Adaptations ofTheRedBadgeofCouragein Popular Culture: Robert Wooster Stallman and the Case of Jim Conklin as Jesus Christ

Abstract

Fox 24). Novels that featured representations of him surged in popularity from the mid-nineteenth century (Reynolds 129; Gatrall 31). Titles such as Lew Wallace's best-selling Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) and Charles Sheldon's In His Steps: "What Would Jesus Do?" (1896) still resonate in popular culture today, but they each provide quite different representations of the figure of Jesus. Wallace presents the reader with a historical figure. His Jesus is idealized, and even feminized, which was common to representations of him in the nineteenth century (Curtis 72). Wallace's Jesus exists within the confines of the Gospel accounts, but he interacts with the novel's titular character in fictional encounters. The young Jesus, for example, offers water to an enslaved Ben-Hur (Wallace 130)-an act which Ben-Hur remembers at Christ's crucifixion (539). Sheldon-an important figure in the emerging Social Gospel movement-presents a very different Jesus (Dorrien 187). His Jesus is the contemporaneous Jack Manning (Ferr e 18). Manning is thirty-three years old, homeless, and unemployed. But he has a living knowledge of Christ's teachings, and he castigates the hypocritical congregation of St. Bartholomew's Church for their lack of help (Sheldon 7). Manning dies upon the communion table, and his death challenges the congregation to imitate the life of Christ (15).