SOURCE: "Through Caverns Measureless to Man: Jean Stafford's 'The Interior Castle,'" in Shenandoah, Vol. 34, No. 4, 1983, pp. 79-95.

[In this essay, Leary relates Stafford's personal experiences, particularly her tempestuous relationship with husband Robert Lowell, to the short story "The Interior Castle, " stating the story "may be viewed as a metaphor of Stafford's own battle for survival."]

Anyone seeking an appropriate title for a book that would do justice to the more colorful episodes in Jean Stafford's own life might feel compelled to come up with something like "Profiles in Pain," for many of the experiences she endured were as harrowing as those of her suffering characters. But the kind of hyperbolic titles we have had thrust upon us by contemporary writers and their publishers was not to Stafford's taste, whether applied to her literary creations or to herself. Schooled in stoicism, she cultivated an ironic view of life and of her own role in it. And while exercising great care in the selection of titles for her novels and short stories (on at least six occasions she changed the titles of stories that were appearing for a second time in collections), she scrupulously avoided the sensational and the declamatory in favor of the comic, the understated, or the cryptic. It is not surprising, therefore, that her pitiless fictional account of the operation needed to remake her nose, after a near-fatal automobile accident that fractured her skull and shattered her face, should bear the curious and enigmatic title, "The Interior Castle."

A penchant for suggestive imagery was not the sole determinant for this choice. When Stafford fixed on "The Interior Castle," she was actually engaged in an early instance of that form of amiable piracy to which she became addicted. Years later she confessed this when, in the Author's Note that prefaces her Collected Stories, she wrote, "I am a great one for appropriating other people's titles," going on to acknowledge borrowings from Henry James and Mark Twain, two of her favorite authors. But for "The Interior Castle" she went much farther afield, as far as a mystical allegory by Saint Teresa of Avila published in 1577. Teresa used the phrase in her book Los Morados ("The Dwelling Places"), wherein she describes the progress of the true believer through the seven-chambered "interior castle" of the soul.

As it turned out, this arresting phrase with its startling image would appeal to others as well. In 1953 Stafford's first publisher, deciding to issue a special anthology of her writings—her two previously-published novels, and the first collection of her stories—chose to call this compendium The Interior Castle. And in 1979, as her contribution to the summer issue of Shenandoah dedicated to the memory of Stafford who died on March 26 of that year, Joyce Carol Oates composed a critical essay titled, "The Interior Castle: The Art of Jean Stafford's Short Fiction." Clearly Teresa's phrase was both evocative and haunting.

But for Stafford it was the metaphorical suggestiveness of Teresa's phrase, not just its memorable imagery, that was compelling. Her heroine, Pansy Vanneman (Stafford's literary persona in this story), lying nearly immobile in her hospital bed, dreading the forthcoming operation on her shattered nose, an operation that would involve surgical cutting and scraping perilously close to her brain, thinks of "the interior castle" not as the soul, but as, precisely, her brain. And yet, for Pansy, the two were very nearly the same thing.

. . . her brain . . . 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 another, diminishing infinitely. It was always pink and fragile, always deeply interior and invaluable. She believed that she had reached the innermost chamber of knowledge and that perhaps her knowledge was the same as the saint's achievement of pure love. It was only convention, she thought, that made one say "sacred heart" and not "sacred brain."

How all this came about, how Pansy/Jean, following the terrifying car accident, lay in her hospital bed thinking these thoughts, and how Stafford came to turn to a passage from the writings of Saint Teresa for the title to the story in which she memorialized this fearful episode from her own life, requires us to focus first on certain events that transpired during the period from Christmas night in 1938 in Boston, to the late spring of 1941 in New Orleans, events involving the tangled lives of two accomplished literary artists-in-the-making, Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell.

Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford first met at a writer's conference in Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 1937. The relationship they established during the eleven-day conference evolved into a romance. During 1938, according to one of his close friends, Lowell "wooed her something fierce," and by the end of that year things had progressed to the point where he invited Jean to the Boston home of his parents to spend the holidays. On the night of December 25, having borrowed his father's blue Packard for the evening, Lowell, described by his biographer, Ian Hamilton, as "a notoriously bad driver," crashed the car with Jean in the passenger's seat into a wall at the end of a blind Cambridge street. Jean suffered grievous hurts, later described by another of Lowell's friends as "massive head injuries—everything fractured, skull, nose, jaw, everything."

Stafford was hospitalized for weeks in Boston and even, for a short period, in the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore to which she was removed at Lowell's urging to undergo an operation which she refused. During this period, Lowell returned to Kenyon College in Ohio to continue his studies, remaining in touch with Jean through correspondence and intermediaries. Later, in the summer of 1939, by agreement between them, Stafford instituted what lawyers refer to as a friendly suit against the Lowells to recover her medical expenses. Years later, she told her friend, Eileen Simpson (then Berryman), "I sued for twenty-five thousand and got a measly four thousand. The lawyers forbade us to meet until the case was settled. The prohibition gave a certain piquancy to our clandestine rendezvous; we saw each other more than ever."

These remarks certainly indicate that the accident did nothing to diminish Stafford's fondness for Lowell. They also reveal the ironic humor which characterized the way she often viewed the more melodramatic events of her life. Further remarks in this vein reported by Simpson reflect not only this humorous tone but suggest as well something of the amazingly detached attitude with which she viewed all this travail. Here is how Stafford, commenting on this grim accident years later, appeared to Eileen: "Although Jean must have suffered greatly as a result of this smashup, she talked about it with a clinical detachment, as if what was of interest was the medical details." Indeed, so sharp and intense is this focus on the medical details in "The Interior Castle," that it appears to have diverted many readers from the story's profounder implications.

Having survived both the immediate exigencies and the later consequences of the automobile accident, Stafford and Lowell were married in April of 1940. Following a few happy weeks spent with their mutual friend, Peter Taylor, and his parents, in Memphis, they proceeded to Baton Rouge, where Lowell had a graduate fellowship in literature at Louisiana State University and Jean a job as secretary for The Southern Review, then edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Here occurred an event that was to put a severe strain on their marriage and, incidentally and ironically, introduce Stafford to the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila. This was Robert Lowell's conversion to Roman Catholicism. Circumstances preceding his conversion which help to explain Stafford's disconcerted reaction to this event are themselves invested with irony. Four years before Stafford met Lowell, in 1933, when she was eighteen, she was herself converted to Catholicism and was baptized after receiving instruction from a priest. But the conversion did not take, and she later became a lapsed Catholic. In her own words, "My mission had not been accomplished, despite my fervor and my need." Seven years later, now married to Robert Lowell, she was at first surprised by his conversion and then dismayed by his metamorphosis into a hectoring zealot. In an avowedly autobiographical story, published late in her life and after Lowell's death, she writes of his conversion:

. . . within a week after he was confirmed I found myself being remarried in the Catholic Church, and a week after that I was going to daily Mass at seven in the morning... and to benediction in the late afternoon; together we told two Rosaries a day, and we replaced our reproductions of "A Little Street in Delft" and "La Grande Jatte" with black-and-white photographs of Bellini's "St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata" and Holbein's "Thomas More."

And elsewhere in the same story she speaks in angry despair of her reaction to Lowell's athletic Christianity and its lugubrious effects on their marriage.

What had become of the joking lad I'd married? He'd run hellbent for election into that blind alley—that's what had become of him—and he'd yanked me along with him. .. . If I'd stubbornly withstood from the beginning, or if I had left him when he left me for the seraphim and the saints—but I had tried to withstand and had got myself only wrath and disdain. Leaving him had not really occurred to me, for I had married within my tribe, and we were sternly monagamous till death.

It is only fair to say that in this story, which may be characterized as a sardonic retelling of the tempestuous last days of the Stafford-Lowell marriage in the late summer of 1946, Jean, with her customary honesty, depicts herself—in the guise of her literary persona, appropriately named Cora Savage—as one who "had the tongue of an adder" and whose "heart was black with rage and hate." And, indeed, one of her present-day admirers, James Wolcott, says of this story that she wrote it "to skin Robert Lowell's religious-martyr pretensions with a blade honed by the keenest scorn."

But, if the Jean Stafford writing in 1978 appeared to be paying off old scores, the Jean Stafford of 1940-41 appeared to be playing the patient Griselda. Not only did she seemingly submit to Lowell's mental bullying respecting religious observances, but—more strangely—she appears also to have submitted to physical violence at his hands. Sometime in the spring of 1941, nearly a year after their marriage, during an argument in a New Orleans hotel room, Lowell punched her face, breaking her nose, the very feature whose earlier reconstruction by means of a delicate and dangerous operation was to be the focus of "The Interior Castle." Concerning this nearly incredible episode, Frank Parker, one of Lowell's lifelong friends, sheds this light, in response to his biographer's frankly skeptical questions.

Did he do it? It wasn't just Jean saying he did?

No. No.

He admitted it?

O yes. He said he hadn't meant to. But he tried to strangle her. Jean was never afraid of him, I don't know why, because he was one of those people who didn't know his own strength. No, Cal said he really did hit her and he felt the nose go and everything, so there's no question of that. Mind you, we none of us ever thought Cal was crazy or anything. He was just a violent man doing his own thing.

Stafford somehow found it possible to accommodate this trauma without leaving her unmistakably violent husband. Perhaps even more remarkable, considering her adder-like tongue, she never to my knowledge referred to this episode in print. On more than one occasion, and to more than one person, she later gave expression to her bitterness concerning Lowell's behavior, especially during the period of the physical dissolution of their marriage, an agonizing experience that dragged on for nearly two years between late 1946 and 1948. But concerning this most bizarre and horrifying of all their public encounters, she seems never to have published a word.

But the memory of such violence cannot be completely suppressed. If it does not later express itself in overt ways, then the inevitable echoes will find covert means to make themselves heard. What are we to make, for instance, of this passage from "The Interior Castle," written eight years after the auto accident and five years after the assault in the New Orleans hotel room, where we find Stafford in addition to describing in painful detail the excruciating operation on her nose, revealing a transcendental vision that momentarily dismantled the hospital of its reality and promised her not so much surcease from physical pain as "the sequel to pain, an ideal terror"? This astonishing statement is only one of those that compel a reader's belief that the metaphysical dimensions of Jean's traumatic experience were of greater significance to her than were the physical. A close reading of "The Interior Castle" will yield just such a conclusion. It is time to give this story such a reading.

"I'm a rather slow person," Jean Stafford once told an interviewer. "Experience has to sink in for years before I can use it... . I have to let impressions and experience age within me until they become integrated into my whole life and perceptions before I can use them as materials for fiction." There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this statement and, since eight years passed between the time of the car crash that robbed Stafford of some of her beauty and nearly took her life and the publication of "The Interior Castle" late in 1946, it would appear that this long time span answers to the description she gave of the rhythms of her creative process. Would, that is, if we were content to read this story as a brilliantly detailed study of the effects of physical pain on a highly imaginative patient. Repeatedly praised for its fidelity to fact, called a tour de force of clinical reportage, "The Interior Castle" is all of that, but it is much more besides. Read for all of its meanings, this story, one discovers, is not just an example of De Quincey's "literature of knowledge"—how it feels to undergo a dangerous operation inside one's head—but is, additionally, a stunning specimen of what he called "the literature of power"—in this instance how it feels to simultaneously win and lose, to be able to go on living but to do so with the acute awareness of an irrecoverable loss.

An examination of the story's structure will serve as a necessary prelude to our effort to pluck out its essential significance. Stafford has sometimes been rebuked by unsympathetic critics for being obsessed with rich textural details at the expense of the larger structural elements of her stories. No such charge can fairly be leveled at "The Interior Castle." Its structure is as carefully planned to contribute to its final effect as are its textural details.

The story's opening three paragraphs, devoted to describing Pansy's first hours in the hospital's emergency ward, followed by some pre-dawn moments in her private room, may be viewed as a kind of Prologue, used primarily to establish the sights and sounds of a House of Death by night and a cheerlessly efficient factory by day.

Following the Prologue, the story is set out in three principal divisions. The first and longest division (six pages), by means of a succession of brilliantly-juxtaposed images, established Pansy's planned retreat into a secret and interior world of metaphysical visions centering on her own brain; fixes the curious wintry stasis of the climate outside the hospital, a meteorological phenomenon that seems to conspire with Pansy to match the physical immobility she adopts as she withdraws into her ideal world; provides a series of oddly-assorted, nearly surreal images based alternately on memories of past persons and events and those inadvertent sights and sounds attendant on hospital routine, images which are provocatively suggestive of eerily beautiful ideality one moment and grotesquely ugly reality the next; and, finally, delineates the mighty opposites in the forthcoming struggle on the operating table—Pansy's nearly supernal self, seeking to preserve at all costs her "sacred brain," and her two adversaries—the physical pain that compels her to be aware of her corporeal self, and Dr. Nicholas, whose admiration for her crushed and splintered nose resembles that of a connoisseur, a collector of nearly-destroyed facial features that challenge his extraordinary skill.

There follows a division, four pages in length, given over to an ironic description of the hospital god, Dr. Nicholas, his retinue of worshipful attendants, his elaborate preparations for the forth-coming operation, his well-meaning pedantries in explaining to Pansy what he intends to do and how he intends to do it, his meticulous pre-operation preparation of his patient whose nerves, but not whose brain and mind, he skillfully anesthetizes, and, finally, Pansy's mute but unyielding hostility toward this invader.

The final division, also four pages in length, represents the actual operation from the moment when Dr. Nicholas, "a tall snowman with silver eyes and silver fingernails," triumphantly demonstrates to Pansy that she has been transformed by the anesthesia into a snow maiden whose cartilage can be cut as though it were "a nerveless icicle"; past the dreadful moment when, forgetting that his patient was conscious, he audibly instructs his attendant, "Stand back, now, nurse; I'm at this girl's brain and I don't want my elbow jogged," setting off a spasm of terror in Pansy that causes the knife to slip just enough to send a flare of pain through the numbed nerves; to the climactic moment when the obsessed Dr. Nicholas whispers "in the voice of a lover, 'If you can stand it five minutes more, I can perform the second operation now and you won't have to go through this again. What do you say?'" Finally, "though the world to which she would return remains unreal," Pansy gives the surgeon her permission.

That permission given, Dr. Nicholas has now "to penetrate regions that were not anesthetized"; he must now invade the area within which lay her "interior castle." The excruciating pain is both physical and mental.

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, hearing the knives hunting like wolves outside, sniffing and snapping.

With the doctor's words, "The worst is over," Pansy can at last turn her eyes inward tranquilly and experience "this time and this time alone" the vision which she had fought so hard to achieve:

. . . she saw her brain lying in a shell-pink satin case. It was a pink pearl, no bigger than a needle's eye, but it was so beautiful and so pure that its smallness made no difference.

Unencumbered like the rich man, Pansy can enter the kingdom of her private heaven passing through the needle's eye. And her charity, like her happiness, is boundless. Her vision expands to embrace everything and everybody.

Anyhow, as she watched, it grew. It grew larger and larger until it was an enormous bubble that contained the surgeon and the whole room in its rosy luster. . . . Never before had the world been pink, whatever else it had been. .. . Of one thing she was certain: never had the world enclosed her before and never had the quiet been so smooth.

Of course, this transcendental moment of glory cannot be sustained. The real world of doctors, interns, and nurses will not permit it. Each of these denizens of the hospital finds it necessary to claim her attention. Unaware of their dreadful invasion of her privacy, they seek to establish their important roles in what they conceive to be a collective victory over the forces of pain and death. Stafford is withering in her commentary on their failure of imagination and understanding. These two sentences tell it all.

The surgeon, squeezing her arm with avuncular pride, said "Good girl," as if she were a bright dog that had retrieved a bone. Her silent mind abused him: "You are a thief," it said, "you are heartless and should be put to death."

Then Stafford rounds off her story with a one-paragraph Epilogue which serves at once to balance the Prologue and to give explicit expression to the "epiphany" that so often appears in the closing sentences of both her long and short fiction.

. . . after they took her back to her room, the weather changed, not for the better. Momentarily the sun emerged from its concealing murk, but in a few minutes the snow came with a wind that promised a blizzard. . . . She lay as if in a hammock in a pause of bitterness. She closed her eyes, shutting herself up within her treasureless head.

No one reading these passages can conclude that what we have here in "The Interior Castle" is an example of "the literature of knowledge." To be sure the story is rich in "medical details." But they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. The "interior castle" is a human mind, not an inhuman hospital. Both minds and hospitals have interiors but they may not be described the same way. Hospitals may be described with the ironic jocularity Stafford adopted years later when she talked about her operation with her friends and associates. But the literary architect who designed and described the "interiors" that are central to this story was moved by much more powerful feelings.

What these feelings were and what prompted them is not difficult to surmise when we consider the storm and stress that Stafford was undergoing during the period when this story was composed. In a word, Jean Stafford was writing an account of the consequences of a physical trauma at the very time she was experiencing a more overwhelming psychic trauma: her six-year-old marriage to Robert Lowell was disintegrating, and she was disintegrating with it. Fortunately, a detailed account of this painful dissolution is not necessary for our purposes here. Ian Hamilton's recent biography of Lowell, at least two of Stafford's stories, and a handful of Lowell's poems tell the story of how and why two such enormously talented young artists grew disenchanted with one another. It is enough for now if—made aware of this dual descent into a marital maelstrom—we see how at least one of the two participants regained some measure of equilibrium.

Jean Stafford found in her art a degree of stability she could not find in her daily life. Ironically, she herself was not entirely aware of this process either then or, more surprisingly, later on. We are in possession of a statement, made many years later, concerning the composition of "The Interior Castle." This statement appears almost casually as part of a long article called, fittingly enough, "Truth in Fiction," which was printed in 1966 in The Library Journal. Wide-ranging and discursive in its approach to its announced subject, the piece devotes its longest sustained passage to an instance of Stafford's failure to achieve artistic distance concerning another very painful episode in her life. Following a detailed account of the reasons for her failure to transform the raw stuff of actuality into the finished fabric of fiction, she adds, almost as an afterthought, this paragraph concerning "The Interior Castle."

I am reminded of another occasion when I wrote directly out of experience, adding only a few camouflaging details and subtracting very little. I wrote a story about an automobile accident I had been in, in which my skull had been fractured and my whole face had been bloodily deranged. In describing the pain that had beset my heroine, I so perfectly revived my own old pain that each time I sat down at my typewriter, I got an awful headache. But that was only a physical distress and the canvas I had set out to cover was not a large one.

Now Stafford, as everyone knows, is a master of irony. But here is an instance of where the master is guilty of a piece of unconscious irony. In this offhand statement she appears to defend the indefensible proposition that so long as the "distress" being written about is only "physical" and so long as the canvas is not a large one (that is, so long as one is writing a short story and not a novel), one encounters no problems in transferring actual experience into convincing fiction. But this manifestly won't wash. The short story is second only to the lyric poem as a vehicle of compressed—and therefore powerful—emotion. If anything, this smaller "canvas" makes it more difficult to see that these powerful feelings are artistically recollected in tranquility.

But it is not just the unconscious irony of this momentary lapse in Stafford's critical faculties that is our concern. Our focus must be on the fact that, writing twenty years after she published "The Interior Castle," Stafford appears unaware of all she had wrought in this acknowledged masterpiece of short fiction. If at this point the usual objection should be raised—that concerning such matters the writer herself is the best judge—then one must invoke the dictum of D. H. Lawrence: "Never trust the author, trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it." One need not pretend to be donning the magisterial mantle of Critic to discover by the kind of close reading to which we have been subjecting "The Interior Castle" that there is much more here than an account of "only a physical distress." Perhaps that has been made manifestly clear in what has already been said. Still, a charting of the metaphysical dimensions of a story so seemingly rooted in the physical may further advance our understanding of its true significance.

Stafford has her heroine confront a terrifying operation with, at first, feelings remarkably like those of a young Catholic enthusiast seeking refuge in the church. Like an ecstatic novitiate, Pansy decides on a policy of deliberate withdrawal from the world around her. Lying immobile, refusing to talk or even acknowledge the existence of the nursing staff, taking comfort in the fact that even nature outside her window "seemed zealously determined to maintain a status quo," affording no movement of tree or leaf, and no discernible change in the sky, she succeeds in creating for herself an ideal—a mental essence—which transcends her physical existence. At the center, in her "interior castle," reposes the image of her ideal, her lovely pink brain, viewed by her alternatively as an unscratched jewel, an unsmudged glass of light, and an unbruised flower. Escaping into her private world, she baffles her attendants. The nurses scold her among themselves for not being happy that she is alive. And her principal surgeon speculates that her strange quiescence can only be explained as her loss of the joy of life because her beautiful face is now mutilated. "Pansy, for her part, took a secret and mischievous pleasure in the bewilderment of her attendants and the more they courted her . . . the farther she retired from them into herself and into the world which she had created in her long hours here and which no one could ever penetrate nor imagine."

Content for awhile with her seeming victory over the quotidian affairs of the hospital she is confined to, Pansy at last grows reluctantly aware that she cannot forever remain in hiding. Thus, despite her stubborn refuge in ideality, she does, finally and unwillingly, consent to the operation that, by recreating her nose, will once again permit her to breathe normally and so to return to the outside world.

Nevertheless, like the sensitive protagonist of William Carlos Williams' "The Use of Force," Pansy remains agonizingly aware of the loss that is the price of this gain. By giving Dr. Nicholas her permission to proceed with his cutting and scraping and resectioning of the flesh and bone of her nose, she is compelled to acknowledge the triumph of the existential world. When the operation is over, medical science will have remade an organ which it has pleased her to believe had once enjoyed something like a miraculous birth. So mortality will triumph over immortality, the material over the supernal, the physical over the metaphysical, reality over ideality, the cunning hand of the surgeon over the soul of his patient. Following an operation of exquisite and lingering pain, Pansy is left, at once restored and violated, her nose rebuilt, but her head robbed of its priceless jewel.

The automobile accident of December 25, 1938, apparently left Jean Stafford with only physical scars. In the years immediately following, she was able to jest at scars even though she had indeed felt the wounds, referring at times to her "darned face," at other times to the ways she and Lowell had circumvented the prohibitions against their meeting invoked by the representatives of an insurance company; and, as we have seen, she impressed her auditors with the detachment with which she could discuss the whole affair, seeming to them most interested in the medical details. Significantly, this accident and the consequent period of hospitalization was followed by a series of rendezvous between the lovers, an engagement, and, finally, a marriage.

Eight years later, this time wearing psychic scars, Jean Stafford ostensibly sets about writing a fictional account of this automobile accident. But "The Interior Castle" turns out to be only incidentally a story of physical suffering and pain. Instead, it is primarily a story told by a woman who, as a college girl, once sought refuge in faith in an absolute, aided by instruction from a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, only to discover that "my mission had not been accomplished, despite my fervor and my need." Now, for a second time, she looks for an absolute, conjuring up a transcendental vision to provide her with a hiding place from a marriage that has been more irretrievably battered than had her face eight years before. She writes a story ostensibly describing the surgical operation that restored her face and nose to something approximating their former beauty. But this restoration of her head and face leaves her broken hearted. Once again she could say, "my mission had not been accomplished, despite my fervor and my need." Reading today this story published during the same year that Stafford's marriage to Robert Lowell broke up, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the recollected pain of the broken face resurfaced as the psychic pain of the broken marriage.

But both Pansy Vanneman and her creator are tough. Just as Pansy endures the excruciating pain of facial surgery and survives, so Jean Stafford endures the even more excruciating pain of a fractured psyche and survives to create a piece of fiction that fuses and reflects and ultimately transcends both experiences. Thus "The Interior Castle" may be viewed as a metaphor of Stafford's own battle for survival. To revive for just a moment the now quaint terminology that I. A. Richards bequeathed to us, the vehicle of Stafford's triumph is her created story, and its tenor is the ironic vision of life which invests and informs both the story and the artist who created it.

No matter what the mission, and no matter what the fervor and the need, it was impossible for Jean Stafford to retreat from life. Everything we know about the way she lived (and we know a great deal) and all that we know about what she wrote (and that lies before us like an open book) supports this conclusion. To repeat what was said at the outset, Stafford was schooled in stoicism and everything that happened to her from the time she was young until she died at the age of 63 contributed to—as it tested—her ironic vision of life.

There can be no better demonstration of the tone of comic irony Stafford so often adopted when confronting the thorns of life than that found in her account of her unique relationship with Saint Teresa of Avila. It will serve as a coda to this analysis of "The Interior Castle." Speaking again with the voice of Cora Savage, Stafford refers once more to the period immediately following Lowell's conversion to Roman Catholicism, during which time he was busy playing high priest to her acolyte. This time she tells us:

Theron (Stafford's fictional name for Lowell) once told me that I was going through the dark night of the spirit and I should meditate and read John of the Cross. I did, with a certain kind of recognition, read St. John's friend Teresa's "Interior Castle," and one morning in the shallow sleep just before awakening I dreamed I got a penny postal in the mail which read, "Dear Cora, I keep out. Love, Teresa of Avila."