SOURCE: "The Young Girl in the West: Disenchantment in Jean Stafford's Short Fiction," in Women and Western American Literature, The Whitston Publishing Company, 1982, pp. 230-43.

[In this essay, Walsh examines the role of women and girls in the western stories in The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford.]

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, Stafford groups ten stories under the heading, "Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains." The heading, which suggests a romantic, mythic West of the past filled with red men and white men in conflict, ironically comments on the contemporary, restricted lives of the characters in Stafford's stories who grow up overshadowed by that myth. For Stafford's central characters are girls and young women and a small Indian boy. They live in a modern West, most of them in one small town, a vantage point from which they get only occasional glimpses of the glorious West that was. They are, for the most part, separated both by time and by sex from the expansive Western tradition which provides a sharp contrast to their cramped and painful lives.

Seven of the stories are set in Adams, Colorado. In the "Author's Note" to The Collected Stories, Stafford writes that her "roots remain" in this semi-fictitious town. Adams, Colorado, is in an important sense Stafford's Yoknapatawpha. The stories she sets there strongly define her perception of the reality of the lives of girls and young women in the West. Adams is a quiet college town in the foothills of the Rockies. For each of Stafford's characters, however, the geography of the town is more narrowly defined than in this generalization. For most, the geography is rather bleak; for some, grotesque. The restrictions on their lives are exemplified in how they see where they live.

Nine-year-old Jessie, "The Healthiest Girl in Town," sees Adams as a place where three different classes of tuberculars live out "their static, cautious lives." The rich live in a resort-like hilltop sanitarium. The very poor live on the edge of town in a settlement of low, mean cottages. The houses of the middle class, the kind of people for whom her mother works as a practical nurse, are epitomized by the home of the Butlers, which smells constantly of witch hazel and which is always quiet except for the sounds of illness and approaching death. For Kitty Winstanley, in "The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies," Adams is a world of near bankrupt boarding houses where her mother and other boarding house keepers rest their swollen feet and their "tumid hands mutilated by work" in kitchens such as the Winstanley's—"a room all skin and bones: a coal-oil range with gaunt Queen Anne legs, a Hoosier cabinet ready to shudder into pieces, a linoleum rug worn down to gummy blackness save in the places that were inaccessible to feet and still showed forth its pattern of glossy bruises. ... " The narrator of "In the Zoo" and her sister Daisy, who also grew up in the geography of the boarding houses, remember Adams as an "ugly town" with a "dreary park," "mongrel . . . churches," a "high school shaped like a loaf of bread." For them, the college campus was "an oasis of which [they] had no experience except to walk through it now and then. . . . "

For Cora Savage, in "The Philosophy Lesson," the college is not an oasis, but a place where she poses nude and immobile for a life drawing class, three mornings a week for three hours at a stretch, ignored by the other students except as she is an object which they paint or draw. Although Polly Bay, in "The Liberation," teaches at the college, for her Adams is reduced to a city block, lined by the ancestral homes of the Bays, a place which induces in her a feeling of claustrophobia. The homes are in various stages of dismantling, which suggest the decay of the Bay family. One has become a museum, one has been made into apartments, and one has been torn down. The fourth is the one in which she lives with her widowed aunt and widowed uncle, a house so "gorged with furniture and with garnishments and clumps and hoards of artifacts of Bays, you had no sense of space . . . and felt cornered and nudged and threatened. . . . "

Emily Vanderpool, the narrator of "Bad Characters" and "A Reading Problem," inhabits yet another Adams. While her own home is a "normal" middle-class household, her travels around Adams take her to the "bedlam" of a Woolworth's, where old men "look as if they were walking over their own dead bodies"; to the library, where the librarian wears a yellow wig; to the lobby of a hotel whose permanent residents are querulous old men; to the waiting room of the jail where she overhears obscenities shouted by drunken moonshiners; and finally to a roadside campground where the single occupants are a traveling evangelist-bootlegger and his daughter.

The Adams, Colorado, in which these girls and young women live is, then, collectively a place of illness, poverty, stasis, and grotesquerie. In this landscape, they are allowed little freedom of action. For months, Jessie is forced to spend several afternoons a week enduring boredom and harassment as the captive playmate of the children of her widowed mother's employer, so that her mother will not lose her job. Throughout the deadly afternoons the sickly Butler children lovingly caress their illnesses and deride Jessie's healthiness. The sisters in "In the Zoo" are equally trapped. None of their movements goes undetected or untaunted by their foster mother. She does not object to their visits to their one childhood friend, a gentle, drunken Irishman who lives by the railroad tracks with two capuchin monkeys and several other animals, because these visits allow her to heap verbal abuse on Mr. Murphy. Her greatest triumph over the sisters and their friend is turning the gentle dog given to the girls by Mr. Murphy into a killer that destroys one of his beloved capuchins.

Emily Vanderpool, whose family and social class at least allow her the freedom of choosing her own friends and moving with relative ease about the town, is nonetheless not shielded from painful and grotesque human situations, which come to her in the persons of Lottie Jump and Opal Gerlash. Emily bewails her "bad character" which causes her to alienate all her friends. Lottie Jump, whom Emily first encounters as a thief in the Vanderpool home, is a hardened, eleven-year-old criminal, "evilly ugly," dressed in filthy, ill-fitting clothes. She is a real "bad character," the extension in all details of Emily's somewhat refined fears. Similarly, Emily's "reading problem" is parodied by the situation of Opal Gerlash. When Emily finally finds a place where she can read and memorize the names of the books of the Bible, Opal and her father intrude upon Emily's peace. Opal, a twelve-year-old con artist who assists her father in selling hell-fire-and-brimstone religion and an alcohol-based liver medicine, recites by rote some of her religious spiel.

The actions of Emily, Jessie, and the sisters in "In the Zoo" are limited partly because they are children. The actions of the older young women in the other Adams stories are, however, equally limited. Cora Savage and Kitty Winstanley are both students at Nevilles College. That they are educating themselves suggests a possible means for them to achieve greater freedom and eventually to escape their current situations. It is important, however, that neither do they consciously consider this point nor does Stafford imply it, other than by portraying them as college students. In fact, in the most stunning image of restriction in the stories, Cora is literally immobile throughout the episode of "The Philosophy Lesson." She poses nude, only her eyes and her mind active, enduring the psychological pain of becoming an object and servant to her fellow students and the harsh physical pain of her straining muscles. Kitty, like Cora, is restricted to the role of servant to her fellow students each evening in her mother's boarding house. Each summer she escapes to the comparative freedom of a dude ranch, where as a hired servant she is in a less ambiguous position than she is in at home, but where she exists at the whim of the dudes and her employers and where her day is circumscribed by chores from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Polly Bay spends her almost thirty years hemmed in by her family's Western chauvinism and inherited bigotries, symbolized by the city block on which they all lived, which Polly feels as a "zone restricted for the use of her blood kin, for there lingered in it some energy, some air, some admonition that this was the territory of Bays and that Bays and ghosts of Bays were, and forever would be, in residence." She acquiesces to all the family's demands, living to please them, so that she feels her life is "a dream of smothering."

The family situations of the girls and young women in the Adams stories contribute to their powerlessness. Most of the characters are in fact either orphans or the children of invalid fathers. Thus, early in their lives they have experienced the deep emotional loss caused by the death or lingering illness of a parent and the resulting psychological and physical deprivation. While Emily Vanderpool's parents are both very much alive, the distortions in the lives of her alter egos are at least partially explained by missing or disabled parents. Opal Gerlash's mother had died a year before Emily encounters her. Lottie Jump's father was slowly dying of tuberculosis. Although Cora Savage fondly remembers some childhood experiences with her father, he is absent from her reflections on the present. It is only her "anxious United Presbyterian" mother whom she has had to reassure about her posing nude. Kitty Winstanley's father has lost a lung. His inability to find work and the constant fear and bitterness of his wife as they live "hand to mouth, one jump ahead of the sheriff unman him, in the eyes of Kitty, who hates him for his weakness and hates her mother "for her injustice" and hates "herself for hating in them what they could not help."

The other characters are true orphans. Jessie, in all her health, is "possessed with the facts of dying and of death," especially by the memory of her father's death from gangrene. While she retains the consolation of a "valiant, pretty" mother, the two of them are subject because of her father's death to having to please people like the Butlers so that they may live. The deaths of both their parents place the sisters in "In the Zoo" in the hands of the paranoiac Mrs. Placer, herself the widow of a tubercular husband. Griefstricken for their parents and with no responsible relatives to offer them comfort, the girls are left to grow up "like worms," in a house "steeped in . . . mists of accusation and hidden plots and double meanings. . . . "

Both Polly Bay's parents are also dead. Her mother died when she was a child. Her father's death, seven years prior to the action of "The Liberation," has placed her at the mercy of her aunt and uncle: "Both widowed and both bereft of their heartless children, [they] had cajoled her and played tricks upon her will until she had consented to go and live with them. It was not so much because she was weak as it was because they were so extremely strong that she had at last capitulated out of fatigue. . . . "

Orphaned or near-orphaned, caught like insects in amber in restricted situations, living in a nightmarish landscape, the girls and young women cope with their situations, but they do not resolve them. Jessie is unable to free herself from spending the obligatory afternoons with the Butler children. She does however defy them with her vitality and frees herself from the feeling they had imposed on her that her health was a "disgrace." In a purging of fear and anguish and as a reaction to their torture, she admits she has lied about her father's dying of leprosy. She exultantly exclaims: "'He got shot out hunting, if you want to know. . . . My father was as tall as this room. The district nurse told Ma that I am the healthiest girl in town. Also I have the best teeth."'

The sisters in "In the Zoo" cope by adapting their behavior to the suspicions of Mrs. Placer, living "in a mesh of lies and evasions, baffled and mean, like rats in a maze." As adults, they wonder why they had not fled their situation as soon as they were old enough to work. They realize, the narrator concludes, that Mrs. Placer had "held us trapped by our sense of guilt. We were vitiated, and we had no choice but to wait, flaccidly, for her to die." The sisters as adults feel themselves at last free of the "succubus" who had preyed on them. Their farewell remarks to each other, however, reveal that they have been permanently damaged by the suspicion and hostility toward other people that Mrs. Placer ingrained in them, even to the point of their unconsciously using her favorite phrase, "I had to laugh," to preface their spiteful remarks about the narrator's fellow passengers.

Polly Bay is awakened to her situation when she falls in love and begins planning to leave her aunt and uncle. She begins to understand how she had coped. She sees, "appalled and miserably ashamed of herself, that she had never once insisted on her own identity in this house. She had dishonestly, supinely (thinking, however, that she was only being polite), allowed her aunt and uncle to believe that she was contented in their house, in sympathy with them, and keenly interested in the minutiae that preoccupied them. . . . She had never disagreed with them. . . . " She counts herself lucky that unlike Aunt Lacy, her uncle's wife, she had not had to die to free herself of the Bays. In an outrageous irony, her fiancé does die. Nonetheless, her love for him and the realization that her love has brought to her about her life continue the impetus for her "liberation." She leaves Adams, not triumphantly as she has expected, but fleeing, taking with her only the clothes she is wearing.

Kitty Winstanley survives by being absolutely realistic about her situation. Her mother and her mother's friends must live by illusion, "lest the full confrontation with reality shatter them to smithereens." They cannot admit "to the monotonous terror of debt that kept them wakeful at night despite the weariness that was their incessant condition, or to the aching disappointment to which they daily rose, or to their hopeless, helpless contempt for their unemployed husbands. ... " Kitty does. Despite the rosy picture her mother paints of her as a college student, she knows that she and the children of similar households are "exhausted from classes and study and part-time jobs and perpetually starved for status .. . and clothes .. . and fun." The summers at the dude ranch, which her mother describes as Kitty's "vacation with pay," Kitty knows to be "friendless, silent, long and exasperating." Nonetheless, Kitty lives through the summers "in pride and without woe," because there at least she can escape the hypocrisy of her life at home.

Cora Savage's body remains frozen in a pose, but her active mind seeks release. The avenues she finds remove her farther from, rather than connect her to, humanity. First she glories in the falling snow, because it dematerializes the studio and conceals "the harshness of the world." Then she reflects on Bishop Berkeley's philosophy and concludes that "she would be at peace forever if she could believe that she existed only for herself and possibly for a superior intelligence and that no one existed for her save when he was tangibly present." Finally, she considers the ultimate dematerialization of self, the possibility of suicide.

Emily Vanderpool, who seems to lead a life that Jessie and Mrs. Placer's foster children would long for, cannot control or resolve by herself the bizarre situations into which she falls. Lottie Jump mesmerizes her. She is afraid that Lottie will "get revenge" on her if she does not join Lottie in the shoplifting venture. Finally, it is she, not Lottie, who is punished when they are caught. She is trapped by the Gerlashes first because she has been taught to answer when adults ask her a question and secondly because Gerlash physically restrains her while they threaten her.

As the powerless often do, many of these characters turn their frustration inward and begin to hate themselves. Jessie begins to loathe her own health. She sees herself as a "pariah" and begins to be ashamed, she says, "not only of myself but of my mother, who was crassly impervious to disease. .. . I felt left out, not only in the Butler's house but in this town of consumptive confederates." In a terrible irony, she longs to be as ill as her tormentors. Under the tutelage of Mrs. Placer, the orphaned sisters develop a suspicion of themselves which makes them "mope and weep and grimace with self-judgment." As Mrs. Placer destroys their friendship with Mr. Murphy, they wish they were dead and wish they were "something besides kids! Besides girls." Kitty Winstanley hates herself for hating her parents. Cora Savage's thoughts of suicide reveal her self-loathing. Polly Bay feels "an ebbing away of self-respect" and under her uncle's harassment doubts "the testimony of her own eyes, the judgments of her own intellect." Even Emily Vanderpool says, "My badness never gave me half the enjoyment Jack and Stella thought it did. A good deal of the time I wanted to eat lye."

The backdrop against which the lives of these characters are played out is the West of "cowboys and Indians, and magic mountains." None of them, however, participates in the heroic West. Polly Bay comes closest. Her family had migrated to Colorado in a covered wagon in the 1840's, and her senile great-grandmother had talked "without pause of red Indians and storms on the plains," chastising her descendants by saying, "Not a one of you knows the sensation of having a red Indian arrow whiz by your sunbonnet with wind enough to make the ribbons wave." The family's pride in its forebears has calcified to a defense of all things Western, and a hatred of all things Eastern. As Polly contemplates her escape to the East, she realizes the Bays have been "too busy defending the West even to look at it. For all their pride in their surroundings, they had never contemplated them at all but had sat with the shades drawn, huddled under the steel engravings." She looks forward to a time after the deaths of her aunt and uncle when the young Bays may return, free to view the landscape, when "in their mouths there would not be a trace of the dust of the prairies where, as on a treadmill, Great-grandfather Bay's oxen plodded on and on into eternity."

For Emily Vanderpool, the heroic West is reduced to a collection of "seedy" souvenirs in the lobby of the hotel: "a rusted, beat-up placer pan with samples of ore in it, some fossils and some arrowheads, a tomahawk, a powder horn, and the shellacked tail of a beaver that was supposed to have been trapped by a desperado named Mountain Jim Nugent, who had lived in Estes Park in the seventies." This West has no meaning for Emily except that the collection is the source of an argument between the old men at the hotel that ultimately forces Emily from her reading place.

Other characters have made westward treks which parody the pioneering of the Bays and the tarnished glory of the souvenirs in the hotel. The pastor who sends the orphaned sisters west to their foster home talks to them "of Indians and of buffaloes," trying to use the romance of the West to quiet them. Jessie moves west with her mother "because there were enough [sick] people there to need her [mother's] services and therefore to keep a roof over our heads and shoes on our feet." Kitty Winstanley's family has sought a new life in the West because of her father's health. The same is true of Lottie Jump's family. The situation in "A Philosophy Lesson" suggests the same is true for Cora Savage's family. For these families, with absent or invalid fathers, there is no possibility that the West will yield riches from a placer pan or a trap line or glory from a brush with the Indians.

The image of the young female in the West that emerges in the Adams stories is that of a human being who is powerless, who has few defenses, who exhibits some degree of self-hatred, who lives in a confined psychological and physical space, and whose actions are restricted to surviving in that space, rather than redefining it. Stafford herself fled the West. "As soon as I could," she says, "I hotfooted it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean." She was pursued no doubt by the smothering image that she presents in the Adams stories. Stafford does give us glimpses of girls and women whose lives do not seem as circumscribed as the lives of her central characters. Cora Savage and Kitty Winstanley go to school with young women who enjoy all the advantages of wealth. The Butler children can control, not be controlled by, Jessie. Mrs. Butler holds a Phi Beta Kappa key, was a student of Professor Kittredge, and writes plays. It is important to recognize, however, that the lives Stafford chooses to reveal fully are circumscribed. The stories also make clear that had she examined the lives of these others, she probably would have found that they too have little freedom. Polly Bay, after all, is a member of a wealthy, prominent family. Emily Vanderpool suffers no economic or physical deprivation.

The other three Western stories in the Collected Stories further develop the idea of the West as a place from which romance and heroism have vanished and as a place which is antithetical to young women. "A Summer Day" is set in the Indian territory, in the capital of the Cherokee nation. Jim Littlefield, the eight-year-old orphan who follows his own trail of tears to Oklahoma, symbolizes the diminished stature of the red man in the West. He and his fellow Cherokees, adults and children alike, are wards of Uncle Sam. He is placed in an orphanage, where most of the children are sick, and one has died, as a result of drinking bad water, because the bureaucrats in Washington have failed to provide an adequate septic tank for the orphanage. While Jim enters the orphanage with plans to escape as soon as night falls, he is overpowered by his experiences of the day—by the heat, the isolation, the bureaucracy, the sickness—and decides to delay his escape. As he falls asleep, outside in the heat, alone and unprotected, lying on the "sickly grass," he sees himself "growing smaller and smaller and lying in a bureau drawer." Jim's sense of himself as diminished, his inability to carry out his escape, his confinement in an institution which is riddled by disease—all re-enact the fate of the conquered Indian nations. It is perhaps no accident that Stafford portrays the powerlessness of Jim Littlefield, an Indian, in terms very similar to those she uses to describe the lives of young women in the Adams stories.

Judy, the narrator and central character of "The Mountain Day," has all the advantages that the Adams characters lack. She is a student at Bryn Mawr, engaged to a handsome and intelligent Harvard student. Her family is loving and wealthy. Vacationing in Colorado with her family, Judy, in this summer of her love, finds the West more beautiful than it has ever been: "The aspen leaves were more brilliant. . . , the upland snow was purer, the pinewoods were more redolent, and the gentle winds in them were more mellifluous; the berries I ate for breakfast came from the bushes of Eden." The same landscape holds danger, however. Huge turtles and hellbenders live in the heart-shaped lake which lies between her father's cabin and her grandmother's house. While Judy is protected from these and other dangers, the young Irish maids who work for her grandmother are not. When they capsize a canoe in the lake, they drown and their bodies are mutilated by the turtles and hellbenders. Thus, against Judy's "storybook summertime romance," Stafford juxtaposes the stark image of the corpses of two young women, "their lovely faces and their work-swollen hands" eaten away, an image of what can happen to women in the West infinitely more powerful than the happy ending suggested for Judy.

The last of the ten Western stories, "The Darkening Moon," is emblematic of Stafford's portrayal of the young girl in the West. Ella, the central character, is eleven years old. Her father has been dead for one year. She lives in a small, nameless mining town. Her story takes place completely at night. When we first see her, she is "alone beneath the black firmament and between the blacker mountains that [loom] up to the right and to the left of her like the blurred figures of fantastic beasts." She makes a trip she often makes, riding her brother's horse several miles through the dark to babysit at an isolated farm on the other side of town. Sometimes she dreads the trip because the horse tries to throw her if it is frightened by the sight of the high bluffs along the highway. Once it had tossed her in the path of a bus and left her to walk a mile and a half home in the cold. Tonight she has the added danger of carrying through town ten pounds of elk meat her brother has poached. She postpones her arrival at the farm as long as she dares, knowing that this will be like all the other evenings she has spent there: "Afraid to move lest by moving she make a noise that would obscure another noise . . . , she would sit motionless all evening in a big pink wing chair. .. . By midnight, she would be wringing wet with sweat, although it was cold and she had let the fire go out. And yet, as soon as she had mounted for the ride back, her fear had changed its focus and she was not anxious to get home, but only to get Squaw safely past the bluff." This night is like the others, except that Ella endures the additional horror of an eclipse of the moon.

Stripped of its narrative particulars, this story embodies Stafford's version of the mythic journey possible to young girls in the West. An orphaned child travels through a dark landscape riding a steed which she has difficulty controlling because the landscape itself threatens the beast. Her destination is a place where she sits paralyzed by fear. She is released from her place of paralysis only to travel once again through the threatening landscape and to return to where she began. This is not the triumphant journey of a hero. Her dark night of the soul does not release her finally into the light of new perceptions and new possibilities. Instead, it is a journey which she is doomed to repeat. The repetition and the willingness with which the young girl reenters her state of paralysis distinguish the horror of her situation. She has accepted the journey as normality.

The stories in the Collected Stories do not provide us with a means of comparing the lives of the central female characters with those of boys and young men in similar settings and situations. Stafford's western novel, The Mountain Lion, does. Stafford places Molly and Ralph Fawcett, a young sister and brother, in exactly the same situations, makes them equally misfit, and has them share an emotional bond which makes them the male and female sides of the same coin. Their destinies, however, are very different. Molly, unlike the characters in the stories, does not cope and is unable to accept the limited life open to her as a female. Consequently, she must die. She is accidentally shot to death by Ralph, who thus frees himself so that he can reach his full masculine possibilities. Interestingly enough, in commenting on The Mountain Lion, which, as nearly as any novel can, equally examines the lives of a young boy and a young girl, one critic doesn't even mention Molly. Another critic apparently considers Molly's death a lesser tragedy than the fact that Ralph must grow up with his principles compromised. Only Blanche H. Gelfant, in my opinion, has fully explained the uncomfortable truth the novel presents:

Molly dies, I believe, in a sacrificial ceremony disguised as accident. Her death is demanded by the great masculine myth of the West—a symbolic place: where boys like Ralph become men; and girls like Molly become not only extraneous and intrusive, but actively threatening to the ritual of male initiation. For just as the West held the promise of innocence, so also it promised manhood. It defined the terms for manhood by its ritual, which, in the American novel, might be modified in its details, but never in its exclusion of women. The young hero going West was to leave all women behind. In the wilderness he was to join a male tribe of archetypal hunters. They were to designate a sacred spot of wilderness and a legendary animal, usually personified, as the place and object of the hunt. When the boy and animal met, in a mystically charged encounter, he achieved courage, skill and pride—and became a man. . . . Ralph has committed himself to a timeless ritual of initiation, and implicitly to the decision to break with Molly. For as a female she encumbers him in his obsessive stalking of the mountain lion, and of the masculinity that is for him the real trophy of the hunt. Her constant presence reminds him of a part of himself he can no longer endure as he grows up, and indeed must kill: the feminine part of his nature.

The female characters in Stafford's stories do not have to make Molly Fawcett's ultimate sacrifice to the myth of the West. What is clear from the stories, however, is that the myth equally excludes them. The reality of their lives denies the ideas in the myth of boundless individual opportunity, of freedom and open spaces, of the chance to form one's own destiny. Instead, the dominant images are repressive ones: girls and young women trapped inside unpleasant houses, frozen in immobile positions, surrounded by the trappings of illness and death, often harassed by grotesque people. The uncomfortable truth suggested by the stories is that the initiation ritual for these young women is learning to accept their condition—to live with fear and pain and restraint as a normal consequence of their being female.