[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 inside their own heads, inside their lives (or the social roles their 'lives' have become), and despair of striking free. Intelligence and self-consciousness and even a measure of audacity are not quite enough to assure freedom, as the heroines of the late stories "Beatrice Trueblood's Story" and "The End of a Career" discover painfully even "the liberation" of Polly Bay (in the story with that title) will strike the sympathetic reader as desperate, an adolescent's gesture. The finest of Jean Stafford's stories possess an eerily elegiac tone, though they are never morbid or self-pitying. "In the Zoo" tells a frightful tale, the narrator confesses that "my pain becomes intolerable," but the story concludes with an extravagant outburst of paranoia that manages to be comic as well as distressing, and poor Ramona/Martha Dunn of the early story "The Echo and the Nemesis," trapped within layers of fat, achieves a sort of grotesque triumph over the 'normal' and unimaginative Sue, who can only flee in terror the spirited (and insatiable) appetite Ramona represents. ("I am exceptionally ill," Ramona tells her friend, with as much pride as if she were saying, "I am exceptionally talented" or "I am exceptionally attractive.")

This is an art that curves inward toward the meditative, the reminiscent, given life not by bold gestures or strokes but by a patient accumulation of sharply-observed impressions: the wealth of a poet's eye, or a painter's. "The Lippia Lawn," for instance, is an exercise in recollection, so graphically presented as to allow the reader to share in the young woman's grasping, groping effort to isolate an image out of her past. The "friendless old bachelor" Mr. Oliphant, while an arresting character in himself, is far less real than the protagonist's thoughts—the 'interior castle' of her subjectivity. She half-listens to the old man's chatter as "the tenuous memory wove in and out of my thoughts, always tantalizingly just ahead of me. Like the butterfly whose yellow wings are camouflaged to look like sunlight, the flower I could not remember masqueraded as arbutus. . . . Slowly, like a shadow, the past seeped back. A wise scout was reconnoitering for me and at last led me to a place where I never would have looked." In the deceptively tranquil, slow-moving "A Country Love Story" the young wife May eludes her husband Daniel—the tyranny of his almost reasonable madness—by imagining for herself a lover, a lover whose natural place is in an antique sleigh in the front yard of their home. The lover possesses a ghostly plausibility: ".. . there was a delicate pallor on his high, intelligent forehead and there was an invalid's langour in his whole attitude. He wore a white blazer and gray flannels and there was a yellow rosebud in his lapel. Young as he was, he did not, even so, seem to belong to her generation; rather, he seemed to be the reincarnation of someone's uncle as he had been fifty years before." Escaping the oppressive authority of her cerebral husband, May drifts into a sinister, because more seductive and satisfying predicament; by the story's end she and Daniel have traded places. ("A Country Love Story" bears an interesting relationship to a very late story of Jean Stafford's, "Lives ofthe Poets," published in 1978).

One cannot quarrel with the prevailing critical assessment that finds Jean Stafford's art "poised," "highly reflective," "fastidious," "feminine." And certainly she worked within the dominant fictional mode or consciousness of her time—there are no experimental tales in the Collected Stories (which cover the years 1944-1969); no explorations beyond the Jamesian-Chekhovian-Joycean model in which most "literary" writers wrote during those years. (Joycean, that is, in terms of Dubliners alone.) Each story remains within the consciousness of an intelligent and highly sensitive observer who assembles details from the present and summons forth details from the past, usually with a graceful, urbane irony; each story moves toward an epiphany,' usually in the very last sentence. There is very little that remains mysterious in Stafford's stories, little that is perplexing or disturbing in terms of technique, structure, or style. Some of the stories, it must be admitted, are marred by an arch, over-written self-consciousness, too elaborate, too artificial, to have arisen naturally from the fable at hand (as in "I Love Someone," "Children Are Bored on Sunday," "The Captain's Gift"). Characters tend to resemble one another in speech and manners, and there is little distinction between men and women; occasionally the author offers clichés in place of careful observation—Beatrice Trueblood's neighborhood in New York City, for instance, is quickly assembled along the lines of a stage setting: there are rowdy street urchins, a bloody-faced "bum" on the sidewalk, brick facades of "odious mustardy brown."

When one considers the finest of the stories, however, one is impressed by the rigorous structure that underlies the "beautiful" prose. And there are of course sudden jarring images, sudden reversals, that brilliantly challenge the sensibility evoked by the fiction's near-constant authorial voice—which is, for the most part, reflective, obsessively analytical, compulsively self-conscious. Consider the brutal yet lighthearted—and charming!—Dr. Reinmuth of "The Maiden," offering as a dinnertable anecdote in post-war Heidelberg the story of how, invigorated by a guillotining he saw at the age of twenty-three, he rushed to propose to his presumably genteel German sweetheart. (Astonishing his fellow guests with his recollection of the guillotining Dr. Reinmuth says zestfully: "One, he was horizontal! Two, the blade descended! Three, the head was off the carcass and the blood shot out from the neck like a volcano, a geyser, the flame from an explosion. .. . I did not faint. You remember that this was a beautiful day in spring? And that I was a young man, all dressed up at seven in the morning? . . . I took the train to Fürth and I called my sweetheart. .. . 'I know it's an unusual time of day to call, but I have something unusual to say. Will you marry me?'") Consider the vicious killing of Shannon, the monkey, by Gran's "watchdog" (and alter ego) Caesar of "In The Zoo"—and Caesar's protracted death-agonies when, next day, he is poisoned by Shannon's grieving owner. Less dramatic, perhaps, but no less cruel, is the haircut poor little Hannah must endure, as part of the ongoing duel of wife and husband in "Cops and Robbers," one of the most successful of the stories. The most startling image in all of Stafford's fiction is the 'perfectly cooked baby'—a black baby, of course—offered to the racist Sundstrom by a similarly racist friend in "A Modest Proposal" "It was charred on the outside, naturally, but I knew it was bound to be sweet and tender inside. So I took him home. . . . and told [Sundstrom] to come along for dinner. I heated the toddler up and put him on a platter and garnished him with parsley . . . and you never saw a tastier dish in your life. . . . And what do you think he did after all the trouble I'd gone to? Refused to eat any of it, the sentimentalist! And he called me a cannibal!" (It is one of the ironies of "A Modest Proposal" that the reader never learns whether the incident ever happened, or whether the speaker has been telling a tall tale to upset the Captain's guests.)

Subdued and analytical and beautifully-constructed stories, then, in what might be called a 'conventional' fictional mode: but they are not to be too quickly grasped, too glibly assessed. The 'interior castle' of Stafford's art is one which will repay close scrutiny for its meanings open slowly outward, and each phrase, each word, is deliberately chosen. Consider, for instance, the terrifying yet rigorously controlled conclusion of Pansy Vanneman's parable-like story:

The knives ground and carved and curried and scoured the wounds they made; the scissors clipped hard gristle and the scalpels chipped off bone. It was as if a tangle of tiny nerves were being cut dexterously, one by one; the pain writhed spirally and came to her who was a pink bird and sat on the top of a cone. The pain was a pyramid made of a diamond; it was an intense light; it was the hottest fire, the coldest chill, the highest peak, the fastest force, the furthest reach, the newest time. It possessed nothing of her but its one infinitesimal scene: beyond the screen as thin as gossamer, the brain trembled for its life. . . .

After the operation Pansy knows herself violated, her interior castle plundered; she is both healing, and doomed. She lies unmoving "as if in a hammock in a pause of bitterness. She closed her eyes, shutting herself up within her treasureless head."