《红色英勇勋章》中的象征

1、精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上学号：红色英勇勋章中的象征主义课 程 美国小说学 生 郑智慧指导教师 姜涛 教授年 级 2010级专 业 英语语言文学学 院 西语学院Symbolism in The Red Badge of Courage HARBIN NORMAL UNIVERSITY  COURSE: American NovelsSTUDENT: ZHENG Zhi-huiTUTOR: JIANG Tao（Professor）GRADE: Grade 2010MAJOR: English Language and LiteratureCOLLEGE: Facul

2、ty of Western Languages and Literatures  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 sy

3、mbols also give prominence to the irony 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 H

4、enry Fleming is a youth with a romantic 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

5、 run away. Then he marched with a troop 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 witnes

6、sed the process of his death. After that, 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

7、 Fleming was the result of fighting with 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. Symb

8、olism in The Red Badge of Courage2.1 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

9、 remarkable development of symbolism 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

10、as faith in progress faded, as liberal 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 ki

11、nship of men: Humes criticism of the 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

12、Lamarckian doctrine that usage can raise 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 s

13、et out to convert the blank, colorless 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 m

14、icrocosm, partaking of the total cosmos, 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 nonexis

15、tent world, a nothingness, as nominalists 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 primitiv

16、e, the amoral or pagan. This world in 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 what

17、ever ones philosophy, the world man encounters 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.Ther

18、efore, one finds symbolists refusing 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

19、intellectuality and of excessive corporeality. 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 particle

20、s jostled and jostling according to immutable 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

21、human personality and the contraries 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

22、 existence in a pattern of antithetical 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 i

23、dentifications to which Kenneth Burke 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.(Sc

24、hneider 23) Thus, the breeding of symbols 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

25、 without offering his comment as a final 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 structu

26、re of things. In a word, symbolists tried 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 t

27、o accept that science completely explained 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. Gener

28、ally speaking, when the sun appears or 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, suspiciou

29、s, excited and fearful. The inner debate 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

30、eyes” of the Confederates are still “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 ear

31、th, the youth saw that the landscape 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 j

32、inks. In other words, the troops have 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

33、 the end of Chapter V. After the North 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

34、the following sentence: “lighter masses 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

35、, pure sky and the sun gleaming on the 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 f

36、irst time, Henry becomes aware of the 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

37、 and rather briefly: “the general beamed 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

38、 instead of the perspective of irony.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 h

39、e gestures defiantly, presumably toward 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 hu

40、man action or a well-wishing one, but 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

41、gay in the blue, enameled sky.”(Kazin 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 t

42、han in its similar appearance earlier.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. No

43、w, in his view, death is merely death. 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

44、which Crane invests the sun is related 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 interio

45、r action of the story.2.2.2ColorCranes 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

46、 of fire, gold, and roses. It is also 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

47、. The Greek word for“blue,” kuaneos meant “dark” in Homer and the other early poets. It was the color of mourning. Another Latin word, lividus, meant “leaden” 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, particu

48、larly jaundice. Metaphorically when one 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

49、 are companion pieces: studies of fear 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

50、 in both works. The blue hotel “screaming 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. Anywa

51、y, red embodies a mind at stretch. To 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,

52、green and brown have identical junctions 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

53、it is the equivalent of red, while in 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

54、 gladness, because its opposite, black, 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 o

55、f the whale that above all thing appalled 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 sh

56、adows 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 that everyth