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In the Zoo | Introduction

Jean Stafford was a post–World War II American author whose fiction remained within the realist and symbolist traditions dating back to the nineteenth century. Influential in the high literary society of her time, Stafford was married to the poet Robert Lowell for six years and then married to two other men. She never forgot her rural Western roots and diffi- cult childhood, however, and themes from her younger life continually reappear in her writings. One such story, entitled ‘‘In the Zoo,’’ is a psychological portrait of two orphans remembering their traumatic childhood in a small Rocky Mountain town.

Stafford published ‘‘In the Zoo’’ in 1953, as the most active years of her career as a fiction writer were drawing to a close. Two years later, the story won the O. Henry Memorial Award for best short story of the year. One reason for the story’s success is its rich characterization, through which Stafford creates memorable characters such as Gran, the manipulative and cruel foster mother of the girls, and Mr. Murphy, a jobless, alcoholic Irishman who treats the sisters with kindness and love. The story is also compelling because of its sophisticated use of symbolism—particularly the animals that represent various people and themes from the sisters’ childhood—and its striking, moving climax, which occurs when Gran turns the sisters’ puppy into an attack dog and lets it kill Mr. Murphy’s monkey. Through these techniques, Stafford comments on themes of psychological trauma, confinement, and the nature of love and companionship. ‘‘In the Zoo’’ is now available in The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (1969), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970.

In the Zoo Summary

Sitting in a zoo in Denver, Colorado, two sisters eat popcorn while watching a blind polar bear, a family of grizzlies, a black bear, and a group of monkeys. The narrator’s sister Daisy is accustomed to seeing off her sister in Denver every other year, while the narrator is on her way back east. Daisy comments that the polar bear reminds her of someone named Mr. Murphy. This comment sets the sisters to thinking about their childhood in Adams, a small town fifty miles north of Denver. Orphaned at eight and ten, the sisters grew up there with a foster mother unrelated to them called Mrs. Placer, or Gran, who ran a boarding house in which, like her, all of the boarders complained and gossiped about the rest of the town.

Mr. Murphy was a gentle, jobless Irishman who spent his time drinking, playing cards, and enjoying all of his animals, which ranged from a parrot that spoke Parisian French to two small, ‘‘sad and sweet’’ capuchin monkeys. Before they reached adolescence, the girls loved him and his monkeys, thinking of them like ‘‘husbands and fathers and brothers.’’ One day Mr. Murphy gives them a present of a half-collie, half-Labrador retriever puppy. At first, Gran would not hear of keeping him, imagining all of the horrible things he would do, but she agrees after she hears... » Complete In the Zoo Summary