25 pages • 50 minutes read
Stephen CraneA Dark Brown Dog
Fiction | Short Story | Middle Grade | Published in 1901A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Hierarchical Power Structures as Inherently Abusive
“A Dark Brown Dog,” with its many manifestations of abuse, portrays violence as matter of fact. Violence is an inherent feature of the hierarchy governing the world of the story. That hierarchy places the father at the top; the family, including the boy, in the middle; and the dog at the bottom.
The cascading nature of the violence in the short story, which originates at the top of the hierarchy with the father, associates violence with power. Having power over others allows one to inflict violence on them. Simultaneously, the child’s behavior seems to suggest, the opposite must be true: To enact violence on another is to secure power for yourself. The moment that the child sees value in the dog, the child “made a swift, avaricious charge and seized the rope” (12), then “dragged his captive” (13) into the dark and foreboding interior of his home. This language further connects violence and power, indicating that one is likely to evoke the other.
This relationship between violence and power is particularly dangerous for the party at the bottom of the hierarchy—in this story, the dog. In an effort to protect itself from violence, the dog strives to demonstrate submission. However, the violence inherent in the hierarchy is not necessarily sensical. When the father flings the dog to its death, the father does so for nothing more than entertainment, as he “was in a mood for having fun” (Paragraph 34).
Stephen Crane’s detached tone, which reflects the author’s pioneering role in developing literary Naturalism, supports this theme. The violence in the story is shocking, but the language portraying the violence does not reflect that—the tone is removed and light, sometimes witty, describing events as if from a distance. This tone is especially on display in the climax of the story, as the father hurls the dog to its death: “He swung him two or three times hilariously about his head, and then flung him with great accuracy through the window” (Paragraph 34). The adverb “hilariously” and the phrase “with great accuracy” both give an air of comedy to the violence. Over the course of the story, this tone contributes to the sense that violence is normal, natural, and commonplace.
The Inescapability of Institutional Violence
Crane’s story, as an allegory for the American South during Jim Crow, portrays white supremacy as a permeating and inescapable force for Black Americans. In this allegory, the three protagonists have the clearest symbolic designations: the dog represents recently emancipated Black Americans; the child represents white Americans who, in theory if not in practice, accept emancipation; and the father represents white Americans who are largely dedicated to maintaining the status quo, despite still reeling from the shock of emancipation.
Crane’s story, written in the aftermath of the Civil War, reflects a time of substantial social change, especially for the South. On a surface level, from the perspective of many white Americans, enslaved Black people in the United States had made alarming strides upward in society. Crane’s allegory reflects these apparent advances. At the start of the story, the dog has apparently gained some measure of freedom, referring to emancipation. The child who adopts the dog offers some protection too. At times, the child even raises his voice in the dog’s defense. These actions on the child’s part hint at the actors in society who fought for abolition and now embraced emancipation, at least to a certain extent.
However, underlying these perceived new gains in power was the entire political and social infrastructure of the American South, a system built by and for white men. Throughout Crane’s story, in the symbols, the dog’s treatment, and the dog’s ultimate fate, the insidious nature of institutional violence is evident. From the start, the dog’s freedom is illusory: The rope hanging around its neck is an important symbol of its continued subjugation. In the house, the dog’s safety and well-being depend heavily on the protection of the child, as the environment is inherently unsafe and inhospitable for the animal. Worse still, in addition to the child’s abuse of the dog, the child’s protection is also flawed: “[T]he child could not always be near” (22), and even once the child “grew to watch the matter with some care” (25), the child forgets sometimes to feed the dog. In the story’s climax, the dog is unable even to recognize the danger the system poses to it in the form of the drunken father: “The dog, lacking skill in such matters, was, of course, unaware of the true condition of affairs” (31).
Through his allegory, Crane posits a number of implicit questions about how a vulnerable party could escape violence perpetrated by the very systems on which his survival depends. Jim Crow laws and the legal disenfranchisement of people of color are examples of the violence that Crane refers to, just as the humans in the story remain complicit in the abuse and killing of the dog.
The Mentality of Enslavement
Using a submissive animal to represent recently emancipated Black people has racist undertones, drawing on a view in the late 19th and early 20th century that Black people, especially formerly enslaved Black people, were inherently submissive. The presence of this theme suggests a failure on the white author’s part to grasp fully the complex forces leaving formerly enslaved people vulnerable to abuse by white people, including their past enslavers. Nonetheless, naming and outlining this theme is important to understanding Crane’s story.
There is a physical side to freedom, a surface-level sense of freedom that Crane questions in exploring the previous two themes. Slavery in the United States was abolished in 1865 with the 13th Amendment, nearly 30 years before the writing of “A Dark Brown Dog.” With it, for white Americans, came the notion of freedom for Black Americans. However, as Crane explores in the story, freedom and bondage can work on a spectrum: The dog does not have an owner and is therefore free to walk the streets, and Black Americans were no longer bought and sold as property—at least in most regions. However, if the dog is unsure where his next meal is coming from, if he has no place to shelter in the cold, and if his physical and emotional needs are not being met, is he free? During Jim Crow, Black Americans were consistently disenfranchised, treated as “other,” as “lesser than,” as second-class citizens. If the recently emancipated Black Americans were unable to find housing, consistent work, supportive community, were they, then, truly free?
This theme, however, concerns freedom in an internal sense, and Crane uses the motif of the dog’s praying to manifest it. When struck, rather than reacting defensively or angrily, the dog assumes its own guilt: As Crane describes it in one instance, the dog takes “[the child’s] chastisement in the most serious way, and no doubt considered that he [the dog] had committed some grave crime” (Paragraph 6). The dog’s persistent assumption of its own guilt and shame, as well as its submissive position when under attack, are precursors to the dog’s act of praying. Notably, Crane notes that the dog prays specifically to its abusers: Early on, the dog “offered a small prayer to the child” (Paragraph 5). Later, when the father attacks, Crane echoes this language: The dog “offered up a small prayer” (Paragraph 33). The dog’s vulnerability is internal as well as external. The animal depends, with absolute innocence and sincere devotion, on the goodwill of humans.
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