Jean Stafford American Literature Analysis
Stafford’s fictional world is one of loneliness, isolation, and alienation. For one reason or another, her protagonists are separated from other individuals or from their society as a whole. Even though they are often powerless to transcend their situation, their detachment makes these characters excellent observers. It is through their eyes that Stafford tells her stories.
Some of Stafford’s most appealing protagonists are imaginative, rebellious children. In “Bad Characters” (1954), Emily Vanderpool becomes fascinated by a young thief and, with her, embarks on a brief but exciting crime spree. In “A Reading Problem” (1956), the same protagonist gets involved with a traveling evangelist, again with hilarious results. In such stories, however, the protagonists face nothing worse than a scolding from their parents. There is no danger that society will actually expel them.
Some of Stafford’s adults, too, manage to transcend the problem of alienation from society. In “Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience” (1955), for example, an American girl who has been humiliated by a group of sophisticates at a French country house transcends her embarrassment by dramatizing it for American friends, thus making it truly “rich,” or funny. Similarly, in “Polite Conversation” (1949), Margaret Heath and her husband, both of whom are working writers, risk losing only their time and their privacy when local organizers try to incorporate them into summer activities. One suspects that the Heaths can find appropriate excuses.
In such comic and satirical stories, the protagonist-observer emerges triumphant. Stafford’s tone, however, can be far gloomier. In “A Modest Proposal” (1949), for example, a dinner guest is confronted at once with the prevalence and the horror of colonial racism. On a more personal level, in “A Country Love Story” (1950), a wife comes to realize that what she had thought was a temporary estrangement between herself and her husband is, in fact, the kind of separate life that he desires. Sometimes, too, Stafford blends sadness with satire, as in the novel Boston Adventure, in which Stafford ridicules Boston society and yet sympathizes with the outsider who has exposed herself to it.
A similar mixture is evident in the autobiographical story “The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies” (1964), in which struggling boardinghouse keepers, like Stafford’s own mother, engage in transparent attempts to convince themselves and one another that their daughters have wonderful lives, both as “Barbarians” excluded from college social life and as summertime waitresses serving the affluent. In this story, the eavesdropping daughter pities and yet despises the “ladies,” while recognizing that their efforts will enable girls like her to escape.
It is interesting to note that the patterns and preoccupations of Stafford’s works did not change in the course of her writing career, although her style did. While it has many virtues, Boston Adventure has the fault of Victorian wordiness. By the publication of The Mountain Lion just three years later, however, Stafford had transformed her style; her prose had become precise, economical, and colloquial. The new style was particularly effective in recording the thoughts of the young, such as the brother and sister in The Mountain Lion; the inexperienced, such as Maggie Meriwether; or the intellectually limited, such as the woman in “The End of a Career” (1956) who devoted her life to being beautiful.
Unfortunately, style alone was not sufficient to maintain interest in Stafford’s works. Compared to the exciting new experimental forms that began to appear in the 1970’s, her realistic works seemed hopelessly old-fashioned. The result was that, for a decade and a half, Stafford was largely ignored. The first sign of a renewed interest in the author was Twayne’s publication in...
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1985 of a biography of Stafford written by Mary Ellen Williams Walsh. Over the next twenty years, major critical and biographical studies appeared at regular intervals. It was evident that Stafford had been rediscovered. Once again, it had been recognized that her unique voice, as well as her flawless style, should ensure her a permanent place in literary history.
Boston Adventure
First published: 1944
Type of work: Novel
A poor girl, the daughter of immigrants, realizes her dream of penetrating Boston society, only to discover its falseness and its cruelty.
Boston Adventure, Stafford’s first novel, was also her most popular work. Although critics do not consider it her best novel, they do point out how effectively Stafford presents the inner life of the protagonist, much in the manner of the nineteenth century novelists Henry James and Marcel Proust.
The story is divided into two parts, each of which has been given the title of a place. Book 1 is called “Hotel Barstow,” after the summer place on the North Shore across from Boston, where Sonia Marburg, the poverty-stricken protagonist, sees the wealthy Bostonians whose lives she yearns to imitate. Book 2 is titled “Pinckney Street,” after the exclusive area in Beacon Hill to which Sonia is taken by a benefactor.
Sonia has good reason to want to escape from the place of her birth. The daughter of two immigrants who have failed to achieve the American Dream, she spends her childhood in a drafty shack, listening to her parents’ quarrels, which are interrupted only by their bouts of drunkenness. Her beautiful but bad-tempered Russian mother, who works as a chambermaid at Hotel Barstow, hates her husband, a German shoemaker she met on the boat trip to America, because he cannot give her the luxury he promised. From her earliest consciousness, Sonia feels unwanted; indeed, her father tells her that she should never have been born.
Sonia cannot help contrasting the chaotic atmosphere of her home with the order of the Hotel Barstow room occupied by an aristocratic Boston spinster, Lucy Pride. Because of her tranquil demeanor and her self-possession, Miss Pride becomes a symbol of an ideal way of life. When her father asks Sonia what she would like to be, she replies simply that she would like to live on Pinckney Street.
Ironically, it is the disintegration of Sonia’s family that makes her dream a possibility. Her father walks out; her little brother, who is born shortly afterward, wanders away from home and dies in a snowstorm; and her mother, who has gradually declined into insanity, is institutionalized. At this point, Miss Pride, who has always taken an interest in Sonia, offers her a position as a secretary, tuition for the training she needs, and, most important, her own room in the mansion on Pinckney Street. The final sentence of this section has a significance that at the time Sonia does not grasp. Dropping in unexpectedly, Miss Pride has found her protégé reading the newspaper comic strips. Politely, she suggests that she does not expect to find such reading in her home. This comment should alert Sonia to the fact that whatever she gains by moving to Pinckney Street will be at the loss of her own identity.
In book 2, Sonia becomes the person Miss Pride wishes her to be, tailoring not only her reading habits but also her clothes and her conversation to her employer’s pattern. Even though she is half in love with a young doctor, Philip McAllister, Sonia accepts the fact that Miss Pride has reserved him for her niece, the lovely, independent Hopestill (“Hope”) Mather, whom Philip adores. Sonia soon becomes privy to this subtle society’s secret codes, understanding what may be inferred from a word, a gesture, or a casual reference. This skill leads her to a shocking discovery: Hope is pregnant by a notorious philanderer and intends to maintain her respectability by marrying Philip. After the wedding, when it becomes evident that Philip, now undeceived, is taking a subtle revenge upon her, Hope deliberately causes her horse to throw her, losing both her baby and her own life. Now aware of the real viciousness beneath the surface of Beacon Hill society, Sonia sadly realizes that by promising to remain with Miss Pride until her death, she, too, has sold herself into bondage.
The Catherine Wheel
First published: 1952
Type of work: Novel
A middle-aged spinster and a twelve-year-old boy separately do battle with their selfish impulses.
As the epigraph indicates, the title of The Catherine Wheel was taken from a passage in Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a play by T. S. Eliot that compares the things of this world to children’s pleasures, as ephemeral as firework displays. In her final novel, Stafford again shows the tragic results that occur when individuals become so intoxicated with their own imagined needs that they are willing to sacrifice other people, as well as their own integrities, in order to fulfill them.
The story is told alternately by two protagonists, Katharine Congreve, a wealthy, unmarried woman from Boston, and Andrew Shipley, a twelve-year-old boy, the son of John Shipley, the man whom Katherine loved and lost twenty years before. For years, Andrew and his older twin sisters have spent their summers at Katharine’s country house in northern New England, never dreaming that their hostess is anything more than the longtime friend of both their parents and the first cousin of their mother, Maeve Maxwell Shipley. To the children, Katharine is the ultimate aunt, an understanding friend and confidant as well as a magician who can always suggest an exciting remedy for boredom.
This summer, however, both Andrew and Katharine are experiencing serious inner conflicts. After a difficult year at home, Andrew has looked forward to spending the summer with his best friend, Victor Smithwick, a fascinating local boy. This year, however, Victor is acting as nurse for his ailing older brother Charles, and he has no time for Andrew. Andrew feels betrayed, and out of hurt and anger he begins to pray for Charles’s death. Meanwhile, Katharine is seriously considering betraying the children who trust her. Discovering in his middle years that he has done nothing with his talents, John Shipley has convinced himself that if he divorces his wife and marries Katharine, he can have a new beginning. Although she has lost her respect for John, Katharine is tempted to take him, not out of love but out of a desire for revenge.
Because both of these essentially decent and sensitive protagonists feel so deeply guilty about their thoughts, each of them mistakenly thinks that the other knows his or her secret. Because they are extremely fond of each other, the result is an intensification of their misery. Even Stafford admitted that the tragic ending of The Catherine Wheel was rather contrived. At a party modeled on a disastrous one of twenty years before, Katharine insists on a display of the spinning fireworks that spell out her name. When one of them sets Charles’s clothing on fire, Katharine saves him, sacrificing her own life and begging the question of her love affair. At the end of the book, however, there is a moving scene in which Stafford has her protagonists realize, too late, that they have taken the wrong direction in their lives. The emotions that Katharine and Andrew should have cherished and nurtured were their deep feelings for each other.
“The Healthiest Girl in Town”
First published: 1951 (collected in The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, 1969)
Type of work: Short story
An eight-year-old girl triumphs over a pair of sickly playmates who have made her believe that being healthy is somehow disgraceful.
“The Healthiest Girl in Town” is one of the stories based on Stafford’s years in Colorado. It is set in 1924 in a Western town whose principal industry is “tuberculars,” that is, people who have come there hoping for a cure for tuberculosis or, at least, for an extension of their lives. Naturally, the town is dominated by anecdotes of sickness and death. In this atmosphere, Jessie, the eight-year-old narrator, feels like an outsider. Blessed with a strong constitution and sensibly raised by her widowed mother, a practical nurse, Jessie cannot manage to get interestingly ill.
This problem becomes acute when she is thrown into the society of two spoiled, sickly girls, Laura and Ada Butler. Although she despises them on sight, Jessie is forced to play with them because her mother has a new position nursing the senile grandmother of the family.
The Butler girls seem to want Jessie at their home merely so that they can have someone to torment. They comment on her mother’s inferior position and suggest that Jessie’s own low status in society is proven by the fact that she has no ailments. Finally, they inquire into the death of Jessie’s father. Although it was gangrene that killed him, Jessie is inspired to say that the cause of his death was leprosy. Immediately, she realizes that she is trapped. If she admits that she lied, the girls will never let her forget it, but if she sticks to her story, she is firmly convinced that both her mother and Jessie herself will be exiled to the Fiji Islands.
Following up their advantage, the Butler girls summon Jessie to take their nauseating “cure” for leprosy. She, however, has had enough. Defiantly, she insists that her father was shot, that he was as tall as the room they are standing in, and—the only truth in her tirade—that she has been called “the healthiest girl in town.” She now has as much pride, or “vanity,” in her health as the Butler girls do in their illness. Never again, in her visits to their home, does Jessie let them make her feel inferior.
Because it moves toward a discovery, in this case that health is not to be despised, “The Healthiest Girl in Town” is typical of Stafford’s short stories. Not all of her stories, however, have the comic tone that is here evident. When she did choose to use comic irony, Stafford won high praise from critics, who did not hesitate to compare her to Mark Twain, America’s greatest humorist.
“In the Zoo”
First published: 1955 (collected in The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, 1969)
Type of work: Short story
Two sisters recall their childhood with a woman who derived her own happiness from destroying others.
“In the Zoo” is a story told within a frame. It begins and ends in the Denver, Colorado, zoo, where two middle-aged women are sitting on a bench, eating popcorn and watching the animals. Neither of them lives in Denver; Daisy has just come there to put her sister, the narrator, on a train heading east. After her departure, Daisy will return to her own home west of Denver. Neither sister has any intention of visiting Adams, Colorado, the nearby town where they spent their childhood. However, when Daisy observes that the blind polar bear reminds her of Mr. Murphy, the sisters are thrust back into a time and place they can never forget.
After the deaths of their parents, the two little girls were sent to Adams, where arrangements had been made for a Mrs. Placer to keep them in her boardinghouse. Mrs. Placer believed that everyone and everything in the world was a fraud. Aided by her embittered lodgers, she pursued her life’s work, decoding conversations to reveal hidden insults and to ferret out evil intentions. She taught the girls to distrust everyone—their classmates, their teachers, even the tradesmen whom they encountered.
Their only friend was Mr. Murphy, an alcoholic with a collection of pets, including two capuchin monkeys. Mr. Murphy welcomed the girls’ visits to his menagerie. One day, he gave them a puppy, which they named Laddy, and when they presented him as a future watchdog, Mrs. Placer let them keep him. Laddy was an exuberant, affectionate dog until Mrs. Placer decided to curb his freedom. She took him away from the girls, renamed him Caesar, abused and mistreated him, and turned him into a monster. When Mr. Murphy heard what had happened, he became furious. With one of his monkeys on his shoulder, he headed for the boardinghouse. As soon as Mrs. Placer saw him, she let Caesar out, and the dog attacked Mr. Murphy and killed his monkey. The next day, Caesar died a horrible death; Mr. Murphy had poisoned him.
As soon as they were old enough, the sisters left Adams. They never went back. However, the author utilizes the frame to reveal a tragic truth: that they never recovered from what had been done to them in childhood. Given their history, their comments about the zoo animals are not as lighthearted as they at first appear to be; in fact, they show how deeply the sisters dislike the whole human race. At the train, both of them express sentiments that are worthy of Mrs. Placer. Daisy points out that someone else has snatched a redcap; the narrator suspects the porter of being a thief. Once the train begins to move, Daisy begins a letter to her sister detailing her suspicions of a priest and her certainty that the passing fields contain marijuana instead of alfalfa.
“In the Zoo” differs from many of Stafford’s other stories in that, though it moves toward a revelation, the protagonists do not arrive at enlightenment; instead, only the author and the reader comprehend what has happened. As the title suggests, though the sisters think they are observers at the zoo, in fact they are as trapped as the animals in the zoo; their cages are just less visible.