Short Story Criticism | Stafford, Jean - Joyce Carol Oates (essay date 1979)

Joyce Carol Oates (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: "The Interior Castle: The Art of Jean Stafford's Short Fiction," in Shenandoah, Vol. 30, No. 3, 1979, pp. 61-4.

[In the following essay, Oates finds Stafford's style conventional but concedes that many of her short stories are powerful and terrifying.]

Certainly [Stafford's] stories are exquisitely wrought, sensitively imagined, like glass flowers, or arabesques, or the 'interior castle' of Pansy Vanneman's brain ("Not only the brain as the seat of consciousness, but the physical organ itself which she envisioned, romantically, now as a jewel, now as a flower, now as a light in a glass, now as an envelope of rosy vellum containing other envelopes, one within the other, diminishing infinitely"). Dramatic tension is subdued, in a sense forced underground, so that while narrative conflict between individuals is rare, an extraordinary pressure is built up within the protagonists, who appear trapped...

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