Jean Stafford Short Fiction Analysis
It is clear from a brief preface she wrote for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford that Jean Stafford did not wish to be considered a regional writer. Her father and her mother’s cousin had both written books about the West, but she had read neither before she began writing. Moreover, as soon as she could, she “hotfooted it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean” and came back to the West only for short periods. Her roots might therefore remain in Colorado, but the rest of her abided “in the South or the Midwest or New England or New York.” The short stories in this collection, which span twenty-five years of her productive life, she grouped under headings that both insisted on the national and international character of her art and echoed universally known writers with whom she clearly wished to associate herself: Henry James, Mark Twain, Thomas Mann.
It is true, as one discovers from the stories themselves, Stafford’s fiction is not limited geographically but is set in such widely separated places as Colorado, Heidelberg, France, New York, and Boston; if, therefore, one thinks of these stories as the result of social observation they do indeed have the broad national and international scope their author claimed for them. Her stories, however—and this may have been as apparent to Stafford as it has been to some of her critics—are not so much the result of observation and intellectual response as they are expressions of Stafford’s personal view of life, a reflection of her own feeling of having been betrayed by family and friends. Her protagonists are often girls or young women, pitted against persons who feel themselves superior but are revealed to be morally, emotionally, or even physically corrupt. Although Stafford’s fiction was all but forgotten at the time of her death, it has been rediscovered by a new generation of readers, mainly through the work of feminist scholars. This is ironic because Stafford herself did not embrace feminist views and, in fact, spoke harshly about aspects of the feminist movement.
The thirty stories in Stafford’s The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford are unified by one pervasive theme, illness—physical, mental, and emotional—and the snobbery which she finds an accompaniment, the snobbery of aberrant behavior. Fascinated, repelled, and at times outraged by the way illness can be used to purchase power over vulnerable individuals, Stafford describes the various forms of this currency, the number of places where it can be spent, and the way it can be used by those of any age or sex willing to employ it. The emotional and physical invalids in these stories clearly think themselves superior to ordinary folk, and the tensions built up in these stories are often the result of conflicts between a protagonist (who usually appears to speak for the author) and neurotic individuals who think themselves justified in exploiting others. Sometimes there is an actual physical sickness—disease, old age—but the illness or psychological aberration frequently becomes a metaphor for moral corruption.
“Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience”
In “Maggie Meriwether’s Rich Experience” the protagonist is a naïve young American woman from Tennessee visiting in France, where she has been invited to spend the weekend at a fashionable country house. There she discovers a crowd of titled Europeans, rich, overdressed, and eccentric, who look down their collective nose at the simple girl from the American South. The reader, who looks through the eyes of the young American, sees how stupid and arrogant these aristocrats are and understands Maggie’s relief at escaping to Paris where she telephones the older brother of her roommate...
(This entire section contains 1820 words.)
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at Sweet Briar and spends the evening delighting in the wholesome provincialism of her southern American friends, regaling them with stories about her recent experience.
“The Echo and the Nemesis”
In “The Echo and the Nemesis” the combination of neurosis and snobbery becomes more convincingly sinister. The story is also set in Europe, in Heidelberg, but the two main characters are Americans. The protagonist, Sue, appears to be a rather unexceptional young woman from a family of ordinary means; the “invalid,” Ramona, is an enormously fat girl from a very rich family (so she says), living permanently in Italy. Sue is at first impressed by Ramona’s learning and by the stories she tells of her family’s wealth, and the two girls become constant companions. At first the relationship, with frequent meetings in cafés, becomes routine, like another philosophy lecture or seminar in Schiller, but then Ramona begins a series of revelations about herself and her family that embarrass, mystify, and then entrance Sue. Ramona reveals that she had a twin sister who died at an early age, a beautiful girl of whom there are many drawings and paintings, and whose room had been turned into a shrine. Ramona next reveals that she has come to Heidelberg not to study but to lose weight, and she enlists Sue’s aid. Captivated by Ramona’s stories about her loose-living family, Sue readily accepts an invitation to visit Ramona’s brothers at a ski resort in Switzerland.
Thereafter Ramona begins to change. She misses lunches, fails to show up for appointments, and wildly indulges herself in food. When Sue makes inquiries about the coming trip and questions her about her doctor, Ramona snaps at her and, once, even slaps her face. Ramona tells Sue that she (Sue) resembles her dead sister Martha and implies that the trip to Switzerland must therefore be called off, since Ramona’s family would be too upset by the resemblance. Ramona’s mysterious behavior is partially explained by Sue’s discovery in Ramona’s room of a photograph of a younger, thinner, and beautiful Ramona. In a final scene prior to Ramona’s departure from Heidelberg, the revelation about her is made complete: Sue promises to remain her friend, and Ramona replies “‘Oh, no, no, there would be nothing in it for you. Thank you just the same. I am exceptionally ill.’ She spoke with pride, as if she were really saying, ‘I am exceptionally talented’ or ‘I am exceptionally attractive.’” When Sue responds, “I’m sorry,” Ramona snaps back, “I’m not sorry. It is for yourself that you should be sorry. You have such a trivial little life, poor girl. It’s not your fault. Most people do.”
“The Bleeding Heart”
The neurotics in Stafford’s stories are not always so aggressive and unappealing. In “The Bleeding Heart” an elderly dandy who is browbeaten by his invalid mother attempts to establish a “fatherly” relationship with a young Mexican girl who has come East and works as a secretary in a “discreet girl’s boarding school.” The girl is at first impressed with the old gentleman’s aristocratic bearing and imagines she would like him for a stepfather, but when she visits his mother with a plant, a gift from the school, she is appalled by the odors, the repellent condition of the mother, and the disgusting behavior of a parrot. When the old man attempts to force his attentions on her, she turns on him and tells him to leave her alone. “Rose,” he tells her, “All I am asking is a little pity.”
“The Liberator”
A briefer summary of several other stories will show how pervasive is this theme in Stafford’s stories, both in the way characters are conceived and relationships established, and in the way the main action is resolved. The point of the story “The Liberation” has to do with the way an old couple, pathetic in their loneliness, try to prevent their young niece from marrying. At her announcement of her forthcoming marriage in Boston to a teacher at Harvard (the story takes place in Colorado), the aunt (who “suffers” from chronic asthma) wrings her hands and her uncle glares at her and both are outraged at the idea of her marrying and going off to live somewhere else. The story takes a curious turn as word comes that the girl’s fiancé has died of a heart attack. The girl is at first stunned and about to resign herself to remaining in Colorado, but her uncle and aunt try to “appropriate” her grief and bind her even faster to themselves. In a panic, without luggage, the girl flees for Boston and her emotional freedom from the “niggling hypochondriacs she had left behind.”
“The Healthiest Girl in Town”
“The Healthiest Girl in Town” also takes place in Colorado, where a girl, whose mother is a practical nurse in a town inhabited mainly by tuberculous patients and their families, is forced to become friends with two sisters because her mother nurses the girls’ grandmother. At first the girl is impressed with the sisters (they also have illnesses) and their Eastern pretentiousness and ashamed of her own good health, but then, after a quarrel with them, she proudly declares herself to be the healthiest girl in town.
Abnormalities and Neuroses
Two other Easterners also proud of their abnormalities are a Boston spinster in “The Hope Chest” who delights in humiliating her maid and in tricking a boy who comes to her door selling Christmas wreaths into kissing her, and an elderly woman in “Life Is No Abyss” from a rich and socially prominent Boston family whom she punishes by going to the poorhouse and allowing them to come and observe her in her impoverishment. “A Country Love Story” also deals with an invalid, in this instance a writer who neglects his wife and then accuses her of being unfaithful to him and so drives her to the brink of insanity. Other characters include a woman (in “The End of a Career”) who devotes her life to looking beautiful and dies when her hands betray her age and a woman (“Beatrice Trublood’s Story”) who marries three times and each time selects the same brutal kind of husband.
“Bad Characters,” which is perhaps Stafford’s most amusing story, treats her usual theme comically. Here the neurotic invalid is cast as a vagabond girl with an appealing swagger, a female Huck Finn but without Huck’s decency. She charms the daughter of a respectable family into shoplifting and, when the two are caught, feigns deaf-and-dumbness and allows the respectable girl (the protagonist) to bear the responsibility alone.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that a writer has but one story to tell. Stafford tells hers in many different places, about people from rather different social levels, ages, education, and backgrounds: There is almost always an innocent charmed or somehow trapped by neurotic individuals from whom she finally escapes. Sometimes Stafford gives the stage to this neurotic individual and gradually peels away the mystery that always shrouds those who think themselves superior to others. The story holds up well in the retelling, for it is a universal and timeless theme.