), and on affect theory. As Clegg’s analysis suggests, awkwardness in general and in “The Monster” is always social, stemming from certain interactions where there is a trespass against social or moral norms. Although Clegg does not do so, this essay distinguishes between behavioral and affective awkwardness in...