An Essay on Civil War Satire: Stephen Crane and Samuel Clemens

Wartime is a time when propaganda and nationalism thrive, and the American Civil War was not an exception to this generalization. Many authors wrote their own views of the war into stories either during or after the war, and many did not share the nationalist view of war as glorious. Different authors chose to address this topic in different ways. Two authors that we studied in this class, Samuel Clemens and Stephen Crane, chose to address their own views of the war through pieces that incorporate elements of literary satire. In this paper, I plan to show how Clemens and Crane used elements of literary satire in order to present a view of war as anything but glorious.

To begin, it is important to define satire as it will be used in this paper. According to Dictionary.com, a satire is "a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit." This paper will focus primarily on two elements of this definition: folly and irony. Folly, as used in this paper, is defined as "lack of understanding or sense" (Dictionary.com). Irony has two definitions as relevant to this paper. The first definition of irony is "an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected," and the second is "the indirect presentation of a contradiction between an expression and the context in which it occurs" (Dictionary.com). By combining these definitions, one can arrive at the meaning of satire as it is used in this paper: a satire is a literary device used to attack human folly by means of either presenting the reader with an outcome that is the opposite of what was expected or through the indirect presentation of a contradiction between an expression and the context in which it occurs.

Elements of satire are overtly present in Samuel Clemens' "The War Prayer." The story opens with several images that promote the noble view of wartime that Clemens will later criticize. He speaks of beating drums, playing bands, toy pistols, and firecrackers. Both bands and firecrackers symbolize the excitement and enjoyment that people felt about the war. Toy pistols are symbolic of the nobility of war - young boys looked up to the war soldiers. Beating drums create a rhythm akin to marching, invoking images of soldiers in full uniform marching on into the war field. He moves from there to speak of "proud parents" who have "voices choked with happy emotion" as they watch their young volunteer sons march by. The boys were excited to either "win the flag" or "die the noblest of noble deaths." All of these images and descriptions combine to create an atmosphere of excitement and pride toward the war and its soldiers.

The day before the soldiers are supposed to leave, the town members gather in the church for a service where the preacher leads the congregation in a prayer for victory. As he does so, a man enters the church and walks up to stand next to the preacher. When the preacher finishes his prayer, the man motions him to the side and begins his own sermon. The man claims to be a messenger of God, visiting the townspeople in order to inform them that God was ready to grant their prayers as soon as they were explained the full implications of what they were asking. He states that by praying for their soldiers lives, they were praying that the soldiers of the opposing forces would be torn "to bloody shreds," that the noise of gunfire would drown out the "shrieks of their wounded writhing in pain." In praying for their own victory, they were praying that the families of the opposing forces would be left homeless "with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst."

In order to examine whether or not Clemens' piece is satirical, one must determine if it fits the definition of a satire. The folly in this story would be the inability to understand all of the implications of war - by praying for their own victory, the townspeople were also praying for the demise of another town much like their own. The irony in this story occurs when the man enters the church and begins his sermon. Up to this point, the story had been about the glories of war. This, on the other hand, addresses the harsh reality of war - the opposite of what one would expect in a glorious war story.

The elements of satire in the first section of Stephen Crane's "War is Kind" are less overt; nonetheless, they are present. This section of the poem is broken up into italicized and non-italicized stanzas. The poem opens with the narrator talking to a young woman whose lover was shot off of a horse. This stanza, like all of the non-italicized sections of the first section of the poem, ends with the lines "Do not weep/War is kind." In the second non-italicized stanza, the narrator speaks to a baby whose father was killed in the trenches. Crane ends this with another repetition of "War is kind." The third and final non-italicized stanza of this section of the poem is of the narrator speaking to a mother who has lost her soldier son in the war. Again, this section ends with "War is kind."

The two italicized stanzas in this section of the poem are what really create the idea of war as a noble engagement. First, these are the only sections of the poem that utilize rhyme with "die" at the end of the second line of each stanza and "lie" at the end of the stanza. This rhyme creates a repetition, much like the drum imagery in Clemens' story, akin to marching. In addition, these two lines are the only ones that are repeated in the two italicized sections. In these sections, Crane really uses word choice to get his point across. In the first line of the first italicized stanza, he calls the "booming drums" hoarse, suggesting that they are less powerful than one would typically expect from marching music. In the second line, he calls soldiers "little souls," reminding the reader that these people are more than just machines, and he follows this with the third line: These men were born to drill and die." The idea that these men are good for nothing other than being participants of war is in stark contrast to the idea that they have souls. In the fourth line, he calls their glory "unexplained," suggesting that they were not even completely aware of what they were fighting for other than glory in and of itself.

The second italicized stanza uses more glorious war imagery. The first line of this stanza invokes the image of a "swift blazing flag, the second line an "eagle." In the fourth and fifth lines of this stanza, immediately following Crane's reassertion that "These men were born to drill and die," he refers to the "excellence of killing" and the "virtue of slaughter." These ideas further expand the idea that these soldiers do not have souls; instead, they are simply people who were born to die in war battles.

Crane's poem also fits the definition of satire, though it is done so in a less obvious manner. He is attempting to expose human folly - the belief that fighting in a war is a noble occupation. He does this through irony in its second definition: the indirect presentation of a contradiction between an expression and the context in which it occurs. This is obvious in the non-italicized stanzas of the poem where the narrator tells a woman who has lost her lover in war, a baby who's lost its father, and a mother who's lost her son that they shouldn't cry because "war is kind." The expression, "war is kind," is contradictory in the context of speaking it to people who have lost loved ones in war. Furthermore, Crane creates a context in the italicized stanzas when he refers to soldiers as "souls." However, this idea that "these men were born to drill and die" is in direct contrast to this context that they are souls - essentially, they are no different than anyone else.

There are two very important elements of literary satire that make a satirical piece of writing work well or not. One is the element of surprise. Clemens handles the element of surprise very well in the way that, as a reader, you never really expect the man who enters the church to give a sermon preaching against praying for victory in war. The other important element is subtlety. Crane handles subtlety very well in that not all of the war criticisms in his poem are obvious upon first reading. To truly recognize his exact intentions, it is necessary to examine every word that he uses and compare the connotations of those words to the contexts in which he is using them. In these ways, Samuel Clemens and Stephen Crane use literary satire in order to express their own personal views of the real, non-nationalism-influenced effects of civil war on a community.

References

Source: Definition of Satire -- Dictionary.com
Source: Mark Twain -- "The War Prayer"
Source: Stephen Crane -- "War is Kind"