Stephen Crane in Badenweiler

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George's Mother

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Introduction

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Brief Analysis

Introduction

With the novella about George Kelcey and his mother who live in the same tenement house as Maggie and her family do, Stephen Crane wrote a companion piece to Maggie – A Girl of the Streets. The story is quite similar, depicts scenes of the bowery and takes a naturalistic view on the people and their surroundings. The reason for Goerg’s ruin is the same as Maggie's. George and Maggie both choose to ignore their real characters and lives and create heroic illusions of themselves instead. As both characters suffer from the environment around them Crane underlines his naturalistic view, but he also “critizises those who hide behind romantic illusions and blame their plight on the environment” (Sorrentino 2006: 56).

Crane began writing George’s Mother in spring 1893, following the completion of Maggie, but set it aside to work on The Red Badge of Courage. He returned to George’s Mother in May 1894 and finished it in November. However, Crane waited to publish it until after the success of The Red Badge of Courage, which appered in 1895. George’s Mother then apperared in 1896.

The novella is often “examined as an indirect dramatization of various personal demons which plagued Crane during his youth, since he too, like George, was raised by a widowed moralistic mother who disapproved of his shiftless ways.” (cf. (1)) The most striking parallels are that Crane’s own mother was stongly religious, as she was decended from a long line of methodist clergy, and a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). “Both women were strong-willed, pious women firmly dedicated to their beliefs.” (Sorrentino 2006: 55). Moreover, Crane’s father was a Methodist clergyman who had authored religious books on such topics as the evils of alcohol and the dangers of popular amusements.
Goerge's character may also be based on Crane’s brother Jonathan who was an alcoholic (cf. Sorrentino 2006: 55).

Brief  Analysis

“One of the central paradigms of Crane's early fiction is that of the conflict between the home and the world. In each of his first three novels, a befuddled innocent, full of naive notions about him or herself and experience, ventures out from the seeming security and moral certainties of a home to the amoral struggle and violence of a world outside the home.

George Kelcey's home, as is true of all three works within the paradigm, is dominated by a mother who is the source of its ethos. Mrs. Kelcey is an almost expressionistic representation of the nineteenth-century idealization of the feminine in its domestic and maternal roles. She is cleanliness, order, religion, work, and temperance. She wishes her son to follow her lead and accept each of these guides to life-to work diligently, come home on time, hang up his coat neatly, attend chapel, and practice sobriety. In short, he is to remain the submissive child under her maternal direction. And since she is a widow and he is a grown man, he is also to be as dutiful as a husband within the conventions of that role. In return, she will supply the emotional gratification for which his fulfillment of these familial roles is the proper reward-that she not only loves him but that he is the sole reason for her being and the center of her existence.

George, though glorying in the part of lord of the manor, is not at ease within its coercive character. But though he may neglect to hang up his coat and will refuse to accompany his mother to chapel, he nevertheless has to exert these expressions of "freedom" within the aura of expectation and disappointment which she has established as the ethos of the home. The small, worn figure, the "women without weapons" in Crane's original title of the novel (Works, 1:105), is fully armed and in control. George's minor gestures of resistance stand for little against her crafty and powerful manipulation of an engulfing love and complete subservience. For all its ego-satisfying pleasures, the home for George is a kind of prison. In order to gain freedom, he will have to escape into the world.” (cf. (1))

Sources

(1): http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3708/is_199607/ai_n8752625/pg_1

Sorrentino, P. 2006. Student Companion to Stephen Crane. Westport: Greenwood Press