[In the following essay, which focuses on three of Stafford's novels and many of her short stories, Vickery examines how Stafford's integration of psychological, humanistic, and Christian concepts contributes to her ironic vision of the world.]

Among contemporary writers Jean Stafford has merited considerable critical attention and received surprisingly little. . . . Reviewers have pointed out her affinities with Proust, James, Austen, and Dostoevski and solemnly agreed that she is not their equal. But since not many novelists are, it is perhaps fairer and certainly more instructive to think of her in relation to such authors as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, both of whom have commanded far greater attention than Miss Stafford, if only by virtue of their connection with the currently fashionable South. All three are fascinated by the image of childhood and adolescence; by the misfit or freak who dramatizes isolation, loneliness, and inversion; and by the poignant quest of the individual for understanding and love. The Member of the Wedding echoes in mood, theme, and character The Mountain Lion The Golden Apples and Boston Adventure both focus on the exclusiveness of a group, whether familiar or societal; and the tormented creatures of The Ballad of the Sad Café, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and Reflections in a Golden Eye find their kin in all of Miss Stafford's novels and short stories.

At the same time there is a considerable difference in the sensibility of these three novelists. Carson McCullers has a gift for the initial perception which is also a basic one and which she enshrines in the movement of the plot. Eudora Welty, a virtuoso of style and mood, is a fabulist of the imagination. In contradistinction to both of these, Jean Stafford is firmly committed to the ironic vision of the external world of manners and the internal world of psychological process. Whatever the reason for critical neglect, then, whether her slender output or simply her failure to capture the popular imagination, it is time that a closer look was given to her novels: Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1947), and The Catherine Wheel (1950), as well as to her short stories, ten of which were collected as part of The Interior Castle (1953). By so doing we may discover a fictional world with manifest interest and significance for our time.

For the historical orientation of this world, Miss Stafford uses the inexorable drift towards the Second World War and its chaotic aftermath. Though she is not primarily concerned with politics, national or international, nor with the events recorded in history books, references to storm troopers, anti-Semitism, the Spanish Civil War, and the attraction of Communism convey the tensions of a world bent on its own destruction. In her view, expressed in an essay in the Kenyon Review (Spring, 1948), the import of our history is to be guaged by our emotional reaction to it: "As human beings, and therefore as writers, we are confronted by wars and the wickedness that makes them, and to the famine and disease and spiritual mutilations that follow them, by the shipwreck of our manners and our morality, by an almost universal sickness of heart. And the most romantic writer and the most diligently lighthearted clown of a writer cannot fail to be touched by the massive mood that lies upon the whole world." The "shipwreck of our manners and our morality" has left its survivors struggling on a new Dover Beach where there is "neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." This cultural dissolution is neatly charted in the three novels, progressing from the moral corruption of Miss Pride and her select group of proper Bostonians in Boston Adventure to the emotional alienation of Ralph and Molly Fawcett in The Mountain Lion and the spiritual disintegration of Katherine Congreve and Andrew Shipley in The Catherine Wheel. Obliquely and with the perhaps unwitting sensitivity or an emotional seismograph each novel registers the successive tremors in American moral attitudes toward the international dissolution of the war that dominated the time of their writing.

The dissolution is suggested through the horrifying glimpses of the mark of the beast beneath the placid and indeed beautiful surface of nature, civilization, and man himself. Though examples might be multiplied until they encompass all of Miss Stafford's work, some of the more striking will suffice. Sonie Marburg in Boston Adventure watches her beloved kitten being mangled by a dog, "the dog's eyes popping as he rent and strangled the creature, spittle mingling with blood," only to return a little later to her play as if nothing had happened. In the pastoral retreat of Congreve House in The Catherine Wheel, a pampered cat gnaws the head off one of its kittens, drags the mutilated body to its mistress's bed, and returns to its basket to luxuriate among the remaining kittens. Horror is intensified as his cousin and sister both suspect the boy Andrew of being responsible. The violence is paralleled on the human level by Molly Fawcett of The Mountain Lion deliberately burning her hand with acid or drowning a wood mouse in a milk bottle and "rejoicing brutishly in the swimming and the squealing which became slower and fainter and at last ceased while the small speckled body swelled and the sharp teeth showed themselves in an angry grin." Actually retching, Dr. Pakheiser in "The Home Front" watches a family getting an intense communal enjoyment out of trampling caterpillars to death. But it is in "A Modest Proposal," as its title would suggest, that horror reaches its nadir as a man describes his preparation of a Negro child, found in a fire-gutted house, as dinner for his friend. Though the grisly meal is only served and not eaten, the casual introduction of cannibalism, first as a practical joke then as an anecdote to be recounted at a cocktail party, is sufficiently appalling.

These dark impulses, expressed not only in individual acts but in the wholesale slaughter of battle, remain as part of war's aftermath of disorder and dislocation. The latter finds its embodiment in the alien as hero, simultaneously epical and picaresque. Like Henry James, Jean Stafford sends her characters to Europe, usually Germany, to have their illusions tested and their innocence shattered in a culture they cannot understand. Typical of these is the young American journalist in "The Maiden," who sees serenity, sensitivity, and, most important, a capacity for love in an unloving world embodied in a German lawyer and his wife, only to discover that their love had had its origin in the totentanz, in the sexual excitation of observing the execution of a petty criminal. The theme of an ancient evil, of guilt and disillusionment, is inextricably a part of the European adventure. Conversely, Europeans are driven by necessity or their own restlessness to become aliens in America. A German shoemaker and his Russian wife, a wealthy countess, a doctor from Heidelberg, a Hungarian landlady, their ties with Europe broken and those with America not yet established, take their place as residents of a cultural limbo where they live the marginal existence of the deracinated.

The theme of the alien, the stranger in a strange land, is also worked out by Americans in an American setting. In "Children are Bored on Sunday" a self-designated "rube" finds herself among New York intellectuals; in "The Bleeding Heart" a young girl from New Mexico goes to live in New England; in "A Summer Day" a young Cherokee boy is suddenly removed from his familiar environment and sent to an Indian reservation. Painfully lonely and uncertain, these characters sense a quality either sinister or menacing in the new world into which they have wandered. But these are partial portraits of the alien who receives his archetypal expression in the figure of the Jew, explored in considerable detail through Nathan Kadish of Boston Adventure as well as in "A Winter's Tale." Once more he has assumed literally the role of the Wandering Jew, but his dispossession is a sign not of punishment but of the human condition. He becomes for Miss Stafford the supreme symbol of the "disaccommodated man" in the modern world.

The cultural dissolution seen under the perspective of alienation and dislocation emerges as well in the collapse of the family. The traditional symbol of power and authority, the father, is notably missing from the scene. When not dead, as in The Mountain Lion, he is curiously ineffectual, unable to control his family or himself. Either he withdraws from the conflict, allowing the women to dominate, or he escapes by simply abandoning his family, as Hermann Marburg does in Boston Adventure or as John Shipley seeks to do in The Catherine Wheel. In contrast, those fathers who are dead are invested with considerable power, particularly over their female descendants. Mr. Bonney, Mr. Pride, and Mr. Congreve arouse in their daughters a feeling akin to idolatry. This striking contrast between the powerful dead father and the ineffectual living one serves to symbolize a lost order, an interrupted tradition, and, most broadly, a historical discontinuity.

Similarly, the mother who is the core of the emotional life and stability of the family is either dead, undependable, or a monstrous burlesque of herself. Mrs. Congreve, unloved by both her husband and daughter, devotes her energy to world causes and movements. Mrs. Fawcett, doting on her attractive older daughters, offers a fussy concern instead of affection to her younger children. And Mrs. Marburg, who feels intense—even maniacal—hatred for her son as well as her husband, regards her daughter with emotionalism rather than emotion. Finally, Persis Galt keeps her family together by blackmail, a practice she also uses on a young Jewish storm trooper, who is thus forced into becoming her lover. This craving for power, traditionally a male prerogative, culminates in Miss Pride, who is utterly incapable of love but who with genteel ruthlessness dominates her servants, her friends, her niece, her very cat. It is little wonder that the child becomes the rebel, repudiating his family in order to join his alter ego, the alien, in his endless quest for a home.

Linked to the alien and the rebel is yet another figure, the freak. For what Miss Stafford refers to as "spiritual mutilation" has a physical equivalent in the symbolic scar. In contrast to the beauty and serenity of Congreve House, there is a veritable gallery of freaks—an epileptic, a monstrously fat lady, a man with an ear no bigger than a peanut, and another with no nose. Others, more normal in appearance, reveal a variety of eccentricities which never fail to fascinate Andrew Shipley and his friend, Victor Smithwick. Though not actual freaks, many of the major characters display some disfigurement, some evidence of their invisible wound. An incongruous note in the perfection of their beauty is provided by Katherine Congreve's snow white hair and by Shura Marburg's cracked and reddened hands. More striking are the crosswork of scars on the face of the young girl in "The Interior Castle." the ugliness, at once pathetic and ludicrous, of Ralph and Molly Fawcett, the unsightly wen covered by the yellow ascot of the seemingly impeccable Bostonian in "The Bleeding Heart," and the livid purple patch on the cheek of Nathan Kadish, making him "as sensitive as if his mark were a raw sore, continually being rubbed against or hit." As long as they bear these scars, such characters are the outcasts and misfits of the human community, presenting the most extreme form of alienation possible, alienation from the self as well as the world. The image of the former is found in Ramona Dunn of "The Echo and the Nemesis" brooding over the Ariel self she had buried under layers and layers of fat, or in Pansy Vanneman of "The Interior Castle" recognizing "that she could never again love anything as ecstatically as she loved the spirit of Pansy Vanneman, enclosed within her head."

These three archetypal figures—the alien, the rebel, and the freak—serve, then, as a focus for exploring the cultural condition of the modern world. That condition is given an ethical dimension through a fusion of psychological, humanistic, and Christian terms. Moral judgment is couched in the language of Freud as well as of the Bible, and the fusion is effected through imagery. The serpent, referred to in crucial scenes of each of the novels, is equally at home in the worlds of theology and depth psychology, and possession by the devil may be construed literally or metaphorically. By seeing the eternal problem of innocence and guilt, good and knowledge, from this threefold perspective, Miss Stafford gives full scope to her ironic vision while enriching and extending her material. The use of terms, concepts, and images drawn from a variety of ideologies is the language and technique of the ironist who seeks to show both the metaphoric, incomplete character of the insights they articulate and their inability to command single-minded belief.

It is clear that this interlocking pattern elaborates a basically dualistic view of the universe. In psychological terms, the conflict is between the unconscious with its welter of instincts, drives, and desires and the conscious mind engaged in its intricate task of self-determination. In humanistic terms, it is between the forces of irrationality or passion and those of reason. And finally, in Christian terms, the dualism is enacted between God and the devil, divine grace and natural depravity. Developing the parallels: the victory of the unconscious may be regarded as self-indulgence and irresponsibility or as sin and possession by the devil. Shura Marburg in the grip of the compulsions she is prey to is described as being "inhabited by a ravenous and indefatigable fiend"; and Hopestill Mather, under the care of a psychiatrist and appalled by her own nature, claims: "There's probably a devil in me, one straight from hell like those in the Salem witches my ancestors used to burn." Similarly, the victory of the conscious mind is also the victory of reason and God. The fusion of disciplines is suggested in Hopestill's definition of her own condition: "I mean my balance was lost, my integrity, whatever it is in the name of God that keeps one together." Each claims recognition and each by itself is incomplete, "for salvation for one soul is perdition for another and what might send me to hell would give you grace."

Caught up in this dualistic universe, the individual is necessarily involved in a never-ending conflict conducted on a multitude of levels. Dream struggles against reality, leading Rose Fabrizio of "The Bleeding Heart" to escape her own environment by inventing a story of being adopted by a cultured Bostonian whom she has seen in the public library, or the young wife in "A Country Love Story" to imagine a lover who finally becomes more real and more precious than her taciturn, suspicious husband. Those who do not retreat into "the interior castle" of fantasy are confronted with a twofold quest: the search for a unified self which will establish inner harmony and the search for love which will assure external accord. The former focuses on the moral and psychological problem of guilt arising out of the divergent pressures of desire and duty or emotion and reason. The latter quest is concerned with the social problem of the relationship between the self and others, bearing its own dichotomies of love and hate, acceptance and rejection, communion and an intensified sense of isolation. In the macabre symbolic marriage of Emma and Eisenburg of "Children are Bored on Sunday" the two quests are fused to reveal their full complexity and irony. If only for a brief time, they seek "to compare their illnesses, to marry their invalid souls for these few hours of painful communion, and to babble with rapture that they were at last, for a little while, no longer alone. Only thus, as sick people, could they marry. In any other terms, it would be a mésalliance....If only it could take place—this honeymoon of the cripples, this nuptial consummation of the abandoned."

But with unremitting irony, Miss Stafford refuses to recognize any final resolution of the conflict. Love has the power not only to heal and unify but to rend and distort. Harmony achieved on any one level signals an unexpected eruption on another. The pattern is clear. In Boston Adventure Sonie Marburg escapes from her own emotionally disordered background into the stable and fixed society of Boston only to find that its order is the result of a concerted determination to ignore the human struggle. Social virtues coexist with moral corruption and social order with personal chaos. The social man is forever engaged in attempting to subdue the primitive elements in his own atavistic self. Accordingly, the resolution of conflict in and through society is exposed as an illusion. In The Mountain Lion, the social order is repudiated by the Fawcett children, who seek in nature a source of strength and renewal. But Molly is as much a misfit in the world of nature as in the world of society, and Ralph discovers that his own immersion in nature cannot solve his moral dilemma. In an ironic reversal of the earlier novel, the distortions and inadequacies of the natural man are vividly defined. Ralph's strong sense of his own shame and guilt prevents him from being absorbed into the amoral condition of nature. And in a final intensification of irony, The Catherine Wheel eliminates every sign of external conflict or disorder without being able to soothe the torment of Katherine Congreve or Andrew Shipley. Katherine's ideal of civilized conduct, embodied in her dead father, has power to regulate her actions but not her reactions. And even as she gains some measure of control over her recalcitrant self, the battle shifts to her relationship with Andrew. The social world of Boston, the natural world of Colorado, and the civilized world of Congreve House symbolize three major ways in which man has attempted to escape the dilemma of his own nature. But the ironic vision forces man to look at his own image and without equivocation to recognize therein a shifting, flickering shape. In terms of action man is necessarily the victim of his own dual nature and world, but in terms of knowledge he transcends the conflict. To understand the human condition is the only form the quest can take when it is conducted under the guidance of the ironic vision.