The ‘Oceanic feeling’ in Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and S.T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner



Abstract

Claudia Ioana Doroholschi

West University of Timisoara, Romania

Stephen  Crane’s  ‘The  Open  Boat’  (1897)  is  a  fictionalized account of the writer’s experience of surviving the shipwreck of the Commodore, a steamboat on which he was heading for Cuba to act as a war correspondent. The present paper will explore Crane’s account of the encounter between man and sea, setting it against the background of S.T. Coleridge’s ‘Rime  of  the  Ancient  Mariner’,  which  Crane’s  story  echoes on several occasions. I will examine the two texts in the light of  the  concept  of  ‘oceanic  feeling’,  as  defined  by  Romain Rolland  and  Sigmund  Freud,  who  both  use  the  metaphor of the ocean as a site of the sublime to speak of a sense of oneness, of connectedness between man and world. I will argue that, while in Coleridge’s poem the Mariner first loses and subsequently recovers a mystical connection with nature, embodied by the connection between man and sea, in Crane’s story the situation is more complex. The short story echoes ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ at key points in the plot, but  seems  to  decode  the  events  in  a  psychological  rather than mystical key. Thus, it seems to suggest that a sense of oneness with nature is not the result of any transcendent connection between man and his surroundings, but merely a  projection  of  the  subject’s  emotions  onto  an  indifferent ature—thus  suggesting  a  psychological  reading  more  consistent  with  Freud’s  than  with  Rolland’s  notion  of  oceanic feeling. Crane’s emphasis on an absurd and indifferent nature in ‘The Open Boat’ has often been read as typical of literary Naturalism. However, I will argue that the ending of the story suggests a return to the Romantic/Rollandian oceanic feeling, and will attempt to untangle the mechanisms and reasons for this reversal. I will also try to account for the allusions to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in this context.


Coleridge, S. T. 1970. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. New York: Dover Publications Inc.

Crane, S. 1984a. ‘Stephen Crane’s Own Story’, in S. Crane and J. C. Levenson. Prose and Poetry. New York: Literary Classics of the US. 875-884.

Crane, S. 1984b. ‘The Open Boat’, in S. Crane and J. C. Levenson. Prose and Poetry. New York: Literary Classics of the US. 885-909.

Crane, S. 1984c. ‘War is Kind’, in S. Crane and J. C. Levenson. Prose and Poetry. New York: Literary Classics of the US. 1325-1345.

Dendinger, L. 1968. ‘Stephen Crane’s Inverted Use of Key Images of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”’ Studies in Short Fiction 5 (Winter, 1968): 192–94.

Freeman, B. C. 2010. ‘The Awakening: Waking Up at the End of the Line.’ H. Bloom (ed) The Sublime. New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism. 1-26.

Freud, S. 1962. Civilization and its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc.

Fusco, R. 2003. ‘Stephen Crane Said to the Universe’, in S. Crane, The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Short Fiction. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics.

Hoyle, L. A. 1969. Stephen Crane and an Unsacramental Nature. A Master’s Report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts. Department of English, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2097/7206/LD2668R41969H68.pdf?sequence=1, 31.07.2013.

Jackson, J. R. de J. 1969 (2002) Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Critical Heritage. Vol. 2 (1834-1900). London and New York: Routledge.

Kant, I. 2007. Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rolland, R. 1999. ‘Dec 5, 1927. Letter to Sigmund Freud’, in W.B. Parsons. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling. Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 173-174.

Stokes, C. 2011. Coleridge, Language and the Sublime. From Transcendence to Finitude. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wolford, C. L. 2007. ‘This Booming Chaos: Crane’s Search for Transcendence,’ in H. Bloom (ed) Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Stephen Crane—Updated Edition. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism/Infobase Publishing. 57-73.


Published : 2014-05-15


DoroholschiC. (2014). The ‘Oceanic feeling’ in Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and S.T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Review of International American Studies, 7(1). Retrieved from https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/article/view/4056

Claudia Ioana Doroholschi  claudia.doroholschi@litere.uvt.ro
West University of Timisoara, Romania  Italy
Claudia Ioana Doroholschi is a lecturer at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the West University of Timisoara, Romania, where she  teaches  English  and  American  literature,  as  well  as  writing  courses. Her Ph.D. focused on the literature and visual arts of the 1890s. Her publications include articles and studies on Late Victorian as well as contemporary literature, and she has also been involved in a number of creative writing projects.



The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.

  1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.

  1. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

  1. User Rights

Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

  1. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.