SOURCE: Feaster, John. “Violence and the Ideology of Capitalism: A Reconsideration of Crane's ‘The Blue Hotel.’” American Literary Realism 25, no. 1 (fall 1994): 74-94.

In the following essay, Feaster proposes a less cosmic reading of “The Blue Hotel” by looking at it through a specific cultural context.

Critical commentary on Stephen Crane's “The Blue Hotel” during the past four decades provides an instructive example of the general dominance of interpretive critical methods that regard literary works, in the words of Jerome J. McGann, as “modeling rather than mirroring forms.” From this dominant a-historical (and at times rigidly antihistorical) viewpoint, literary works “do not point to a prior, authorizing reality (whether ‘realist’ or ‘idealist’), they themselves constitute—in both the active and the passive senses—what must be taken as reality (both ‘in fact’ and ‘in ideals’).”¹ Readings of Crane's provocative story of course differ widely in interpretive details; what they...