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The prejudiced individual creates his own stereotypes, very often unconsciously, by reading into situations involving Negroes those stock meanings which justify his emotional and economic needs…. Thus on the moral level I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro….
Because both a white man and a black man play heroic parts in Stephen Crane's Monster , critics have been inclined to praise the author's racially progressive thought. In Crane's novella a black hostler, Henry Johnson, bravely risks himself to rescue his employer's son from a fire, but suffers catastrophic injury—his face and mind destroyed. The disfigured but otherwise harmless man so threatens the townspeople of Whilomville that he in turn must be rescued by the boy's father, Dr. Trescott, a leader in the white community. Given the compassion of Trescott and Johnson for each other, critics tend to view The Monster as having a socially advanced attitude about racial issues. Charles W. Mayer praises the story's contribution to “human brotherhood” and the “fundamental and continuing matter of American race relations” (29); and R. W. Stallman extols Crane's “appeal for brotherhood between white and black,” declaring that “No white American author had pictured a Negro performing a truly heroic act before Crane did it in ‘The Monster’”(334). Moreover, following out the narrative's symbolism, critics have observed that with the injury to Johnson's face Crane perceptively represents the way in which the black man has been “denied a real identity” (Holton 207) in America, has been literally effaced by the dominant culture.
Yet, without careful qualification, we may be mistaken in