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Savagely spiritual: illness and the imagination in the fiction of Jean Stafford

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Savagely spiritual: illness and the imagination in the fiction of Jean Stafford

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Savagely Spiritual:
Illness and the Imagination in the Fiction of Jean Stafford

by
Petrina Crockford

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE & CREATIVE WRITING)

August 2023

Copyright 2023 Petrina Crockford

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Writing is a private, almost secret enterprise carried on within the heart and mind in a room
whose doors are closed; the shock is staggering when the doors are flung open and the eyes of
strangers are trained on the naked and the newborn; one’s doubts and misgivings and fears
should be allowed to rest in sick-room quiet for awhile.

Jean Stafford, from her 1952 speech “An Etiquette for Writers”
1

1
Reprinted in Jean Stafford: A Study of the Short Fiction by Mary Ann Wilson, p. 92

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This dissertation is dedicated to the women who helped me arrive.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph…………………………………………………………………………………...ii
Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iii
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...v
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1
Chapter One: Reading with Sympathy: “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story”………………….22
Chapter Two: The Competing Narratives of Illness and Sickness in “The Warlock”…...30
Chapter Three: “The Interior Castle” and the Structure of Healing……………………..40
Conclusion: Art & Life…………………………………………………………………..64
References……………………………………………………………………………......67

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This dissertation examines the life and work of twentieth-century writer Jean Stafford through
the lens of gender and illness to illuminate their role in her imagination and fiction.

1

Introduction

In 1921, Virginia Woolf addressed the National Society for Women’s Service—a group of
women “concerned with the employment of women”—about her professional experiences. In her
address, she lays the image of her professional development onto that of her imaginative
development, thereby offering a fuller picture of the professional-woman-artist she’s been asked
to give. She traces her development in stages, beginning: “But to tell you my story—
it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in
her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right—from ten o’clock to one. Then it
occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all—to slip a few of those pages
into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into a red box at the
corner. It was thus that I became a journalist . . . (“Professions” 58)

Woolf’s story begins with the girl writing privately in her room; it is only after the envelope is
dropped in the mail that the “she” becomes the “I” becomes the journalist, becomes, in other
words, the professional. But all of this must begin with the private “she,” a self that Woolf keeps
us distant from by the invocation of the third person. This invocation continues as Woolf tells us
how she—the girl, the “I”—when writing a book review for money (a boon to her professional
development) was confronted by the “phantom” of her insecurities. This phantom has a voice
that tells her not to write so critically, nor so fiercely, and to be, instead, as sweet and
conciliatory as a woman should be. Woolf manages to murder this phantom and continue with
her writing and professional life. In slaying this phantom she is able to write freely and honestly.
But soon, a second, more intractable problem arises when the journalist matures into the novelist.
Woolf continues:
I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a
girl sitting with a pen in her hand . . . The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl
is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out
over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of

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the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience,
the experience that I believed to be far commoner with woman writers than with men. The line
raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away . . . The imagination dashed
itself against something hard . . . To speak without figure she had thought of something,
something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say.
(61)

Here, Woolf disappears into the image of a girl fishing, transcending the personal to say
something about women and the imagination in general: that there is the problem of the body. In
a world engineered by men, Woolf reminds us—whether it is an imaginative one built sentence
by sentence, or a literal one made brick by brick—how will the girl speak her body, her self? By
linking thought with the body and its passions, Woolf touches on the notion, famously
expounded by William James not long before this lecture, that body precedes emotion and
thought; that the body, in fact, is thought. But what to do when the body is without figure and
unfitting? What, then, is the shape of the thought?
Of these two experiences, Woolf is successful in conquering her first problem. “But the
second,” she says, “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved .
. . Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without
finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against” (62). Woolf, in the instance of this
lecture, casts her literary problem as a problem for all women, and one that tests the supposed
limits of the imagination: how to imagine woman’s body and her passions in spaces even less
free than literature?
Five years earlier, in 1926, Woolf confronted the body—or, perhaps, was confronted by
her own body—to point to another literary problem: the dearth of writings on illness. Why isn’t
the “daily drama” of the body a literary theme, she asks (“On Being Ill” 3). To write of illness,
she says, a new language is required, a new “hierarchy of the passions” (34). As with woman’s
body, illness requires an investigation of the imagination and the ways in which it might reflect

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and create a more representational reality. Thus, this problem of woman’s body, illness, and the
imagination that Woolf identifies dovetails with another one of her concerns, which underpins
the malleable relationship between form and meaning: that of reality and representation. If, for
Woolf’s literary forebears—and to borrow George Eliot’s mirror imagery—reality was reflected
by techniques such as verisimilitude and influenced by the milieu of empiricism, scientific
naturalism, and all of its attendant discoveries, then for a modernist such as Woolf, reality
became aligned with the subjective self and its experiences—with, as Maren Linett points out in
Bodies of Modernism, “the mind’s experience of life rather than the external features of that life”
(8). By this shift, distinctions between the inner self and the outer world collapse, with the body
and the mind acting as the bridge between them.
I begin with Woolf and the early twentieth century to draw out the genesis of a set of
literary problems that the writer Jean Stafford takes up years later, in the middle of this same
century. By the word “problems” I don’t mean to imply solvability; perhaps “tensions,” is the
better world, i.e., those tensions inherent in the phantoms and images Woolf draws forth: the
tension between the female body and society, for example; the tension between a professional
and an artistic life; the tension between illness and health; between reality and the imagination;
between the internal self and the external world; between being, finally, a woman and a writer, as
if these two facets exist separately within the woman writer, the way they do for the society that
looks at or reads the woman writer. While Stafford’s writing does not treat these tensions
dialectically—in other words, Stafford is not interested in resolution—her stories hover in the
rich, linguistic space between them; here, the imagination and reality come together in surprising
and illuminating ways.

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Though Stafford explored these tensions in a post-WWII historical context—and one
influenced by the New Critical movement—she is, in a fundamental sense, Modernist, if this is
defined by the collapse of the internal/external division I noted above. Maureen Ryan, in her
study, Innocence and Estrangement in the Fiction of Jean Stafford, writes that Stafford was
“inevitably” a Modernist because of her concern with alienation and her disavowal of social
novels, an argument she bases on Stafford’s essay “The Psychological Novel,” in which Stafford
disavows overtly political fiction in favor of fiction that is objective and non-judgmental.
Stafford’s disavowal is based on aesthetic terms rather than political ones, which makes her
argument difficult to parse; she was a fiercely independent thinker, and one suspects Stafford
would take equal offense to her work being called “Modernist.” But in doing so, I mean only to
trace a literary trajectory and to begin to show the ways in which Stafford pushed this line of
thought and writing towards new questions and, therefore, new limits that her fiction tests and
reflects. While Ryan—like many Stafford critics before and after her—notes that Stafford
contributed an “American inheritance” to the Modernist tradition by fusing the concerns and
vernacular of Twain and James to those of Proust and Joyce, I believe her most fascinating and
original contribution—and one that does not require comparison to make—is her exploration of
this relationship between the mind, body, and the imagination
2
. The sociologist Arthur W. Frank

2
According to Ryan, Stafford “inherited and merged in her work the Gothic symbolic tradition of Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Herman Melville; the social criticism and novel of manners of Henry James and Edith Wharton; and
the comic frontier tradition of Mark Twain and the early local colorists” (7). A brief look at the ways in which
Stafford has been read critically since the 1950s illustrates how her fiction tends to be read as an amalgam of styles
and concerns. Stafford, for example, writes in the shadow of Modernists such as Joyce and Eliot (Wilson 1996) but
with Chekhovian influences (Hassan 1955); or she couches moral judgment “in the language of Freud as well as of
the Bible” (qtd. in Wilson 117, 1962); or she fuses the psychological with the novel of manners, i.e., James and
Wharton (Eisinger 1963); or the isolated dreamworlds of her characters call on Proust (Mazzaro 1965); her pace is
Jamesian and her rhythms are Whartonian (Karl 1983). These assessments tend to cast Stafford less as a visionary
writer than an orthodox one. Thus, Joyce Carol Oates argues that Stafford did not write outside of a Jamesian-Joyce-
Chekhovian model (1979) and one critic, in 1968, wrote that Stafford’s “sentences are beautiful in a way that has
almost become passé” (Wagner 426, 1969). The tensions and resultant irony in Stafford’s work are difficult to parse
on the level of her prose, thus this tendency towards comparison and amalgamation. From the seventies onwards, as
Stafford’s fiction became analyzed through the lens of Western studies and a feminist critique, this tendency towards

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not only notes this linking of the mind and body in illness (“the mind does not rest above the
body but is diffused throughout” [2]) but also points to illness as a circulation of stories or
narratives that, across time, are either more or less dominant, and that impact the way we
understand ourselves and each other. In a modern time—in the mid-twentieth century in which
Stafford wrote—the medical narrative dominated. To be sick, in this time, is to surrender oneself
to the experts in what Frank calls narrative surrender, “which is the central moment in modernist
illness experience” (6). Stafford’s characters—and Stafford in her life—fight this surrender by
immersing themselves in their imagination, which has the power to rewrite the world. In this
way, they are enacting what Frank goes on to call a postmodern or postcolonial voice, or the
reclamation of one’s narrative from the dominant, modernist medical discourse (in Woolf’s more
literary terms, this means to claim the personal dimension of illness). Though Stafford’s
characters don’t always succeed in rewriting the world, they make the attempt, and it is this
attempt that leads me to read Stafford’s work as visionary—both in content and style—rather
than the orthodox writer she’s been assumed to be.
I also begin with Woolf to gesture towards the enduring tangle of writing and
womanhood that underpins Stafford’s life and writing. If, in Virginia Woolf’s time, the terms
woman and writer were being imagined and defined, in Stafford’s there was the agony of their
sameness and separation. Margaret Atwood pointed out this fact near the end of Stafford’s
career, in 1976, at the height of second-wave feminism, when she wrote, “Paradox: Woman and

comparison lessens as these tensions come to be understood thematically, such as one critic’s understanding that
Stafford’s fiction melds the savage-golden view of the west and calls on Shakespeare and Cooper (Jensen 1973). I’m
less interested in making comparisons than in drawing forth the various tensions in Stafford’s fiction—through the
unique lens of illness and the body—to illuminate the ways in which her style, while difficult to write about, is
unique and visionary.

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Writer are separate categories; but in any individual woman writer, they are inseparable” (195).
Stafford, in her life, lived their inseparability at the same time she veered between the two, often
longing for one or the other—and often using the domestic as a retreat, though, for her, the
domestic was also an embarrassment in that it reminded her of her domestic and intellectually
weak (by Stafford’s account) mother—or pitting the one against the other in a culturally inflected
drama she could not escape. For Stafford, the intellectual mind was masculine (and associated
with her father, a failed writer) and the domestic mind, feminine (her mother). This paradox not
only appears as subject matter in Stafford—most notably in her second novel The Mountain
Lion, in which young Molly Fawcett, in longing to be a writer, is outcast from a masculine
society that cannot incorporate her—but also in her technique. It is not simply that Stafford’s
characters, nearly all of whom are women, are metaphors for “universal alienation” or that we
must make a distinction between feminist and feminine in Stafford’s work (Ryan 10). We must
also make room for the messy, unresolvable parts of experience and being, something Stafford,
in her personal life—and in her fiction—struggled to do.
In the years she was developing as a writer—and before the publication of any of her
major works—she wrote to her friend Robert Hightower about a work in progress:
Yesterday I began my novel over again with an idea that has been working in my mind for a
long time: the question: why is it that a woman cannot write a book like A Portrait of the
Artist. I mean, why is it that her experiences cannot be those of a man. The main character,
Gretchen Marburg, will make an attempt to live such a life, that is with a male mind in which
there is such a compartment for literature and such a one for love, but in the end she will be
faced with the realization that a woman’s mind can never be neatly ordered and every
experience is tinged by every other one. (Qtd. in Goodman 81-82)

Love and writing—and, more generally, as Stafford’s experience would illustrate, writing and
life—can’t be neat or compartmentalized for the woman writer; one compartment must flow into
the other, as into doorless rooms, with the room, in Stafford’s fiction, often symbolizing the

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imagination and creative self. The drama of the mind, then—and, by extension, the body—is a
culturally inflected one. Though the novel Stafford describes would never be published, its
central drama resonates across her work. It is not simply that a woman cannot have a man’s
experiences or that the minds of men and women are different; but one must also be attuned to
the fact that the mind, despite what Stafford or her characters desire, is social. And this fact splits
into its many facets of love and art, domesticity and writing—those very tensions that drive
Stafford’s work.
Stafford’s complicated relationship with the terms woman and writer makes reading and
thinking about her work in these terms tricky because it risks simplifying these tensions. I
suspect, too, that Stafford would have balked at the attempt. At the end of her career, when she
was publishing little fiction but making money writing reviews and op-eds, Stafford pitted
herself against the feminist movement with a passion that has baffled her readers and critics,
many of whom revived Stafford in the context of feminist criticism in the nineties
3
. How could a
writer of woman’s experience write that people have been “bamboozled into the belief that all
women are, or wish to be, Liberated”? (“Don’t Use Ms. . .”) or that the feminist movement
“attracted hordes of Dumb Doras and Xanthippes and common scolds” (“Intimations”)? Perhaps,
as Joyce Carol Oates writes, a comment like this is just an aspect of Stafford’s masochism. But I
read Stafford’s position as indicative of her wish for an independent mind and imagination free

3
Though Stafford’s fiction began to be critically examined in the 1940s—and she won the Pulitzer Prize for her
Collected Stories in 1970—by the late eighties, not only had critics not yet examined her work from a feminist
perspective, but many did not even remark on the fact that her stories feature almost entirely women and center
women’s experiences. This changed when Stafford’s work began to be reissued in the nineties and three biographies
(by Roberts, Goodman, and Hulbert) were published in that same decade. Charlotte Goodman’s biography (1990) is
written from a feminist perspective while Mary Ann Wilson’s Jean Stafford: A Study of the Short Fiction (1996) is
both feminist in its approach and the first in-depth study of Stafford’s short fiction. After the nineties, when critics
accepted the centering of women in Stafford’s fiction—and feminist readings of her work became less novel—
critics began to layer an interest in Western Studies, Disability Studies, and Queer Studies onto more feminist
perspective. See Allison, Collins, Hanson, and Stanford.

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from social constraints. Although this wish might read as naïve and antisocial, Stafford is
painfully aware of this fact in her fiction. In fact, her awareness serves the structural irony of her
fiction, an irony of which much has been critically spoken
4
. To understand Stafford’s position
and the difficulty of this topic, I return to Atwood again: “It’s not finally all that comforting to
have a phalanx of women . . . come breezing up now to tell them they were right all along,” she
writes in the same essay. “It’s like being judged innocent after you’ve been hanged: the
satisfaction, if any, is grim” (191).
To be a woman, a writer, a body, and to be ill, whether of mind or body—it’s at this
nexus that Jean Stafford writes and that I read her. I center illness in my reading because
illness—in Stafford’s life and work—is, I believe, the foundation on which the power of her
imagination and fiction rests; and, as her biographer Ann Hulbert points out, it was generative
for Stafford in that it gave her creative momentum (135). Illness, too, features in Stafford’s
fiction either explicitly as a theme, as a fact hovering in the background, or as a rich,
metaphorical language that gives context and meaning. In her short story “The Children’s
Game,” for example, a gambler in a decrepit gambling hall looks “chronically ill and engrossed
in his symptoms”; the casino “could have been a hospital ward.” Hugh Nicholson, who has
brought his lover Abby to this sordid casino so that she might better understand his masochism,
asks her to try her hand at playing, “just as a clinician” (“Collected” 31). In “The Echo and the
Nemesis,” Ramona Dunn is under the care of a psychiatrist for her excessive eating; her
relationship with psychiatry, and her inability to find cure, drives the story’s plot. “The

4
Much has been stated about Stafford’s irony in part because of the influence of New Criticism—which held irony
as a key component of literature—on Stafford’s fiction; nonetheless, it’s interesting to note that discussions of the
irony in Stafford’s work are attempts to make sense of the unresolvable tensions that animate Stafford’s fiction and
which, in their inability to be resolved, often lead to a critical reading of the role of irony in Stafford’s personal life.
Thus, Ryan posits this irony as Stafford’s attempt to distance herself from WWII-society; Wilson argues that irony
was Stafford’s “defensive posture” in both her fiction and life (xiii); and Wanda Avila argues that Stafford adopted
an ironic stance to deal with betrayals in her personal life.

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Healthiest Girl in Town,” reverses the trope that illness gives special dispensation or identity by
having its child protagonist, who befriends two sick girls in a town of recovering tuberculosis
patients, declare, defiantly, her good health. And, in “A Country Love Story,” a woman married
to an ill writer going mad from his work seeks retreat from his illness in her imagination,
ultimately losing touch with reality.
While Woolf’s concern about a lack of illness stories held little relevance in Stafford’s
time, her call for a language of the body, fused as it is with the mind, resonates in a new context
with Stafford. In his study on the American short story, William Peden noticed something in
American literature that began in the 1950s, a decade in which Stafford was publishing her most
celebrated short fiction: namely, an “explosion” in the depiction of the “borderland between
normal and abnormal, sanity and madness” (87). He writes that “the depiction of the mentally ill
and emotionally maimed became one of the major directions taken by the American short story
since 1940” and notes a fascination with the grotesque and the bizarre (88). To make his
argument, Peden reads works by Tennessee Williams, James Purdy, William Goyen, Truman
Capote (to name a few), and Jean Stafford. “The smell of the sick room permeates the
thoughtful, carefully wrought stories of Jean Stafford,” he writes “. . . with very few exceptions,
physical maladies, individual peculiarities, or private misfortunes force her characters to
withdraw from the world of customary urges and responses into a sick world of unfulfilled
longings and desires” (98-99). This is the only explicit treatment of sickness in Stafford’s fiction
that I’ve found in critical literature, despite, as Peden notes—and in my reading—sickness being
a feature in her stories and in her three novels. While critics and biographers such as Ryan,

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Hulbert, and Goodman have passingly noted the role of illness in Stafford’s work and life, a
study of Stafford’s work that centers illness is yet to be done.
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Peden uses the term “sickness” to encompass the state of being not well in general—and
this includes not being well physically or mentally—though he places being “not well” in a
social and historical context that adds depth to Virginia Woolf’s more personal understanding of
illness. Psychiatrist and medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman later makes this distinction
between illness and sickness, with the former hinging on the personal experience of illness and
the latter on its social constructions, i.e. on disease and its medical and social implications.
Though distinct, both involve storytelling; in the first instance, the patient’s experience is
centered while, in the second, the patient’s experience is lost to the social constructs of sickness.
6

In my study, I understand illness not as a disease but, to follow Kleinman, as “the innately
human experience of symptoms and suffering” (3). This definition broadens illness to include the
complicated and often mysterious ways in which Stafford’s characters—and Stafford herself—
experience symptoms and suffering at the confluence of mind and body. The stories I read touch
on the internal experience of illness and its relationship to the imagination, and how this dynamic
exists in a social context, thereby becoming a sickness that is perceived and parsed by others.
They also track these competing narratives—between illness and sickness, or the personal and
the social—thereby rounding out the various tensions in her work and fueling the psychic drama
of her characters and the trajectory of her plots.

5
Ryan notes that Stafford’s “notorious hypochondria and real ill health perhaps granted her a special feeling for the
exigencies of the aged and the ill” (2). Illness, too, in discussions of Stafford’s work often conflates it with passivity
rather than see it as a fact of its own. See Ryan and Wilson.
6
Arthur W. Frank delves further into how these categories construct narrative and meaning in The Wounded
Storyteller, while Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor details the ways in which the human, experiential dimensions
of illness aree overwritten by the language of disease.

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To read at this nexus requires a relationship with biography and an acknowledgement and
exploration of this final tension, between the public and the private, which is the most difficult
and mysterious one to approach in relation to Stafford—and one that makes reading her fiction a
delicate act. The writer Peter Taylor—a close friend of Stafford’s—in his commemorative tribute
to her delivered at the National Academy and Institute of Letters after her death in 1979, sets
Stafford’s “rage for privacy” against the remarkable public success of her work. According to
Taylor, Stafford was no careerist; in fact, she was a “‘private person’ (her phrase)” who played
many roles, including “the role of a writer, a woman writer,” though she was not ever a
professional writer (59, italics Taylor’s). “In a sense,” he writes, “her literary personality remains
her best kept secret” (59). Taylor’s memorial returns us to Woolf’s lecture, in which the private
“she” becomes the professional “I” that must confront the body. But, as Taylor points out, in her
writing Stafford remained the private “she,” though, in bringing her work to the world, the doors
are thrown open on her private, secret self. The very structure of Taylor’s memorial is a moving
effort to give form to this secret, respecting Stafford’s urge for privacy while also conveying the
limits to which anyone—even those closest to her—might have known her: he begins by
articulating Stafford’s literary style and private self through his and others’ recollections of her;
finally, in the last paragraph, he widens his scope to view the place at which most people would
begin—the hard rock of public biography. “Born at Covina, California, in 1916, Jean Stafford
grew up . . .” his tribute ends. The final sentences underscore both the finality of Stafford’s death
and the impenetrable nature of Stafford’s art and life.
Throughout the years, attempts have been made to pierce the mystery of Stafford’s
literary personality. Ann Hulbert’s 1992 biography of Stafford is an explicit attempt to lay bare
the secret Taylor does not expose. David Roberts’ 1988 biography, though less explicit in its

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intent, nonetheless exposes Stafford’s private life in a manner that veers into what Joyce Carol
Oates calls “pathography”: a sordid obsession with the difficult aspects of Stafford’s personal
life, including her alcoholism and many illnesses (and speculation about a venereal disease and
whether this prevented her from having children). The details of Stafford’s life become familiar
after even a cursory look into her work: her embarrassment at her father’s failures as a writer and
his inability to support, financially, Stafford, her mother, and three siblings; her shame at their
poverty; her marriage to the poet Robert Lowell who, after drinking, and in unclear
circumstances, drove their car into a wall, which smashed Stafford’s face beyond recognition and
which required her to undergo multiple surgeries on her nose (during their marriage he broke her
nose again and choked her one night, nearly killing her); a second unhappy and short marriage
(but a happy third one, during which she nearly stopped writing fiction); health problems; thirty-
eight stays in psychiatric hospitals; alcoholism; a novel she worked on throughout her life but
that she could not finish nor make sense of; and, finally, aphasia—a condition in which she could
no longer express herself with language—at the end of her life.
7

7
Stafford wrote in a generation of writers who inspired “pathographies” of the type Oates discusses, i.e., instead of
biographies that place the writer and their art in the canvas of their time, smaller, dysfunctional portraits will do:
John Berryman, Dylan Thomas, Katherine Ann Porter, to name a few. And she wrote alongside writers whose lives
were also decimated by alcoholism, illness, and suicide, such as Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz. Eileen
Simpson—once married to John Berryman—in her memoir Poets in Their Youth, sensitively captures these lives
and their time in a way that lets us see beyond the questions that generate the pathography (How could someone so
damaged write what they did? Is madness necessary for art?) Kay Redfield Jameson, in her recent biography of
Robert Lowell, does touch on the latter question, but with grace and caution: Above all, it is Lowell’s poetry that
matters, she argues, and because this matters, one should take into account how he wrote it. Of course, it’s the
“how” that is important here, not simply the circumstances under which Lowell wrote. But in examining the time in
which Stafford wrote, the question arises as to why so many writers of this era both wrote of the emotionally
maimed and disillusioned and themselves lived lives that reflected their work. The rise, in the mid-century, of
psychiatric treatment and language provides the historical context that might begin to answer this question.
Simpson’s memoir also illustrates the psychic and personal costs of literary ambition from a particularly male, and
blustering, perspective. In her accounting, writers like Berryman, Schwartz, and Lowell struggle against
circumstances as varied as lack of recognition, too much recognition, and financial hardship; she places the life of
the mind in a social context to illustrate the ways in which the mind runs aground of society and what this does to
those who not only live the life of the mind but who are afraid of living otherwise, lest they lose their “gift.”
Running through the memoir, too, is the role of psychiatry and this move toward self-understanding. (“Analysands
All,” one chapter of the book is titled.) In tracing the course of these writers’ careers and personal lives, we’re able
to see how this psychoanalytic self-understanding changed the course of their work towards what became called

13

Likewise, nearly every academic study of Stafford’s fiction—whether from a feminist,
western, or the more recent disability studies point of view—either frames Stafford’s work with
her life or conflates the two. This is, perhaps, an understandable move, given that Stafford’s
fiction tracks so closely with her life. Many of Stafford’s characters—from Cora Savage in her
stories and unfinished novel, to Sonia Marburg in Boston Adventure, to Molly Fawcett in the
Mountain Lion (characters, too, that represent the various stages of a woman’s life, from
girlhood through adulthood)—read as aspects of Stafford’s self. The “problem” of Stafford’s
father, for example, or of a friend’s suicide while Stafford was an undergraduate at the
University of Colorado, Boulder—an event Stafford tried, unsuccessfully, to bring to fruition in a
series of unfinished works—weave their way into various stories. Stafford’s shame at her
childhood, even her tendency to self-harm when younger—these feelings and their resultant acts
appear again and again under various guises. Her fiction leads one to ask: What is the
relationship between self and story? For Stafford,
The most interesting lives of all, of course, are our own and there is nothing egotistic or
unmannerly in our being concerned with what happens to us . . . But it is not fair to
buttonhole our readers with a diagnosis of ourselves . . . And while autobiography is
inevitable, we must winnow carefully and add a good portion of lies, the bigger the better . . .
(“Truth in Fiction” 96)

in order, she goes on, to avoid judgment and the collapse of objectivity, which is the aim of good
fiction. Stafford is careful to draw the distinction between art and life, between craft and

“confessional.” Jean Stafford, who was a contemporary of these men—and married to Robert Lowell—is included
in Simpson’s memoir though she’s given different treatment. The psychic and personal costs of Stafford’s ambition
not only include financial hardship and the double-edged problem of recognition, but also include those facts unique
to her as a woman: domesticity, caretaking (especially for Robert Lowell), and a tension between being a woman
and a writer. I’ll discuss the role of psychiatry, in terms of Stafford’s form, later in this essay.

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material. Why is it, then, that a consideration of her art has forced—and yet also seems to
require—a consideration of her life?
The question of art and life, as important as it has been for Stafford’s critics and
biographers, was just as important for Stafford, though not in the expected direction. In other
words, the ways in Stafford’s fiction and imagination touched and presaged her life are as
striking and critical as the ways in which her life appears in her work. This is a movement
Stafford was keenly aware of and that caused her fear and anxiety. “I have written no novel so
bizarre as my own life and have fashioned no characters so improbably as you and I, and have
developed no relationship so unrealistically geometrical as ours,” she once wrote to a potential
lover and friend (qtd. in Goodman 112); in an early, unpublished and unfinished fictional sketch,
in which she reflects on the relationship between her life and art, Stafford writes, “She was
terrified by the patterns of her life and by her prophetic insights, by the fact that she had
imagined and had written much that had happened to her” (qtd. in Hulbert 228). This movement
from art to life animates those tensions that undergird Stafford’s fiction, which express the power
of the imagination and its relationship to the will. It is under these terms—and in this reverse
movement—that I read Stafford’s fiction. For not only do Stafford’s stories track this movement
in her characters, but at times her life came to reflect that which she wrote, as if, in the acts of
imagining and writing, she makes it true. Stafford’s relationship with language and reality is not
merely to take from her experience and recreate it with language; language also holds the
capacity to remake the world. In her fiction, characters seek solace and independence in their
imaginations. This move creates the high drama of a Stafford story, when the unexpected and
terrifying consequences of this act become apparent.

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We see this relationship between life and the imagination—and the anxieties this
entails—in Stafford’s 1948 story “The Bleeding Heart.” Twenty-one-year-old Rose Fabrizio, “a
Mexican girl from the West,” lives alone in Boston and works at a boarding school as secretary
to the headmistress, Miss Talmadge. Rose, an outsider to New England’s charms and foibles, is
constantly reminded of her dubious origin in this blue-blooded town. “‘Good Morning,’” Miss
Talmadge says to her, “‘How is our Westerner? Acclimated? Finding the charm of New England
both within and without?’” (“Collected” 146). Like many of Stafford’s women, Rose is an
outsider who longs to belong; her ethnicity is a symbol of her alienation. Stafford’s stories are
peopled with children, orphans, Mexicans, Native Americans, the children of immigrants (as in
Boston Adventure)—a sometimes-unfortunate shorthand Stafford reverts to in her attempt to
capture being an outsider; Stafford, ever the outsider herself, told friends she’d left home at the
age of seven and that she wished she’d been an orphan (“Domestic Gothic”). In her longing to
belong, Rose imagines being adopted by a New Englander, even going so far as to find, in the
town library where she passes the time, a “man about sixty” whom she assumes to be a suitable
father. Rose is convinced of her selection: “The ascot alone would have set him down as a person
of prominence, for no one unimportant, she reasoned, could afford to be so boldly eccentric.”
Though Rose cannot see what her “foster-father” is reading (she is reading psychology), his
“scholarly Oxford glasses” are “perfectly fitted on his stately nose.” She thinks “he might be a
mathematician or a novelist” (149), in other words, a perfectly blue-blooded choice. As she sits
watching him, Rose begins to construct a fantasy in which, finally, she belongs.
Yet despite her longing to be adopted and made an insider, Rose does not act on this
fantasy. “Indeed, she took pains never to see him out of his context” (150). Rose prefers a careful
distance between her life and what she imagines; she does not wish to discover that what she’s

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imagined is too far removed from reality and that, for instance, this man is really a sordid
stranger. And so Rose spends her days in her room, reading or imagining, allowing her mind to
wander in this sanctuary, away from pesky reality. Except she shares a wall with the apartment
next door, and all of its banging and strange, female voices—and also the electric car that keeps
coming up the drive—impinge on her isolation. It is Rose’s isolation that makes her fantasy of
belonging possible, as if belonging is only possible—ironically—through isolation. But slowly,
with the controlled tension of a horror story, the tenuousness of this position is revealed.
It begins innocuously enough: Rose goes to the Inn and runs into the man eating his
Thanksgiving dinner but “she knew that she had secretly expected him, for she was not at all
surprised” (152). The fantasy thus begins writing itself into Rose’s life. Then, Rose spots the
electric car outside of the restaurant. Does it belong to the man? she wonders (though, already,
we have a hunch). No, it must belong to the other diners, a woman with two children, Rose
concludes. Perhaps the woman is her noisy neighbor? Her foster-father, after all, is an aristocrat,
not someone who would drive an electric car. Back home again in her room, Rose hears a man’s
voice in the apartment next door. The voice startles her. The sound of its laughter sends her into
memories of her own father, a “low” man Rose blames for her poverty and isolation—if only
she’d had a different father, a better one, she believes, she wouldn’t be so “disgusted with herself
for spending so much time conjecturing on unseen and unknown people” (155). The story’s
terror, its mechanism is thus revealed: that the fantasy of the man will dissolve into a sordid
reality; that, perhaps, the fantasy Rose has fashioned for herself is really a mirror image of
something unfortunate inside of her—something she’d like to rid herself of or forget, but that
continually returns to her no matter how far into flight her imagination takes her. We learn,
finally, that Rose is almost frightened of this:

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She was almost frightened to think of him just as she had almost been frightened as a child when
everyone had left the church after the last mass and she had wondered what happened then,
whether the plaster saints came to life and if God emerged, full-bodied, from the wafers in the
ciborium. (154)

But Rose is only “almost” frightened because there is still an aspect of interest in the situation: as
with the plaster saints who, though plaster, encapsulate the mystery of faith—a mystery that
impels Rose’s childhood imagination—what happens when the mystery enters the realm of real-
life? What does this emergence do to the relationship between the imagination and reality?
And then, one day, Miss Talmadge asks Rose to take a bleeding heart plant to a former
matron of the school, as a gift. The matron is ill and, coincidentally, is Rose’s noisy neighbor.
Rose accepts “the commission with the greatest reluctance” because “she wanted the occupants
of the other house to remain anonymous” (158). Rose rings the bell next door and waits, and
while she’s waiting the electric car comes up the drive. Somewhere inside, a door opens and
closes and from the porch Rose hears a man’s voice. The reader, by now, connects what Rose
cannot—that the voice belongs to her foster father—and this solidifies the story’s irony and
narrative tension. The door opens and Rose’s foster father stands before her: “It was clear that he
recognized her but he was not surprised; it was almost as if he had expected her all along” (160).
Here, stories and worlds collide; Rose’s fantasy runs up against the problem of another story that
is being written, and one that presages Stafford’s life. For the sick matron is the man’s mother
and she is suffering from a loss of verbs and adjectives—a loss startingly like aphasia. Inside the
man’s house—whose name, we find out, is Mr. Benson—Rose is led to an inner chamber where
his mother lies with a talking parrot that rips apart the bleeding heart plant with its beak. It’s a
strange scene yet it’s presented as inevitable for both Rose and Mr. Benson: “Rose, while she
could not claim to be really surprised herself, could not adjust herself to the man’s unhesitating
acceptance of the situation as if they had planned it together some days before” (161). Rose is

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not surprised, in part, because we are not surprised—here Stafford is winking to us about her
carefully planted narrative connections. But, more importantly, Rose is not surprised that she has
willed this into being. Her only surprise is that Mr. Benson has a part in this strange world,
though not in the way Rose expected or wanted: he brings to this world his own narrative, though
one that oddly reflects hers. From here, the story takes on the shape of a nightmare or a dream:
“The shape of the room and the situation of the furniture” in the inner chamber where Mr.
Benson’s mother lies is “the same as in Rose’s room as if in planned parody” (162). For a
moment, Rose is left alone with the man’s mother and has a revelation. She is
forced to accept the reality of the afternoon, that the man in the yellow ascot lived here and that
he drove the electric car and that in no particular did he resemble her image of her foster-father . .
. A good deal in her quiet life would be changed . . . She would be free, it is true, to walk once
again in the parts of the town and the country she had enjoyed before but this gain was offset by
the knowledge that there was no mystery left: she knew exactly where the man lived and,
moreover, of her regret, she knew how he lived. (164)

Rose tries to leave the room but the man begs her to stay: “‘Strictly speaking, we live in the same
house, Rose,’ he says. Won’t you come again?’” (167). The story ends the following day, when
Rose is walking to the library and Mr. Benson, upon seeing her, follows her in his electric car.
Rose tells him that she is not afraid of him (she is only displeased, we learn). “‘Just think of me
as your father,” he says. ‘Why don’t you call me that as a matter of fact? I mean, not ‘Father’ but
one of the more familiar things like ‘Daddy’?” (160). It’s a line that reflects what Rose cannot
escape, though she runs away from him, towards the library, and he leaves his car and runs after
her:
When she was within the storm doors, she looked back and saw him standing there in the
snow with his neck bare and his arms spread out, his palms upward in supplication. He had
flung his head back and his derby had fallen to the ground; he wore the yellow ascot on his
left arm like a maniple. Just behind him, the electric car cast an absolutely square shadow on
the white ground. (170)

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Rose’s story, filled as it is with symbolism and imagery, ends on a hard fact: the “absolutely
square shadow on the white ground,” as if, without qualification, this observable fact is the only
thing we are left with, that we can be sure of, though this is by no means relieving or redemptive.
Interestingly, we are not left with the hard fact of Mr. Benson; in his posture, we’re reminded of
the Saints in the church who, after mass, come to life. The fantasy Rose spins, with all of its self-
sustaining desire, comes to an end. In rejecting her foster father, Rose rejects the impurity of an
imagination run aground on the world. At first, Rose is afraid of this, but by the story’s end, she
is merely displeased, the way an artist might be displeased at having gotten it wrong. Because
Rose’s imagination, though seemingly free, was burdened with memories of her father, with the
past; and while she might now be free to exist in Boston without the fear of her fantasy being
destroyed, she is also beholden to a world without mystery. The story ends with a cold, final
distance, a necessary dispassion. One can imagine that Rose has “learned her lesson.” Never
again will her imagination run away from her; from now on, we might surmise, she will regard
the world with a dispassionate, weary eye, lest the world turn out to be the unwelcome reflection
of her inner sanctuary, and lest her inner sanctuary lose its power to remake the world.
I begin with this close reading of “The Bleeding Heart” to highlight the imagination’s
power in Stafford’s fiction and the ways in which it reflects and constructs the world. I also offer
this close reading to point to this essay’s methodology. Stafford’s literary gift is her ability to
write bodies and minds that defy critical and social expectation; the magic of her imagination is
that, in doing so, she writes her own life and so tests the limits of the will, the imagination, and
the social. To pay close attention to Stafford at the level of language and structure, too, is to
acknowledge the New Critical milieu in in which she worked and which she was deeply
influenced by; and, as I plan to show later, reading in this way illuminates the role illness has in

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the formal construction of Stafford’s fiction. To center illness, too, is to shift my role as critic.
Here, I take from Kleinman and narrative medicine and attune myself to expressions of illness
and health—and their attendant languages—to read with Stafford’s life and stories, rather than
“about” them (Kleinman 23). And, if to write of and through illness is to write the body, then my
role as critic is, in some sense, to read and understand that body. Thus, in paying attention to
Stafford’s prose—in attuning myself closely and offering novel readings—I hope to enact the
method of bearing witness and the “active transport of love” the narrative medicine scholar Rita
Charon elucidates.
In choosing which stories of Stafford’s to read here, I considered not only those that
explicitly center illness but also those that, in the years I’ve been reading Stafford, have both
moved and bewildered me, another aspect of my reading with Stafford. In reading the stories that
I do to make larger claims about Stafford’s fiction and imagination, I don’t intend for them to
stand for the whole; rather, I mean for them to help me raise thoughts and questions that have
larger implications, both in Stafford’s work and beyond. I also read in a specific order to trace an
arc that enacts my argument about Stafford’s art and imagination. Thus, I begin with “Beatrice
Trueblood’s Story” to locate and elucidate a method of reading with sympathy that will guide me
through the rest of my study; I move on to a reading of “The Warlock,” to lay bare the competing
narratives of illness and sickness in order to determine how they construct the self and how they
turn questions of meaning and interpretation back onto the reader; and, finally, I bring both
discussions to bear on my reading of “The Interior Castle,” in which I look closely at Stafford’s
style and form to locate the self both hidden in, and revealed by, language. My intent is to add
depth not only to the way in which we’ve understood and will understand Jean Stafford’s life and

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art, but to add something novel to the relationship between women’s literature, illness, and the
imagination.

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Chapter One: Reading with Sympathy: “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story”

In 1955, ten years after publishing “The Bleeding Heart,” Stafford published “Beatrice
Trueblood’s Story” in the New Yorker, where she published most of her stories, under the
editorship of Katharine White and Howard Moss. (Moss, like Jean, was an outsider from the
West in New York’s literary world, while White was akin to one of the east coast matriarchs or
stepmothers Stafford’s characters hate to love, though the two had mutual admiration for each
other.) The story reads like good gossip: we’re dropped into a Newport social scene, where a
group of friends is discussing the sudden deafness of their friend Beatrice. Beatrice, in her
“middle thirties and on the very eve of her second marriage” was visiting these same friends with
her fiancé when she discovers she is deaf (“Collected” 385). The onset of this deafness is
sudden; Beatrice comes down the lawn one morning to join the other guests sitting at the water
and hears nothing of what they’re saying, nor does she react when they address her. At first, the
other guests think Beatrice is playing a joke on them, but the joke goes on too long. Jack
Onslager, who with his wife, Priscilla, is hosting, observes Beatrice in the moment she realizes
what has happened. Rather than looking terrified the way one might expect, Beatrice’s face
registers a look of “revelation.” It was “as if she had opened a door and found behind it a new
world so strange, so foreign to all her knowledge and her experience and the history of her
senses, that she had spoken only approximately when, in a far, soft modest voice, she said, ‘I am
deaf. That explains it’” (397).
Onslager is tasked by his friends with visiting Beatrice in New York, to convince her to see a
psychiatrist. There seems to be no medical reason for Beatrice’s deafness, at least not from what
anyone can tell. The story’s first pages are filled with speculation about what’s happened to poor

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Beatrice: Is her deafness psychosomatic? A matter of fate (as Priscilla Onslager believes)? Jack
Onslager hesitates to accept his mission because he doubts “the right to invade Bea’s soft and
secret and eccentric world” (397). He has sympathy for Beatrice: he “would give ten years of his
life . . . to be able, when he wanted, to seal himself into impenetrable silence” (388). When he
finally visits the deaf Beatrice in her apartment, Onslager is struck with love for her, for, despite
“the upheaval of her life, she was as proud and secret-living as a flower” (399). Respectfully,
Onslager asks Beatrice what happened, though he has his suspicions. After all, the look of
revelation on Beatrice’s face that morning, along with her words, seemed to belie an expectation
or awareness of what had happened to her. And, the night before her deafness, Onslager
overheard Beatrice and her fiancé arguing. He remembers a critical part of the argument:
‘You musn’t think you can shut your mind to these things,’ he [Beatrice’s fiancé, Marten]
said. You can’t shut your ears to them . . .’
‘I am exhausted with talk, Marten,’ Beatrice said softly. ‘I will not hear another word.’ (392)

Onslager’s memory primes us for a psychoanalytic reading of Beatrice, or at least a
symbolic reading of her situation that would have us assume her deafness is an escape from her
fiancé, Marten, and the “things” he mentions. But the story asks us to pivot away from this kind
of interpretation and towards a more nuanced reading. The day Onslager visits Beatrice in her
apartment, she confirms what he suspects—that she’s willed her own deafness—while also telling
him that it is precisely this that scares her. In the story’s words, it was not
the deafness itself that scared her . . . What had begun to harry her was that her wish to be deaf
had been granted . . . She emphasized that she had elected to hear no more, would not permit of
accident, and ridiculed the doting Priscilla’s sentimental fate. She had done it suddenly and out of
despair, and she was sorry now. ‘I am ashamed. It was an act of cowardice,’ she said. (400)

At this point, the narrative, in which Beatrice has been offstage until this moment with
Onslager—in other words, we’ve only received impressions of Beatrice from Onslager and other

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secondary characters—swerves abruptly to Beatrice’s unhappy memories of her childhood and a
difficult, previous marriage. We learn of her mother’s alcoholism and of her first husband, who
regarded rancor as a necessary part of marriage: “He would not let Beatrice go but tricked and
snared her and strewed her path with obstacles, until finally she had been obliged to run away
and melodramatically leave behind a note” (403). This sudden swerve into Beatrice’s mind
highlights the story’s structure—which hinges on speculations and false interpretations of
Beatrice’s deafness—by, finally, offering Beatrice to us from her own perspective. But the pieces
of Beatrice that we receive only have meaning in that she must forget them; when she finally
emerges from her memories, the first thing Beatrice tells Onslager is that her fiancé will forgive
her if she comes “to her senses.” “Coming to her senses,” in the story, entails Beatrice forgetting
her past—especially her first marriage—because of her fiancé’s jealousy. This forgetting is
phrased in general terms: “‘But how do you amputate experience? How do you eliminate what
intransigently was?’” Beatrice asks. Her question harkens back to her fight with her fiancé: could
this inability to forget have been the reason for Beatrice and Marten’s quarrel? It’s another
question the story does not answer, though a more pressing one is revealed: How can Beatrice
fully integrate herself into a life and world that would ask her to amputate herself? How, in these
terms, could she ever be whole? And, further, what does it mean to be whole? Beatrice’s
dilemma in the story is not merely the condition of her deafness, but rather, an illness
experience—if we define “illness” as the experience of symptoms and suffering [Kleinman 3)]—
that traps her in a net that is personal, social, and cultural. As for Rose Fabrizio—and for
Stafford, who wrote about the seduction of the compartmentalized, male mind—the social self,
the imaginative self, and the self of experience and memory present a messy problem: How can
they exist coherently in a single person?

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Beatrice agrees to see a psychiatrist, and, at the story’s end—which leaps ahead in time—
Beatrice is no longer deaf and is married to another man. Everything is righted, or so it seems.
Because in the story’s final moments, Onslager witnesses an argument between Beatrice and her
new husband. Only this time, Beatrice and Onslager are aware of each other—they exchange a
look in the story’s final moments: Beatrice, previously unaware of being watched, sees Onslager,
and Onslager sees her; they “travailed in the brief look they exchanged” while beyond them, the
“water was a mass of little wrathful whitecaps” (405).
As a character, Beatrice is the finest outline. The story’s structure limns her in the way a
medical case study might: it begins well after Beatrice’s deafness, when Priscilla, Jack, and their
guests sit together rehashing what happened to Beatrice and speculating about the cause of her
deafness. The story’s distant, third-person narration stays closest to Jack—on Jack’s memory of
Beatrice’s fight with her fiancé; on his own wish to be mute; on his visit to Beatrice and his
impressions of her apartment—before alighting, briefly, on Beatrice’s own memories, which
serve to give us a sense of the wholeness the story skirts and that must, ultimately, be amputated.
And then there is Stafford’s style itself, which further distances us from knowing Beatrice by
collapsing point of view into a strange omniscience that, in its admixture of conversational and
baroque language brings us into confidence while keeping us at arm’s length: “But the builders
of the house where Mrs. Trueblood lived . . .” we read of Beatrice’s home, seemingly in
Onslager’s point of view, though this is registered in that state of collapse, “had pretended that
the neighborhood was bourgeois and there was no seamy side, and they had commemorated their
swindle in a big facsimile of rectitude” (398). Inside Beatrice’s apartment, the cushions are
“asceptic green,” and a lampshade is “some ersatz material made esoterically in the form of a
starfish” (398). And while, of Beatrice’s apartment we are given paragraphs of description, of

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Beatrice we only see that she is smiling, “cool and tranquil,” before we are given Onslager’s
direct perception of her as a flower. When Beatrice does speak to Onslager we do not know what
she says. Rather, we recede into her memory.
Maureen Ryan argues that Stafford’s women withdraw from the “horrors” of modern
society and “the oppressions of a patriarchal structure” by retreating to their own minds (99);
physical and mental ailments become metaphors for alienation from society (107). This is the
kind of reading Stafford teases. As the narrative progresses through the various speculations and
assumptions about Beatrice, we, too, are primed for symbolic readings, as when we learn of the
argument between Beatrice and her fiancé that Onslager overhears, or when we learn that
Beatrice has run from a marriage once before. Beatrice’s deafness in this context might be
symptomatic of her condition as woman. But this tendency towards interpretation—which
Stafford both teases and mocks by refusing to give us definitive insight into Beatrice—both
perpetuates and reveals the dehumanizing limits of a purely symbolic reading. No one can know
Beatrice, and it seems she’d prefer it this way; only Onslager is hesitant to invade her soft and
secret world. But despite the fact that this style of interpretation overwrites Beatrice, it does
illuminate the confluence of symptoms and cause, both of which remain mysterious in the story,
regardless of our attempts to decode them. What matters to Beatrice is her symptom—her
deafness—and her suffering, which the story phrases in moral terms: how seductive to escape
through her deafness (even Onslager sees this) but how cowardly Beatrice feels for doing it.
Beatrice may have succeeded, in one sense, in leaving the world, but what are the personal and
moral costs of leaving it behind? We never go far enough with Beatrice to answer this; she is,
presumably, cured before we see her live this question. But it’s the question at the limit of the
imaginative self that Stafford explores.

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Further, to read Beatrice’s deafness as mere metaphor for alienation denies Beatrice her
enormous agency as a character despite her relative absence from the page. She is the silent but
active center around which the story revolves, shifting, through her will, the terms of her world
and the narrative. The reason for Beatrice’s deafness—and whether or not it is psychosomatic,
and whether or not she is retreating from a bad marriage—is not the story’s central question. Nor
is “The Story of Beatrice Trueblood” a didactic story, one easily reduced to the simplistic socio-
politics Stafford abhorred. One of the story’s most compelling questions and themes, beyond the
one about the morality of retreat and the seductive but dangerous power of the imagination, tests
our assumptions about symptom and cause: Is Beatrice’s deafness the cause of her isolation? Or
merely the symptom of it? In these terms, her deafness is not just metaphor, but an aspect as
factual as her sex that calls into question its socially constituted conditions. Nor is Beatrice’s
deafness linked only to her alienation, itself tricky concept when applied to this story. For
alienation implies that Beatrice, regardless of her desire not to, should belong. But to belong,
Beatrice reminds us, requires an amputation. It requires a denial of the self and so it cannot mean
belonging in the context Stafford, in her stories, usually means: recognition.
What to do with a character that, in her relative absence, seeming passivity, and
complicated retreat, troubles our ability to find easy cause and symptom, let alone empathize
with and recognize? Stafford grants Beatrice something she rarely grants her protagonists: shared
sympathy. When we finally meet Beatrice in her apartment, we see her in the light of his
sympathy: “she was as proud and secret-living as a flower” (399), Onslager observes. Rather
than see Beatrice as a puzzle, mystery, or scandal—as the other characters in this story do—
Onslager approaches her with cautious respect. She’s defied his expectations: he finds her
apartment well-appointed (rather than shabby), and she is proud rather than pitiful. And although

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Onslager receives Beatrice’s secret “uneasily” (400), he receives it nonetheless. Of everyone,
Jack Onslager is the character best equipped to receive this secret, given his own thoughts about
shutting himself off from the world; interestingly, it is not their sex that links them—or their
shared experience as women—but a need for an independent self that pre-exists either. But most
importantly, it is Jack’s recognition of Beatrice’s secret, private self that allows him to receive
her. For, regardless of what he shares in common with Beatrice, it is his recognition that gives
him the vision of a flower where others would see an outline or nothing at all. Thus his moment
of recognition grants him a transformative imagination. For their moment of communication
Stafford crafts a touching, funny scene: Jack Onslager writing on a notepad to Beatrice, and
Beatrice speaking in turn, both of them communicating more deeply to each other than if they
were communicating through their usual senses.
Which makes their final moment together both touching and vexing. To “travail,” as
Onslager and Beatrice do in the “brief look” they give each other, is to do great physical or
mental work, often of a painful nature. It is associated, more specifically, with the labor and pain
of childbirth. Moreover, the word, in its etymology, connects the mental with the corporeal, from
exhaustion and struggle through birth and body mortification. In its Biblical sense, the word
connotes the toil of prayer and contemplation (OED). The look Onslager and Beatrice exchange
is both active and mysterious: theirs is not a passive look, but a transitive one that indicates
something being brought forth. As such, it’s a creative act. The story refuses to share the
dimensions of this mutual secret and creative act, leaving it for Beatrice and Jack Onslager to
know. This refusal reiterates the fact that the interpretive act—or the kinds of unsympathetic,
interpretive acts Beatrice is subjected to—in a story where interpretation and assumption drive
the plot, is secondary. What matters is to receive, to listen, and to hold, and, in this, to make an

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imaginative and transformative leap. The story, with its final, cryptic look, makes this demand on
us as readers at the same time it enacts the lively, mutual recognition so few of Stafford’s women
receive.

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Chapter Two: The Competing Narratives of Illness and Sickness in “The Warlock”

In her 1955 short story “The Warlock,” Stafford adds an explicitly social layer to the strata
of illness, mind, and womanhood: the medical profession. The story follows Mrs. Kimball as she
sails from Brooklyn to the West Indies on a ramshackle cargo ship “for a convalescence in the
sun after a long and depressing illness and an operation” (25). Mrs. Kimball is traveling alone;
she’s left her husband and children behind, though, at the story’s outset, we learn that Mrs.
Kimball does not mind this, that, in fact, she is not afraid of her isolation, though the story’s
insistence that we know this implies the fragility of her attitude. But despite this fragility, Mrs.
Kimball’s solitude, we learn, is necessary for her convalescence; in order to recover, Mrs.
Kimball needs quiet and sleep. But any hope Mrs. Kimball has for either is dashed by the sordid
reality of the boat and her loud, sloppy cabinmate, Mrs. McNamara, who is traveling to the
islands to wait out her divorce. A bit Dickensian in her construction, Mrs. McNamara talks too
much, too loudly, and takes up half of the cabin. When Mrs. Kimball receives a bouquet of white
roses from her absent husband, Mrs. McNamara and her brother Mr. Weed (who is there to see
his sister off), seeing the roses but not knowing who they’re from, imply that Mrs. Kimball must
have an admirer. Is she, too, travelling to the islands for a divorce? they wonder. Mrs. Kimball,
mortified, squirms beneath their assumptions. She tries to correct them with the truth, but her
reticence and their insistence make this impossible. For Mrs. Kimball is a stubbornly private
woman. She refuses to divulge the true reason for her travel, preferring to keep it—and her
dignity—to herself: “sickness was far too personal to reveal to strangers” (27).
Thus the stage for the drama between Mrs. Kimball’s public and private selves—between
the self she understands to be hers and the self the world reflects, albeit distorted, back to her—is

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set, though Stafford begins to move this drama into Mrs. Kimball’s mind. Mrs. McNamara and
Mr. Weed’s assumptions set off an ugly train of thought in Mrs. McNamara that catalyzes the
story’s narrative movement. After they assume she has a lover, we move closer into Mrs.
Kimball’s consciousness to learn that, just before the onset of her illness, she and Mark Kimball
“had been on the very brink of divorce” (27). Mark Kimball had an affair. And while he may
have returned to the marriage, did he do so out of pity? (From this we might imply: Does Mark
love Mrs. Kimball?) A second question haunts Mrs. Kimball and calls into question her sense of
self—namely, her agency:
Nor—and this was even worse—could she be sure that her illness, coming at a time so crucial, had
not been unconscious blackmail; it was almost, she often thought, as if her body itself had said to
Mark, ‘See, if you leave me for Martha, I will die!’ Marianne Kimball, an honest woman, could not
bear these days to hear the word ‘psychosomatic.’ (28)

Mrs. Kimball’s illness is first likened to “unconscious blackmail” before this description is
softened to something more ambivalent: “it was almost . . . as if her body itself had said,” we are
told, as if Mrs. Kimball’s body spoke without her knowledge and said what she dared not speak
to herself—and this is delivered with a bashfulness that evokes the uncertainty of an illness that
seems to have no rational cause. While one could argue that Mrs. Kimball, in an echo of the
more symbolic readings of Beatrice Trueblood, withdraws into illness to cope with the pressures
of her marriage, her illness is also an assertive force that speaks and insists on its own narrative.
The body resolves itself to speak, but who asks it to do so? (Marianne Kimball is, after all, “an
honest woman.”) Thus, while Mrs. Kimball’s illness appears passive, Stafford ironizes this
passivity by using it to drive the narrative action. Mrs. Kimball’s illness not only impels her onto
the boat, but it reorders her understanding of her self and her world: she begins to experience
both with increasing fear, insecurity, and paranoia. For what Mrs. Kimball fears is loss of
control: of her marriage, her body, her self—in essence, the narrative she had been living until

32

her husband’s revelation and her illness. This fear registers as a paranoia: Does Mark Kimball
love Martha Kimball? Why are Mrs. McNamara and Mr. Weed obsessed with Mrs. Kimball’s
marriage? The story swerves from its initial concern of Mrs. Kimball’s recovery and destination
and begins to tell the strange journey into Mrs. Kimball’s consciousness. Stafford externalizes
this consciousness to great effect: internal and external worlds meet to create a new geography.
In this space, we begin to question the line between fantasy and reality, rational and irrational,
and, finally, illness and health.
Stafford plays with this line of questioning to insist on Mrs. Kimball’s agency. We learn,
for instance, that during her illness Mrs. Kimball had a surgery, and this fact gives us a
seemingly rational reason for Mrs. Kimball’s overactive mind:
How fanciful she [Mrs. Kimball] was! Sensibly, she reminded herself that she was still poisoned
with the countless anodynes that had been mingled with her blood, and that this foreboding she felt
came from the strange condition of her chemistry; some part of her mind, she was sure, had been
awake in the operating room while the rest of her had been killed violently with ether, and this
unforgiving and unforgetting self could sometimes prejudice the rest of her and persuade her that
she was a scapegoat and a victim. (28)

We never learn the exact nature of Mrs. Kimball’s illness, and, likewise, the story is not clear on
this sense of foreboding, though here is an attempt to pin down its cause. We’re left to wonder:
Does this sense of foreboding have to do with Mark’s affair? With Mrs. McNamara and Mr.
Weed’s assumptions about Mrs. McNamara having a lover? With the boat’s shoddy condition?
Given these possibilities, it’s more false reassurance than indisputable truth that Mrs. Kimball’s
“fanciful” nature might be the result of medications given to her during her surgery. And though
she “sensibly” reminds herself of this fact, the word “sensibly” and all it entails is obliterated by
the striking, final image of one part of Mrs. Kimball being killed off with ether while her awake
part takes stock of what she will never forget. That image haunts the sentence, dividing Mrs.
Kimball into two parts: the sensible part of her under the influence of “countless anodynes,” and

33

the other, eternal part of her that observes all and makes meaning from her observations. For
Mrs. Kimball’s mind, we learn, will not die; it is ever active and often at her expense (thus her
tendency to make herself scapegoat and victim). What is clear to us, then, is that Mrs. Kimball,
passive as she might seem, is violently alive and observant. Her mind, despite her seeming
passivity, is eternal.
It is at this borderland between Mrs. Kimball’s internal and external worlds that Dr.
Cortez—the story’s Warlock—appears. Though he’s the ship’s doctor, Mrs. Kimball does not
seek him out for treatment: she merely needs him to refrigerate her medication. As the word
“Warlock,” implies, Dr. Cortez is as versed in medicine as he is in less rational matters; his
bookshelves are an “unmedical scramble” of yoga, reincarnation, voodoo, telepathy . . .” (30).
His appearance in the story marks the shift into this borderland and is represented by his office,
which is “in the heart” of the boat and a “red-carpeted and rococo suite of rooms” (28). Mrs.
Kimball struggles to decode the apparent symbolism of Dr. Cortez’s office: “There were no
pictures on the walls, but there were two ornate mirrors, one of which was superlatively
(superciliously, really) faithful to reality, the other capriciously made to distort” (28). It’s as if
the drama of Mrs. Kimball—her private, true self vs. her reflected, public self—is manifested on
the wall.
Reading in this borderland makes it difficult for us to know if Mrs. Kimball is merely
paranoid or if Dr. Kimball has dark intentions. Upon first meeting her, Dr. Cortez tells Mrs.
Kimball that he’s been “expecting her.” It’s a terrifying and strange moment, but it only means
that he’s had access to the list of passengers and noticed that Mrs. Kimball comes from Boston;
her would love to discuss MIT with her, as he’s building a mechanical brain, which he calls a
“genius machine.” He’s also interested in “the use of supersonic wave lengths as a weapon to

34

destroy the enemy through the collapse of his sympathetic nervous system” (32) and, oddly,
ventriloquism. The comical way in which Stafford conveys Dr. Cortez as a threat pushes the
story into satire; but despite this comedy, there’s a sense of building dread that Dr. Cortez’s
interests—and his capacity as a healer—hinge on a keen interest in the meeting point between
mind and body. Thus, he’s a threat to the private Mrs. Kimball, the practitioner of a magic that
threatens her privacy and healing. Here, then, two powers meet: that of doctor and patient.
Stafford sets the two against each other in a battle for narrative control and meaning.
Dr. Cortez’s power—and the narrative surrender it requires—threatens Mrs. Kimball’s
agency. And though she is afraid of him, Mrs. Kimball obliges his keen curiosity: “she realized it
would be improvident to offend him, since later on she might need his care and she did not like
to think of a hypodermic needle in the hands of an enemy . . .” (31) Though the sentiment
become comical, it nonetheless underscores the necessity of Mrs. Kimball’s acquiescence; in
order to be treated medically, she must be passive and innocuous enough not to offend. In this
way, the story enacts the tension between a dominant, medical imperative—and its concomitant
narrative—that requires acquiescence, and Mrs. Kimball’s personal and private experience of her
illness. Although he’s yet to use a needle on Mrs. Kimball, Dr. Cortez figuratively pokes at her
by asking about her marriage, her reason for travel, even offering unwanted commentary about
his own marriage. His interest further triggers Mrs. Kimball’s paranoia because, finally, it is a
violation of her private self and the illness experience she would prefer to keep close, both for
her healing and autonomy, lest she be parsed and misunderstood by others.
We see this battle enacted when Dr. Cortez begins to speculate about the reason why Mrs.
Kimball is traveling alone: Is Mr. Kimball dead? Though she tries to set him straight, Dr. Cortez
receives her information “doubtfully and let it drift away” (33). He then turns to the subject of

35

marriage again. Mrs. Kimball tries to leave the room: “‘So you slip out of my fingers for only a
little nonce,’” Dr. Cortez says, when, suddenly, Mrs. Kimball sees herself reflected in one of the
mirrors:
Mrs. Kimball, catching sight of her spread-nosed, pig-eyed, squashed-in face in the distorting
mirror, gasped, and she shivered in a sudden icy chill. From behind the mirror—or from outer
space—came an exact echo of her own voice, saying, ‘I am Mrs. Kimball . . .’ The chill that had
come over her when she saw that appalling travesty of her face was not imaginary or emotional; it
marked the onset of a new affliction, and by dinnertime she was burning with fever. There was a
gnawing ache in her limbs, her head hurt dully, and she recognized she had flu. The knowledge
made her weep. Was she faltering into permanent invalidism? Was the rest of her life to be a
succession of fleshly ills? (33)

It’s at this moment when Dr. Cortez, sure as he is of himself, pins Mrs. Kimball down with his
assumptions—writing, in essence, his own narrative for her—that Mrs. Kimball sees herself
distorted. In seeing herself distorted—and in hearing herself mimicked by Dr. Cortez’s
ventriloquism—what, exactly, does Mrs. Kimball see? Here, it might be tempting to give an
autobiographical reading of this story, to say that Mrs. Kimball is Jean Stafford, who, after her
car accident, was left looking “battered” (Showalter). (Mrs. Kimball, in this reading, merely
reflects her maker.) But a more distressing anxiety about the power of another narrative to
overwrite one’s very sense of self—without one’s participation or consent—lurks behind the
moment. For as much as Mrs. Kimball demands her privacy while insisting on her story—that
she is not getting a divorce, and that her husband is not, in fact, dead—she must contend with an
alternate one. And this story, which has the capacity to alter her sense of self, originates from Dr.
Cortez. Her ensuing illness, then—her taking to her sick bed—is her recourse and her way of
speaking, though this ultimately returns her to Dr. Cortez’s powers. For, after seeing herself thus
reflected, Mrs. Kimball is sick for days and becomes Dr. Cortez’s “captive . . . forced to submit
to his twice-daily professional calls, his stethoscope examinations, and his injections of
penicillin.” We learn that Mrs. Kimball could have healed from her initial illness and surgery “if

36

only Dr. Cortez had left her alone” (36). And while Mrs. McNamara takes care of Mrs.
Kimball—here we learn, conveniently, that Mrs. McNamara is also a nurse— she’s never
granted the privacy she needs to heal.
Dr. Cortez’s diagnosis of Mrs. Kimball—a diagnosis that Mrs. McNamara shares—is that
she is “hiding a shattered heart”:
They could not in any other way account for her being away from home at Christmastime; their
questions were loaded with insinuation, and because her answers were evasive (she had developed
this talent and was proud of it), the questions were incessant. It might have saved her some vexation
if she had told them the whole truth—that she had been ill and was going south simply for the
sun—but she knew that they would both be far too fascinated, the Doctor from a professional point
of view and the nurse from a social one, and she shrank from the thought of their cross-
examinations. (38-9)

Mrs. Kimball’s illness, then, is not just a matter of a shattered heart, but of her hiding it; if only
Mrs. Kimball would tell the truth, then all would be well. But the problem with “the truth,” in
this instance, is that it invites the doors being flung open on Mrs. McNamara’s heart, when, by
the nature of their profession and inquiry, Dr. Cortez and Mrs. Kimball cannot recognize what is
there. To heal would require an openness that Mrs. Kimball will not give because it cannot end
in recognition, in the kind of sympathy, perhaps, that Jack Onslager gives Beatrice Trueblood.
Here, the story teases a question: What happens when an illness becomes social? How does one
hold onto their private narrative in the context of other narratives, in other words, how does an ill
person maintain a sense of agency and self in the social context of sickness?
It’s a question that, given the period in which Stafford wrote, is difficult—if not
impossible—to answer. The fact, though, that the story poses the question is itself an
achievement that points to the prescience and visionary quality of Stafford’s fiction. Thus the
story’s conclusion feels like a missed opportunity when we might read it, instead, as the
foreclosure of a possibility the story gestures towards—in other words, the possibility of Mrs.

37

Kimball realizing a self and a narrative that is fully her own. The story draws to its conclusion
when Mrs. McNamara leaves the boat and Mrs. Kimball is finally granted her privacy. Although
she’s granted her privacy, and can begin to sleep and recover, there is still the problem of the Dr.
Cortez. He haunts the story’s final pages, bringing to the foreground again the question of what
in the story is real and what is Mrs. Kimball’s fancy. The ship makes its first stop at a small
island. Mrs. Kimball is sitting on the deck, listening to the stevedores unload the cargo when Dr.
Cortez appears. Just as the ship docks at the island, we dock, suddenly, in the continent of Mrs.
Kimball’s mind: Dr. Cortez’s teeth, for example, are now “snowy, feral” (40)—mind bends
reality to match its anxieties. Mrs. Kimball decides to go ashore “to escape this sleek, too well-
dressed vampire” (40). On the island, she takes a ferry back and forth to another small island.
She’s immersed in the lively, unfamiliar scene when, suddenly, Dr. Cortez appears. It’s unclear
how he gets onto the ferry and why. He appears so suddenly at the end of a long, vivid
description of the scene: there are “girls dressed in the shimmering green of parakeets or grass
snakes, in numbing purple, in scarlet that made the eye look down . . . Men in pastel zoot suits
and oxblood shoes . . . babies—dozens of babies—their mouths stoppered up with pacifiers . . .”
and then, suddenly: “Besides these colorful commuters, there was Dr. Cortez.” Stafford paces
this description so distinctly that one feels as if Dr. Cortez has traveled ages in a few minutes, to
appear just where Mrs. Kimball is sitting. (Indeed, the passive “there was” seems to make a joke
of this.) Dr. Cortez says nothing to Mrs. Kimball, only sits opposite her with a deadly, fixed
smile. The scene is bizarre—is this happening? Has Mrs. Kimball gone mad? But, for once, Mrs.
Kimball is not afraid to see Dr. Cortez outside of her bed and “by all these people, protected by
the brilliant public light of day” (42). It’s as if, ironically, a life lived in public—though firmly in

38

the continent of her mind—will protect Mrs. Kimball. Back and forth they ride on the ferry, in
this strange stalemate.
Eventually, Mrs. Kimball tires and longs “for her dark cabin and narrow bed” (42). She
returns to the ship alone and believes she’s lost the doctor until, turning into her passage, she
sees “a figure at the end of it advancing at a measured, ecclesiastical gait; it appeared, to further
the churchly impression, to be clad in a flowing robe. She stopped and waited, frightened to
death.” It’s Dr. Cortez, of course, “in a black shantung wrapper.” He asks Mrs. Kimball if she’s
been out all this time, to which she cries, “‘You were there! You were on the ferry all afternoon.
Weren’t you?’” But Dr. Cortez tells her he’s been asleep all afternoon:
‘You’re lying!’ She wanted to tear out his eyes; she wanted, indeed, to kill him and
obliterate that smile forever.
‘Poor Mrs. Kimball,’ he said soothingly. ‘You have had a touch of sun intoxication, I
believe, just as I feared.’ (43)

It’s a final scene that manages to be both droll and haunting: Mrs. Kimball insisting on her
experience, which shapes her reality, an experience that Dr. Cortez attributes to “a touch of sun
intoxication.” As in “The Bleeding Heart,” Stafford ends with a religious image; one has the
sense that Dr. Cortez, in being transformed, briefly, into Priest, has entered the realm of the
sacred and so become more of a threat to Mrs. Kimball than when he was a Warlock. But as
Rose does with her foster father, Mrs. Kimball comes to see the shabby truth of Dr. Cortez in his
filthy wrapper. What causes her to see him, finally, in this way? And do we trust her perception?
While we might question it, at this point in the story, the accuracy of Mrs. Kimball’s perception
is less significant. What becomes clear in the story’s final moment is the gap between the
experiential nature of Mrs. Kimball’s illness and Dr. Cortez’s understanding of it, which would
rather overwrite Mrs. Kimball than hold it, and her, in sympathy and understanding. In this gap,
how will the story resolve itself?

39

Stafford has an answer for this, though a not very satisfying one. In the story’s final
moments, Mrs. Kimball reads the cablegram waiting for her on her windowsill. It’s a message
from her husband, who says he is flying down to the islands to stay with her for a week. Mrs.
Kimball is relieved—her husband loves her!—but, more than this, she is transformed. All of
those speculations and assumptions—the foundations of a narrative she does not want—will
finally be dispelled. Her narrative—the one nearly destroyed by her husband’s affair, and the one
her illness scrambled—has been restored and the world can now settle back into its less
threatening aspects. Mrs. Kimball, in other words, is “mistress of herself once more” (44).
Restored, Mrs. Kimball apologizes to Dr. Cortez, saying she came on board ill and full of drugs.
We take this with a proverbial grain of salt. The only thing we can be sure of is that Mrs.
Kimball has won (for now). There is still, however, the question of her legibility and place in a
world that failed to recognize her in the first place. When, in the story’s final sentence, Mrs.
Kimball writes back to Mr. Kimball that she’s “never felt so well in all her life,” do we believe
her (45)? Or, hidden within the personal dimension of her suffering, is another conclusion,
beyond this tenuous restitution, possible?

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Chapter Three: “The Interior Castle” and the Structure of Healing

In Stafford’s short story “The Interior Castle,” published in the Partisan Review in 1946, a
young woman, Pansy Vanneman, lies in a hospital bed awaiting a surgery on her nose. She’s just
been in a car accident. Beyond this, little is known about Pansy; like Beatrice Trueblood, she’s a
cipher the other characters—in this case, the nurses and doctor treating Pansy—try to decode at
the same time we as readers try to reach her through the story’s language and structure. I finish
with a reading of “The Interior Castle” to lay out the architecture of this structure and to close
read Stafford’s language in order to tie together the lines of inquiry I’ve made thus far. In tying
them together, I hope to illuminate the magic of Stafford’s style and begin to puncture the screen
between her art and life.
Thus, I return to Stafford’s life and her attempts at healing. Towards the middle of her life
and after a series of illnesses that affected her both physically and mentally, Stafford turned to
psychiatry to understand herself and to heal. Stafford was ambivalent about this turn and, early
on, resisted it.
8
Of her ambivalence, Stafford once wrote to her sister Mary Lee: “There are times
when I feel that it’s psychiatry that has destroyed my gift, but perhaps the gift isn’t gone yet, I
don’t know. If it has, God knows what will become of me because that is the only thing in the
world I have” (qtd. in Goodman 197). Psychiatry threatened Stafford’s “gift”—by which she
means her ability to craft fiction and to craft it well—because, for Stafford, writing fiction
ostensibly required a certain obfuscation of self (in other words, an objective eye that is not
trained on the self) and the ability to hold those unresolvable tensions and contradictions at the

8
Stafford’s involvement with psychiatry can be seen as a continuation of her early interest in meaning and
symbolism that began with the Catholic Church. Eventually Stafford left the church behind during her marriage to
Robert Lowell (in part because of his religious fanaticism) but her impulse towards the spiritual, sacred, and
symbolic would never leave her, as the rich symbolism of her stories show.

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heart of her work. Given her ambivalence, it’s striking that Stafford turned to psychiatry in the
first place, in the mid-1940s, after the publication of her first novel, Boston Adventure (1944).
The success of her book—it was a bestseller and critically acclaimed—followed an arduous time
writing and living with the writers and critics Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, and Robert Lowell in
Tennessee, at the Tates’ Monteagle home, where each of them wrote and critiqued each other’s
work. That year proved to be a masterclass in fiction for Stafford; Gordon and Tate were older
and more established than Stafford and Lowell and mentored their young houseguests. But
Stafford was bullied by the other writers. In letters, both Gordon and Lowell credit this bullying
with her subsequent breakdown and first commitment to a psychiatric hospital, though her
separation and divorce from Robert Lowell also impacted her greatly (Goodman 125). During
this time, too, Stafford was also ill with a mysterious illness that later turned out to be bronchitis
though, as Hulbert notes, this illness gave Stafford the liberation and sense of detachment from
her stressful surroundings to finish Boston Adventure, which she was writing at the time (131).
Before her subsequent commitment to Payne Whitney Psychiatric Hospital in 1946, Stafford
sought treatment multiple times, though she was rejected by doctors and hospitals for refusing to
comply with their plans. In part, Stafford’s difficulty in finding and receiving treatment had to do
with her shame at being perceived as ill and weak (Goodman), but also with the psychic effects
of flinging open the doors of her world. The latter act required the kind of trust and care that was
difficult for Stafford to find. She did eventually find it at Payne Whitney, in a psychiatrist she
would work with for the rest of her life: twenty-eight-year-old then-resident Mary Jane Sherfey.
Interestingly, the only psychiatrist Stafford worked with long-term was a woman who played an
active role in the feminist, cultural moment Stafford derided: in 1972, Sherfey published The
Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality, which argues that the patriarchal social structure is

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built on the curtailment of women’s sexuality. As Charlotte Goodman notes, Stafford’s trust of
Sherfey arose from their shared experiences as young women in male-dominated professions.
Sherfey, she writes, could understand Stafford’s “feelings of insecurity and her role conflicts”
(170).
I linger here on Stafford’s first hospitalization and mention her psychiatric treatment
because it determined the trajectory of her later writing and life, in which she stumbled, often
painfully, towards health. That this stumbling entailed a kind of journey towards self-
understanding was not lost on Stafford. In a letter to Robert Lowell written during this first
hospitalization she wrote that she’d been “one sick girl for thirty-two years” and that she was
working hard to understand herself (qtd. in Goodman 170). While, at the time of her
hospitalization, she’d published Boston Adventure, several early short stories, and The Mountain
Lion, the work she is most known for—mostly short stories she published in the New Yorker—
was written and published in the 1950s, during her period of intense psychotherapy with Dr.
Sherfey. While I don’t mean to imply that Stafford’s work changed or shifted after she sought
treatment, it’s worth noting that, despite Stafford’s anxiety about psychiatry, she was incredibly
productive during this period, though almost exclusively in short fiction. (Stafford would publish
one final novel, The Catherine Wheel, in 1952.) And although Stafford never explicitly wrote
about her time in psychiatric hospitals or her treatment—unlike some of her friends and
contemporaries, such as John Berryman—the experience provided her with a frame for her life
and work, though the word “role” might again be the better word. Because at times Stafford
embraced the role of patient, using hospitals and doctors as “buttresses” (Hulbert 329) while at
other times rejecting them and claiming that they compromised her “gift.” As the sociologist
Talcott Parsons noted—interestingly, around the time of Stafford’s treatment with Sherfey in the

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1950s—the “sick role” involves those sets of behaviors the sick person expects from others and
that they expect from her; in the modernist, medical paradigm in which Stafford wrote, this
meant surrendering one’s body and narrative to medicine (Frank 81, 5-6). The tension between
this surrender and the need to wrest control through language is the structure of “The Interior
Castle” and, I believe, a foundational architecture of Stafford’s fiction.
Stafford’s turn toward psychiatry parallels a larger social and historical turn towards
psychiatry and psychology in the United States, which historicizes this architecture and gestures
towards wider literary implications that, while I don’t explore them here, open another
dimension in my study. In her book about the gap between the medical and personal narratives of
mental illness, Rachel Aviv notes that during the middle of the twentieth century, psychiatry
became a new framework through which to understand society. In this understanding—and in the
words of the first director of the World Health Organization, “the world was sick, and the ills
from which it was suffering were mainly due to the perversion of man, his inability to live at
peace with himself” (34). In this context, many American writers during this period—a list that
includes the “confessional” writers but that might be widened to include writers like John
Cheever, Richard Yates, and Mary McCarthy—were reflecting this “sick” world. But beyond
this diagnosis, a sense of the need for treatment also pervaded society. In 1948, for example,
President Truman, addressing the American Psychiatric Association, said “the prerequisite for
peace” was sanity; and, according to the psychologist Abraham Maslow “‘The world will be
saved by psychologists . . . or it will not be saved at all’” (34). But how could sanity be
achieved? What could be the cure for this sickness? Drugs—which would become the preferred
method of treatment decades later—would not be developed until the 1950s; in fact, it would not
be until 1965 that the chemical-imbalance theory of mental illness would be proposed. Until

44

then, barbiturates, sedatives, electroconvulsive therapy, and lobotomies were methods of
treatment (48). But analysis, with its end goal of self-understanding and enlightenment, proved to
be the most enduring method. If one could understand oneself, then health could be achieved.
Understanding required the help of a guide—the analyst or psychiatrist. This new framework
provided both diagnosis and cure, and, unlike the chemical-imbalance model that would
dominate the culture in the decades following, it required its patients to engage in a self-analysis
that ended in enlightenment.
The literary way in which Stafford understood this shift is apparent in two essays she wrote
immediately after her first hospitalization. Both essays lay the groundwork for her thinking on
fiction and form. The Psychological Novel was delivered as a lecture at Bard College’s
Conference on the Novel before being published in the Kenyon Review in 1948. It’s a
straightforward argument that now reads as commonplace: all novels are and must be concerned
with the psychological, Stafford says, “with emotional motivations and their intellectual
resolutions, with instincts and impulses and conflicts and behavior, with the convolutions and
complexities of human relationships, with the crucifixions and solaces of being alive” (214). But
Stafford also draws a distinction between psychology and the psychological, saying that, while
the novelist borrows “methods of analysis and deduction” and even “diagnostic methods” from
the psychoanalyst, the novel must transcend its technique to avoid the “smell of the clinic” (215).
In other words, one must make a distinction between science and art despite the similarities
between the two. Stafford also acknowledges debt to Freud for making “moral attitudes more
humane” and for modifying our “observational habits” (216), though Stafford is clear that, while
Freud created a language for a human behavior and new pathways for thinking about it, this
doesn’t change the representation of the behavior itself, which is the purview of the novelist:

45

We do not make a drunk any drunker by calling him a dipsomaniac nor do we alter the
alcoholic content of whiskey by calling it a substitute for love. In general, I think, the
writers who steal the doctors’ thunder get only second-hand thunder that the doctors stole
from them in the first place. (217)

But if Stafford makes a distinction between science and art, what makes something art? And
what are the novelist’s techniques? Rather than lay these out, Stafford makes the general claim
that objectivity and fidelity to the truth are fundamental to good writing and art. Even language,
she says, will do its work if one is “loyal to reality”:
Language is quite able to take care of any of our needs if we are only affectionate and
respectful toward it and, above all, patient with ourselves: patient, not only in our hunt for
the proper words themselves, but patient in waiting for our observations to mature in us,
to lose their confused immediacy so that their timelessness will emerge and their meaning
will become available to our reader and applicable to him as well as to ourselves. (223)

If a writer is loyal to reality, then, the particularity of the reality being represented will be
transcended and a sense of the universal—of timelessness—will be achieved. Here, the word
“patient” takes on a double meaning: the writer must be patient with herself and become, in a
sense, her own patient awaiting the clarity and insight that time and maturity bring. To represent
reality—to write well—requires both observation and self-reflection. The writer may borrow
techniques from the analyst and these must always turn on the self if one is to get to the heart of
human behavior. And what is in the heart? Wars, famine, disease, “spiritual mutilations,”
Stafford says. And, to return to the theme of illness, “an almost universal sickness of the heart”
(224).
9

9
Stafford’s emphasis on objectivity (or a lack of judgment towards situation and character), fidelity to reality,
detachment from character, and the role of language, echoes New Critical thought of the period which, when
Stafford delivered her lecture, was flourishing in American Universities. While the New Critical method in literary
studies is well-known—close readings of texts to identity literary devices, such as irony, which are then analyzed to
determine meaning—New Criticism also influenced the practice and teaching of creative writing in universities,
including fiction. New Critical figures such as Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and John Crowe Ransom
emphasized the formal properties of works of literature (especially poetry) and helped create the image of the writer-
scholar, while others, such as Allen Tate—Stafford’s friend, mentor, and an early critic of her work—pushed this act
of close reading towards questions of literary technique, and especially towards unwieldy, difficult forms like fiction

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This turning towards the self and into the “universal sickness of the heart,” Stafford
embodies in her essay “My Sleep Grew Shy of Me,” which appeared in Vogue magazine in 1947
and which, in its structure and content, mirrors her short story “The Interior Castle.” In My Sleep
Grew Shy of Me, Stafford writes personally about her struggle with insomnia, though the essay is
strangely impersonal in its use of language and structure to erect a scaffolding around Stafford’s
heart; despite this, it’s a remarkable essay in its accounting of a journey, through illness, towards
health and understanding. This journey is as much a struggle with the self as it is with language,
and Stafford evokes this struggle through the essay’s form. She borrows her structure from The
Interior Castle, an instructive prayer book by the sixteenth-century Catholic mystic St. Teresa of
Ávila (Ávila’s The Interior Castle also provides the structure for Stafford’s eponymous short
story). In it, St. Teresa writes about achieving oneness with God through prayer, crafting the
metaphor of an interior castle of seven rooms that resides within the self, thus concretizing the
soul’s journey to God, who resides in the inner, seventh room. To reach him, one must journey
through six rooms. To enter each room requires work, and each room has its own distractions
and perils. In anchoring the abstraction that is prayer and communion with God to figurative
language, St. Teresa engages in novelistic world-building as much as she does in moral
instruction. If, as William James noted, the “incommunicableness of transport is the key to all

and the novel. In his 1943 lecture “Techniques of Fiction,” Tate insists on fiction as an art in the way that poetry is
an art, i.e. that one may study its composition and effects, though he attempts to move away from the myopic, small-
scale, critical discussions of technique—point of view, for example—to understand how novelists achieve a sense of
reality, or the wholeness of life. It’s this wholeness, which is similar to Stafford’s loyalty to reality, that proves
elusive to the critic. Perhaps only the writer knows it, Tate acknowledges, because the whole often eludes the critic’s
grasp while the particulars become, in most critic’s hands, schematic. Like Stafford, Tate makes general claims
about what makes fiction artful: completeness of presentation, showing versus telling (which he borrows from
Henry James), and, perhaps most important, a direct impression of life. Tate does not emphasize truth the way
Stafford does, though he does emphasize this fullness, or wholeness. He credits Flaubert for developing the greatest
technique for achieving this: action rendered in terms of situation and scene. According to Tate, this technique
heralds modern fiction, and it is also one Stafford uses to great effect and surprise in her fiction.

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mysticism,” then St. Teresa wrote to make this transport communicable (442). In Stafford’s
secular sense, St. Teresa was a psychological novelist writing with clarity about the travails of
the heart; and if she was a psychological novelist then she was also a kind of psychologist, or
someone who also wrote what James called “descriptive psychology.” St. Teresa’s work, he
wrote, convinces us that we are not dealing with the imaginary experience of the mind or of
prayer, “but with phenomena which, however rare, follow perfectly definite psychology types”
(450).
Like St. Teresa, Stafford, in her essay, reaches for language to clarify an elusive state
that, in her case, is sleeplessness and her journey towards health; reading it, one has the feeling
that she closely follows St. Teresa’s seven-mansion structure because it provides the plans with
which to build, on the page, such a personal, inner journey. As Stafford notes, St. Teresa’s
Interior Castle “laid bare the anatomy of my melancholy” and offered “a prospectus for my
repose.” As the essay progresses, we learn that sleep stands for something else (as it does for
Mrs. Kimball); sleep, we learn in the first room of Stafford’s seven-room journey, where she
lingers “all livid and unlovable,” is also a matter of morality. As Stafford drops her sleep
metaphor, we begin to understand this morality to dovetail with sickness. Thus, by sickness,
Stafford does not mean physical sickness only; she also means sickness in the “figurative sense
of ‘heartsickness,’ ‘lovesickness,’ ‘homesickness,’ or those ‘universal afflictions’ that one lives
through and is not ashamed of . . . although they seem archaic and literary, one knows very well
what the humours are” (135). It’s sickness with indeterminate cause that Stafford is after,
widening the scope of sickness to include those sicknesses of soul and self that are experienced
as illness but that, like the disproven theory of humours, are difficult to locate and thus
disregarded by a modern medical model.

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It’s only after redefining sickness in this way—in a moral way that encompasses the
experiential and not just the empirical, and, interestingly, in a way that banishes the possibility of
shame—that Stafford admits to being ill, as if shifting the terms of definition are critical to
healing. But there is still the issue of professional help, or, in the context of this journey, of
appealing to a guide. Of this, Stafford writes:
It is only when one has a fever or a rash or a visceral pain that one applies to a physician.
Sometimes it did occur to me, in spasms of despair, to call upon a psychiatrist, but this
seemed a foolish waste; the medical vocabulary could only approximately describe what
the moral vocabulary named precisely and I believed that I was an invalid because I was
‘weak’ or ‘self indulgent’ or juvenile.’ And thus, snarling and humiliated, I sat in judgment
against myself as if to endure were the only honourable way. (135)

Stafford here touches the heart of the matter: language. In matters of healing, how does one
accurately describe and name? What happens when the medical vocabulary meets the moral one?
Stafford’s distinction between medical and moral vocabularies, in this instance, adds depth to the
burden of representation she touches on in “The Psychological Novel” by highlighting the
importance of language in the effort to describe and lay down the truth of experience. To
describe accurately, to find the proper words for something so elusive as the sickness Stafford
writes about—and, by implication, to hear and be receptive to this language—is the basis for
healing. To call oneself weak, self-indulgent, or juvenile might have an equivalent in medical
language, but this language fails to capture the fullness of these words and their dimensions. In
the same way that Stafford shifts the terms of definition for sickness, she begins to play with
language to create a more truthful vocabulary for her suffering, on which her agreement to seek
help hinges. Thus, Stafford writes, “in order to bring myself at last to see a doctor, I played upon
words, thought of virtue literally as strength, thought of a doctor as a docent and of myself as
docile or used the terms ‘physician’ and anticipated a catharsis, or ‘psychiatrist’ and rendered it
‘mind-healer.’” It’s only when Stafford shifts language that she accepts the role of “patient”; and

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once she embraces this role, she understands she was really sick, and not just figuratively, as if
language has the ability to settle reality. And settle it does. By shifting language and accepting
her role, Stafford slides towards health, albeit passively: she likens herself to a child and her
doctor as her parent; she is reduced, she writes, “to helplessness,” and to an “acquiescence” to
her doctor that leads to moments of sleep and ease (171). Like a mystic, Stafford, in her
passivity, reaches the elusive state of health.
Stafford’s is an odd journey. In one sense, “My Sleep Grew Shy of Me,” reads as a
somewhat simplistic journey towards health that’s contingent on passivity and a sudden
acceptance of the sick role Stafford works so hard to reconfigure: “I was being mysteriously and
imperceptibly ‘cured,’” she writes, “and while I could not imagine how it was done, I honored
the good practice of psychiatry as I had heretofore only honored religion and the arts, and to see
that its intention is profoundly moral in the most splendid and intelligent sense because it aims to
create happiness” (171). It’s an unconvincing ah-ha moment. A richer, more convincing
conclusion comes in the essay’s final paragraph, when Stafford writes of her arrival in the
seventh chamber, which is the place of health and repose:
Tumult seldom penetrates the walls of the interior castle which is, I find, in an ambiguous
situation for, although it is very much within and I am very much the sole owner of it, the
prospect it commands is of reality and of the world and of all the possibilities of
experience which I had believed I had foresworn forever. (174)

Healing and health, then, is a matter of peace, of the internal self protected from an external
world that might drive it back to sickness. But the castle metaphor poses the problem of being
both inside and out: one exists within its protective walls that command a view outward, towards
reality and the “possibilities of experience” that, though they’re possibilities, have already been
foresworn. In this way, the view out is also towards the past, and within this is the contradiction
that troubles Stafford’s women, including Beatrice Trueblood, Rose Fabrizio and, as we’ll see,

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Pansy Vanneman. St. Teresa also grappled with this contradiction of being inside and out: for, if
the castle is the soul, how does one enter its rooms? (“For we ourselves are the castle: and it
would be absurd to tell someone to enter a room when he was in it already!” [17]). Before she
answers this, St. Teresa writes that there are many ways of “being” in a place. Some of us exist,
for example, in the outer courtyard without even knowing there are more interior rooms.
(Interestingly, she then makes another analogy, between souls without prayer and people with
paralyzed limbs—they may possess hands and feet, but they cannot control them.) But it is only
through prayer and meditation—or a rigorous self-study—that one can confront this
contradiction and move towards self-understanding and unity with God, though this is not a
purely dialectical process because it does not involve the type of synthesis a dialectic entails. It’s
the attempt at a moment of unity between the internal and external—between the interior self and
its commanding view—that matters.
William James captures this sense of reconciliation and its strange effects in The
Varieties of Religious Experience, an important text to the New Critical, Catholic writers that
influenced Stafford and one that Stafford also studied. In his essay on mysticism, in which he
brings his analytical skills to thinking through the ineffability of religious sensation, he notes the
existence of a form of consciousness that is entirely different from our waking consciousness,
and from which we are parted “by the filmiest of screens” (422). This consciousness opens new
regions to us and new insights of “metaphysical significance,” and its keynote “is invariably a
reconciliation”: “It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make
all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into a unity.” James concludes that the “living
sense” of this state’s reality arises from the mystic state of mind. There is a Hegelian bent to
James’s observation: when opposites (species) are melted into a unity, he writes, it as if these

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species not only belong to the same genus, but “the nobler and better” species is itself the genus,
absorbing the other into itself (423). This aligns with St. Teresa’s problem of absorbing the other
that is the self that is God. For Stafford, this becomes the problem of reaching one’s internal self
where the imagination lives free from the external, social world that would parse and corrupt it;
the contradiction lies in the fact that this imaginative self must also exist in relation to the
external world, without which it would not exist—it must, in a sense, absorb it. As with St.
Teresa, Stafford seeks truth and fidelity of experience, though in a secular sense. Her secular
bent returns us to her understanding of fiction: an allegiance to reality through an inward turn
and patient attention to language.
By evoking this sense of the ineffable, I also mean point to the way in which Stafford’s
fiction punctures “the filmiest of screens” between her art and life. To read criticism of “The
Interior Castle” is to read a microcosm of Stafford criticism, which tends to foreground her life at
the expense of her art: it typically begins with the autobiographical fact of Stafford’s car
accident, subsequent surgeries, and the physical aftereffects she dealt with for the rest of her
life—the first two of which are fictionalized in the story. As one critic recently noted, cultural
assessments of Stafford tend to re-enact her accident; more directly: “Stafford’s car accident has
become the crux of her literary legacy” (Collins 122). This begins to answer for the critical
neglect Stafford has suffered, which is twofold: not only are discussions of her work flattened by
the purely autobiographical approach and the tendency to make comparisons (i.e., Stafford’s
prose is an amalgam of James and Proust), but critical and even general interest in Stafford
comes and goes without ever holding steady. (The most recent essay pointing out Stafford’s
neglect was published in LitHub this past November.) Of this neglect, a critic in the New York
Times, upon the 2019 publication of Stafford’s novels, noted that “there is a new opportunity to

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ask why work of such originality could ever be forgotten. It is not a case of ordinary neglect”
(Seghal). But what constitutes unordinary neglect? Perhaps the critical tendency to locate
Stafford’s life in her fiction has led to an uncomfortable slippage that makes it easy to blame
Stafford—with her many illnesses and treatments—for her own lack of readership (Collins 122).
But this fails to acknowledge the fact that these same illnesses and treatments contain the
generative seeds of her art. Perhaps this problem of “unordinary neglect” is a burden better
placed on the reader: for Stafford’s stories—with their difficult-to-locate women and distant,
narrative style—challenge, rather than embrace us; they ask us to excavate language and read
with sympathy so that we can locate and understand her imaginative power.
It’s in this spirit that I approach “The Interior Castle,” a difficult yet majestic story in that
it reaches, however briefly, the moment of ineffability and reconciliation. It begins simply
enough: “Pansy Vanneman,” the first sentence recalls, “injured in an automobile accident, often
woke up before dawn when the night noises of the hospital still came, in a hushed hurry, through
her half-open door” (“Collected” 179). We begin with the fact of Pansy’s name, as if the story,
from the beginning, must first insist on the fact of Pansy’s existence; we then pass through the
sentence, from the startling reason for Pansy’s hospitalization—which of course recalls
Stafford’s own experience—to a description of the hospital and its “night noises.” As the
opening paragraph continues, we track Pansy’s perceptions of the hospital room as well as her
sensations. This cues us to the story’s method, in which narrative tension and drama are
internalized and the plot, rather than centering on a series of events—or, in the more mundane
sense, of a character moving through a sequence of actions—is instead a series of sensations to
register, contextualize, and interpret. As in “The Warlock,” we are in the drama of the mind,
though we are curiously removed from it: for we register Pansy’s sensations through Stafford’s

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distant third narration and a language that is both personal to Pansy yet removed from her. Thus,
looking outside her window Pansy sees how “Cold red brick buildings nudged the low-lying sky
which was pale and inert like a punctured sac” (180). The description is both clinically
observational (“cold red,” “pale and inert”) yet personal (“nudged” and “like a punctured sac”).
This tension between closeness and distance to Pansy is the hallmark of Stafford’s style, which is
often labeled distant, removed, and even unsympathetic. But if Stafford’s prose detaches us, in
some sense, from Pansy, it does not do so on the level of understanding: despite the difficulty of
rendering a character’s abstract internality, Stafford keeps us firmly grounded in Pansy’s
experience. Rather, this detachment—or, perhaps, tension—requires us to excavate language to
reach Pansy. In this way Stafford’s prose resists our attempts to easily master it and Pansy.
Though Pansy is immobile throughout the story—first, she’s lying in a hospital bed
awaiting surgery, and then, at the story’s end, she’s immobilized by the surgery—her mind is
alive and active. Her mind, despite her body’s stillness, alights on the world and knows it, giving
Pansy an embodied knowledge and sense of self. In this embodied spirit, Pansy looks out the
window and knows, “keenly as though she were one of the walkers, how very cold it was
outside” (180). Her knowledge is part imagination and part memory, for to know the cold so
keenly as if she were a walker outside she must first imagine this scenario, while the ability to
feel the cold “as keenly as”—to be able to draw metaphor and make this comparison—requires
memory. Stafford sets this embodied knowledge—and its concomitant language of
observation—against the nurses’ and doctor’s from of knowledge, which is empirical and
rational (in a medical sense), thus setting up a linguistic conflict that will determine two different
narratives of knowing and being: a spiritual, embodied knowledge and self, versus a medicalized
one.

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Not only is Pansy immobile throughout the story, but she also displays a “resolute
quiescence” and passivity that also makes it difficult for us—and the doctors and nurses in the
story—to locate and understand her. The story’s opening heralds this passivity: Pansy “found
herself in a ward,” we learn “from every bed of which, it seemed to her, came the bewildered
protest of someone about to die” (179). This construction signals this passivity—how does one
“find oneself” in a ward, let alone anywhere?—though the rest of the sentence reveals an active
state located in the language. For within this sentence’s passive construction, bewildered protests
“seem” to come from every bed. This begins to imply a conflation of Pansy’s emotional state—
are the protests real?—with her external world, of reality reconfiguring to meet her emotional
state as if, by concretizing and externalizing the inner self, it will be fully represented and
brought into the present. And so, the dark hospital suggests agony and death to Pansy, and, as the
story continues, the shouts multiply to match this emotional register. In fact, by the story’s end,
this externalization will be complete. In this way, Pansy’s inner life, which is non-existent to the
doctors and nurses—and which reads, superficially at least, as so distant from us—is
externalized and placed onto description and detail: “So perfect and stubborn was her body’s
immobility,” we learn, “that it was as if the room and the landscape, mortified by the ice, were
extensions of herself” (181). By this logic, a “caged light” on the bed next to Pansy becomes
meaningful to both her and us, and Pansy’s observation of a priest administering Extreme
Unction to a dying patient becomes the pattern for the story’s structure, in which observations
are layered on top of each other: “He was stout and elderly and he suffered from asthma so that
the struggle of his breathing, so close to her, was the basic pattern and all the other sounds were
superimposed on it” (179).

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Although we as readers are thus able to locate, within language, her active mind, for the
nurses treating her, Pansy’s passivity resembles “a final coma”:
And they observed, in pitying indignation, that she might as well be dead for all the interest
she took in life. Among themselves they scolded her for what they thought a moral
weakness: an automobile accident, no matter how serious, was not reason enough for
anyone to give up the will to live or to be happy . . . She [Pansy] was twenty-five years old
and she came from a distant city. These were really the only facts known about her . . . Had
anyone the right to live so one-dimensionally? . . . It was impossible to laugh at her for she
said nothing absurd; her demands could not be complained of because they did not exist;
she could not be hated for a sharp tongue nor for a supercilious one; she could not be
admired for bravery or for wit or for interest in her fellow creatures. She was believed to be
a frightful snob. (181)

Located within the nurses’ observations are two concrete and indisputable facts about Pansy: her
age and that she is from a “distant city.” Yet their “pitying indignation” causes the nurses to
overread Pansy; these facts become conflated with their contempt and end up underscoring their
perception of Pansy as a one-dimensional and a “frightful snob.” Pansy, for her part, revels in her
passivity, and her denial of the nurses gives her “a secret and mischievous pleasure”; she further
retires into herself “and into the world which she had created in the long hours here and which no
one could ever penetrate nor imagine” (181-2). Pansy’s revelry and retirement, though, is not just
a matter of defiance. It’s necessary for the rigorous self-study she’s undertaking. Like St. Teresa
of Ávila in The Interior Castle, Pansy is undergoing a rigorous self study that, in this case,
centers on her physical brain:
What Pansy thought of all the time was her own brain. Not only the brain as the seat of
consciousness, but the physical organ itself which she envisaged, 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. It was always pink, always fragile, always
deeply interior and valuable. She believed she had reached the innermost chamber of knowledge
and that perhaps her knowledge was the same as the saint’s achievement of pure love. (182)

Like St. Teresa’s castle, Pansy’s brain concretizes her abstract self, which is her “innermost
chamber of knowledge.” It is a self that exists within other selves—thus, the light in the glass

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and the envelope of vellum within other envelopes—but that, in its location, is deeply private
and removed from the external world. Yet this removal is not complete. After this detailed
description of Pany’s brain—which arrives at the story’s center point—we linger in a painful
memory of Pansy’s: she recalls arriving at a picnic in a pink summer hat when all the other girls
are dressed for fall.
10
It’s a memory of inadequacy but also of unrequited love: a man Pansy
adores rejects her at the picnic, and she’s left heartbroken and ashamed. It would seem—by the
way it’s placed in the story’s center, and the casual yet painful way in which it is recalled—that
this memory would hold primary place in Pansy’s consciousness and character. But this
assumption is undercut: “It was only the fact that the hat had been pink that worried her [Pansy].
The rest of the memory was trivial, for she knew that she could never again love anything as
ecstatically as she loved the spirit of Pansy Vanneman, enclosed in her head” (183). This
conclusion, in its clinical matter-of-factness, is difficult to accept, and it points to Pansy’s
fanatical study. But beyond this obvious point, it also gestures to the attempted reconciliation
James expressed. Unlike Rose Fabrizio and Beatrice Trueblood, Pansy Vanneman must not be
burdened with the past if she is to achieve “the saint’s achievement of pure love.” This is a love
that is not carnal but divine, and in its divine nature it reaches the ineffable. But in order to reach
this moment, Pansy must work through a final, painful contradiction: that this love must be
reached through the body.
In St. Teresa’s of Ávila’s The Interior Castle, the journey to the innermost, seventh
chamber (where God resides) is strewn with obstacles that distract one from prayer and

10
Pansy’s memory, in a literary sense, recalls Virginia Woolf’s story “The New Dress,” which is equally interested
in a woman’s state of mind. In Woolf’s story, Mabel Waring attends a party (thrown by Mrs. Dalloway), but is
afraid she’s not dressed well enough; the story takes this fear and explores Mabel’s sense of inferiority. “The Interior
Castle”—to harken back to the beginning of this essay—shares this modernist style of interiority with Woolf but
layers it with the competing narratives of the doctor and nurses.

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contemplation. For St. Teresa, these obstacles were the work of the devil; for Stafford, they are
equally evil and cruel, but exist in their secular dimensions: they are pain and Dr. Nicholas, who
performs the operation on Pansy’s nose. Of the two, Dr. Nicholas is the less complicated
distraction, though he’s no less horrifying. He greatly admires Pansy’s “crushed and splintered
nose which he daily probed and peered at” and his “shapely hands ached for their knives . . . He
spoke of ‘our’ nose and said ‘we’ would be a new person when we could breathe again’” (184).
His curiosity and need to bring Pansy into his confidences—and overarching narrative—make
him a frighteningly good doctor; not only this but, we learn later, he is “interested in the
psychology of his patients.” This manifests in an interest in the relationship between the physical
and mental, with Dr. Nicholas even having once noted that “severe attacks of sinusitis were
coincident with emotional crisis.” In these terms, Pansy perplexes him:
Miss Vanneman more than ordinarily captured his fancy since her skull had been fractured and her
behavior throughout had been so extraordinary that he felt he was observing at first hand some of
the results of shock, that incommensurable element, which frequently were too subtle to see. There
was, for example, the matter of her complete passivity during a lumbar puncture . . . (186)

Dr. Nicholas struggles to pin down this “incommensurable element.” By what standard can he
make sense of Pansy? If the nurses treat Pansy with disdain, rejecting her when they can’t make
sense of her, then Dr. Nicholas looks at Pansy every which way to determine the reason for her
passivity and her “tolerant and understanding” complexion. Did she used to be a beauty and,
after seeing her smashed-up face, lose all joy in herself? Had she been “high-spirited and
loquacious” (187)? Dr. Nicholas never comes to any conclusion “about what went on in that
pitiable skull”—interestingly, both Dr. Nicholas and the nurses misread Pansy from the position
of pity—and so, for the remainder of the story, he focuses on Pansy’s nose with zeal. Like Dr.
Cortez, Dr. Nicholas’s zeal and keen interest in Pansy make her illegible; thus, his curiosity only

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postures as humanity. The story registers this inhumanity throughout, though Stafford does turn
it back upon the doctor in this striking passage, in which Dr. Nicholas’s nose is described:
His own nose was magnificent. Not even his own brilliant surgery could have improved
upon it nor could a first-rate sculptor have duplicated its direct downward line which
permitted only the least curvature inward toward the end; or the delicately rounded lateral
declivities; or the thin-walled, perfectly matched nostrils. (184)

The description arrives in a paragraph that hews closer to Dr. Nicholas’s point of view before it
pulls back into a general, descriptive point of view that suggests a specific personality (“first-rate
sculptor”) that is, at the same time, flattened by clinical language (“delicately rounded lateral
declivities”). In other words, the observation is not necessarily Pansy’s, though the more
colloquial aspects of the description might suggest her. The sentence, torn as it is between the
personal and impersonal, enacts, at the sentence level, an indeterminacy of narration and of
knowing; both, it seems, are up for grabs. This indeterminacy widens out to become a battle for
the terms of the imagination itself. For immediately after this description of Dr. Nicholas’s nose,
we return firmly to Pansy’s consciousness to learn that, while Pansy does not doubt Dr.
Nicholas’s “humaneness or his talent—” (and here we note the irony) “—. . . She questioned
whether he had an imagination” (184).
Pansy questions Dr. Nicholas’s imagination because he cannot envision what lies
“immediately beyond the prongs of his speculum.” In other words, he cannot fathom Pansy’s
“treasure,” her brain, and her spirit—that “incommensurable” part of her. In his lack, Dr.
Nicholas fails to imagine Pansy’s subjective and immaterial self. But this questioning also works
the other way: before he performs her operation, Dr. Nicholas wonders if Pansy is aware of the
danger she’s in. Thinking her “both ignorant and unimaginative” and that any consolation would
cause her fear, he says nothing to reassure his patient (187). Whereas Dr. Nicholas cannot fathom
the incommensurable Pansy, Pansy, by Dr. Nicholas’s standards, cannot fathom her own

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condition—in other words, Pansy, in not understanding the danger she’s in, cannot fathom
herself. To know herself would require her to submit to Dr. Nicholas’s assessment (not only this,
but even to receive his reassurance, Pansy must submit). This submission recalls Mrs. Kimball’s
narrative battle with Dr. Cortez and Stafford’s own submission to her psychiatrist in “My Sleep
Grew Shy of Me”; one has the sense that submission is the only way to health and self-
understanding, a fitting conclusion and, perhaps for Stafford, the only one imaginable. But
within this questioning of who does and does not have an imagination, we might discover the
brief flicker of what it means to imagine: it is to transform the terms of reality, however briefly,
through a sympathetic relationship with it.
In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur W. Frank brings up the notion of writing through the
body and not just about it (2); if modernist medicine claims the territory of the body (10), then
narratives of illness, in reclaiming this territory by writing through the body, might be said to
draw new maps of self. Stafford achieves this in “The Interior Castle” by writing through pain;
it’s a method that St. Teresa touches on in her own Interior Castle, when she writes that the
immaterial soul is “delectably wounded” (93) by God’s presence. This wounding is further called
“an operation of love” (93) with the word “operation” meaning exertion but also, in the
physicality of St. Teresa’s description (of an arrow piercing the bowels and, upon removal,
drawing out the intestines with it) presages the physicality of Pansy’s medical operation. This
pain, St. Teresa writes, is not just physical but also spiritual; and this pain is united with
“tranquility and joy”—and, ultimately, with love—as opposed to restlessness and combativeness.
It requires a withdrawal from the world in order to unite with it; and, though it might seem
abstract or purely spiritual, there can be no doubt of its existence. To have pain, then, is to unite
with love and, most importantly, it is to have certainty of one’s existence, a sentiment Elaine

60

Scarry echoes in The Body in Pain when she writes, “to have pain is to have certainty; to not
have pain is to have doubt” (7).
In embracing pain, Pansy comes closer to her inner chamber and to love, and the screen
between her mind and the world—and Stafford’s art and life—begins to lift. The story’s
expression of pain—and Pansy’s experience of it—not only gestures towards the transcendent
possibility of Pansy reaching herself, but also towards the immaterial majesty of Stafford’s
prose. At first, the pain comes to Pansy on its own, “running like a wild fire through all the
convolutions to fill with flame the small socket and ravines and then, at last, to withdraw, leaving
behind a throbbing and an echo” (184). At other times, Pansy coaxes out the pain herself as if, in
calling for it, she quickens her arrival at herself. Language reaches for the appropriate metaphor:
pain is a wild fire before it arrives at a “snail’s pace”; it rushes like a “tidal wave driven by a
hurricane,” with Pansy the flooded inlet and her brain now a boat waiting for the “calm weather
and the safe journey home” (184-5).
11
When Dr. Nicholas prepares Pansy for her operation by
packing her nose with anesthetic, the pain is immense; she turns her “eyes inward”:
She was aware of nothing but her ascent to the summit of something; what it was she did
not know, whether it was a tower or a peak or a Jacob’s ladder. Now she was an abstract
word, now she was a theorem of geometry, now she was a kite flying, a top spinning, a
prism flashing, a kaleidoscope turning. (189)

The descriptions are abstract before they are concrete, though, as we move towards the concrete
we gain a sense of fleetingness, as each object conveys a sense of wonder, of childhood, even of
wistfulness. Language flies away from the degradation of the operation. But this flight is cut

11
The image of a boat in a storm recalls Charlotte Brontë’s famous female bildungsroman, Villette. At the end of
that novel, we’re left uncertain as to whether or not Luce Snowe’s betrothed, M. Paul, has died in a shipwreck; this
ambiguity underscores Lucy’s isolation and inability to be incorporated into the world—through marriage—because
of her sex. The novel thus troubles the genre of the bildungsroman, as does Stafford’s novel The Mountain Lion. But
across her fiction, Stafford’s women face a world that struggles to incorporate them. Like Pansy Vanneman at the
end of “The Interior Castle,” they must make a negotiation between their inner world and a social world that does
not recognize them, which adds a bitter note to “the safe journey home.”

61

short when, her nose finally packed with anesthetic, a nurse at the foot of Pansy’s bed tells her to
look in the mirror. Pansy does, and the room laughs. What does she see?
. . . Over the gruesomely fattened snout, her scarlet eyes stared in fixed reproach upon her
upturned lips, gray with bruises. But even in its smile of betrayal, the mouth itself was
puzzled: it reminded her that something had been left behind, but she could not recall
what it was. She was hollowed out and was dry as a white bone. (189-90)

Like Mrs. Kimball looking into the distorting mirror, Pansy sees something she does not expect
and here it causes her “reproach” though her mouth is smiling; and though it’s smiling, it’s
puzzled. The smile is the residue of another self. From this moment forward, the story registers
the operation as a fracturing: over Pansy’s head is a mirror with “a thousand facets in which she
saw a thousand travesties of her face”; beside Pansy are the glittering blades of many knives,
“thrusting out fitful rays of light”; “the face of the nurse at the foot of the table broke apart.” As
as the world fractures, it also becomes cold and white: “all the cloth was frosty; everything was
white or silver and as cold as snow. Dr. Nicholas, a tall snowman with silver eyes and silver
fingernails, came into the room soundlessly, for he walked on layers and layers of snow that
deadened his footsteps” (190). But this fracturing settles into something new. We are now firmly
in the geography of Pansy’s mind, which recalls the moment, in the beginning of the story, when
Pansy looks through the window of her hospital room and keenly knows the cold world outside.
Now, her embodied mind, rather than merely alighting upon the world, begins to change its
terms—the externalization is complete.
Thus, “In the great stillness of winter, the operation began. The knives carved snow.” In
her pain, and through his fracturing, Pansy reaches a stillness that registers as a great nothing,
and the painful operation on her nose is transformed into an operation of love:
Pansy was happy. She had been given a hypnotic just before they came to fetch her and
she would have gone to sleep had she not enjoyed so much this trickery of Dr. Nicholas’
whom now tenderly loved. (191)

62

As we recede further into Pansy and the external world takes on the contours of Pansy’s mind,
this fracturing resolves into a restructured reality that is both marked and clear. Until this point in
the story we’ve lingered with Pansy in an eternal present, in which time dilated and widened
[“Pansy could not remember another season in her life so constant, when the very minutes
themselves were suffused with the winter pallor as they dropped from the moon-faced clock in
the corridor. In the same way, her room accomplished no alterations from day to day” (180).]
But suddenly, in the midst of the operation, marked time makes an appearance: “There was a
clock on the wall and from time to time she [Pansy] looked at it. An hour passed . . .” As the
world resettles into its new dimensions, Pansy, finally, sees a glimpse of her brain. It comes at
the most painful part of the operation, when the story’s language works hard to describe and
encompass not only pain, but, through it, Pansy’s ecstatic vision of herself:
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, hearing the knives hunting likes wolves outside, sniffing and
snapping. Mercy! Mercy! Cried the scalped nerves . . . she [Pansy] closed her eyes and this time
and this time alone 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.
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 within its rosy luster. (192)

The moment of reconciliation, of ineffability, however brief, is achieved and Pansy reaches a
state of certainty: “never had the world enclosed her before and never had the quiet been so
smooth” (193). It’s a state that recalls the mystical state of absorption, in which tension and
contradiction, if not resolved, are held together in a brief moment of achievement. Thus Pansy
passes “from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from

63

an unrest to a rest.” For a moment, she resides in that unified state of internal and external, in
which “the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the account” (James 453).
Stafford wrote an early draft of “The Interior Castle” six years before its publication. In
its first ending, Pansy is left with the vision of her brain, or “agony’s wonderfully perfect pearl”
(Hulbert 241). In its revised, published form, Pansy is only granted this momentary vision before
she must return to the claims of this world, before the sounds of the doctors and nurses slash at
Pansy’s “resisting trance,” underscoring the fact that Pansy’s moment of unity is impossible to
sustain. For, despite the seduction of her self-study, Pansy knows, as Rose Fabrizio, Beatrice
Trueblood, and Mrs. Kimball do, “that the time would come when she could no longer live in
seclusion, she must go into the world again and must be equipped to live in it” (192). Thus, the
story’s final line, in which Pansy, lying “in a pause of bitterness” closes her eyes, “shutting
herself up within her treasureless head” (193). It’s tempting to read Stafford’s denial of Pansy’s
treasure as cynical. Though the story denies Pansy her treasure, it does grant her, however
briefly, a glimpse of a reconciled and resettled world, and thus of herself. In being privy to this
moment, we, too, might hold a new reality. It’s so fleeing as to seem inconsequential, though, as
Jack Onslager and Beatrice Trueblood do, we might “travail” in the moment. It’s in this that we
might find the seed of possibility in Stafford’s art.

64

Conclusion: Art & Life

In an essay written to commemorate Stafford’s death, her friend Nancy Gibney (later
Flagg) recounts the six weeks, in 1952, that Stafford spent with her at her home in the Virgin
Islands. Stafford was there to wait out her divorce from her second husband. At the time she was
unwell, suffering from many illnesses (“‘at least seven uncommunicable diseases’” she told
Flagg [66]) and recovering from a hysterectomy. She was in such bad shape, Flagg writes, that a
diagnostician who also happened to be visiting, upon seeing Stafford, said she must leave the
island at once. “‘She is like a raging fire—a bomb set to explode . . . She suffers from every ill
she has mentioned and possibly several more. She should never have left the hospital,’” he tells
her. She’s “basically the healthiest girl I know,’” Gibney retorts. “If there’s no doctor around,
she won’t need a doctor” (70-71).
Flagg’s pointed retort gets to the heart of the essay, as much memorial as it is an attempt
to prove her own theory that Stafford’s death—coming as it did at the end of years of being
physically and mentally unwell—happened by the hands of doctors. By which Flagg means that
Stafford trusted too much in doctors and did not trust herself; once in their hands, she deferred to
them at the expense of herself. Outside of their care and in the Virgin Islands that winter,
Stafford was able to return to health on her own. Reading Flagg’s essay—and essays by Howard
Moss and Wilfrid Sheed, who also memorialized Jean on her death—one is left with the feeling
that for Stafford—“a noted hypochondriac . . . who outdid everyone in real and imagined
illnesses” (Moss 78)—illness provided another language through which she expressed herself.
Gibney, Moss, and Sheed take the stance that, for Stafford, illness was an escape: “Off Jean
would go to the hospital,” Sheed writes, “a place I believe she secretly liked because they treat

65

you like a child there” (96). But if it was an escape—and whether her illnesses were real or
imagined—it was not a pleasant one: “I just decided that the reason it’s bad to have a body like
mine is that your brain goes to pot,” she wrote a friend. And also: “Having had to be conscious
of my body for so long, during the rare intervals when I don’t hurt, I have become savagely
spiritual and I swear, having realized that the only time your brain can work is when it is not
bothered with a malfunctioning body” (qtd. in Goodman 52). But despite her belief that her brain
could not work when ill, Stafford wrote through illness to craft a body of fiction that maps
striking new landscapes.
Flagg paints a picture of Stafford enjoying herself on the island, despite the fact “she
hated hot weather, was allergic to the sun, feared small boats and rough water, and had never
learned or care to swim” (66). Stafford is productive, too, writing what will become one of her
most celebrated short stories, “In the Zoo.” When she’s not writing she spends time on the beach
with Flagg and her one-year-old son, Ed. Her time with Ed is impactful beyond, it seems, Jean’s
own understanding. Flagg writes how Jean, twenty years after the fact, sends the adult Ed a letter
that reads:
You don’t know me, but I knew you well when you were an infant and daily, for nearly seven
weeks, I watched you sit with your mother on that sublime beach of yours . . . Indeed, one of
my most treasured photographs shows you and me—I rarely smile when I am being
photographed, but I’m smiling in this one because you are, with grace and aplomb and joy,
approaching me . . . (71)

Stafford describes both the image and its impression; it stays with her even after she leaves the
islands and is back in New York where, Flagg writes, her illnesses flare up again and her eyes
begin to tear up uncontrollably (a result of the car accident). In 1956—one year after publishing
“The Story of Beatrice Trueblood”—Stafford writes to Flagg. It’s worth quoting in full here:
In the endless search for the cause of my eye trouble, I have been going to my groper [Dr.
Mary Sherfey] again and what we talk about now is more interesting than any other encounter

66

with psychiatry I have had. One thing she finds significant is the timing of the tearing—it
began just after I came back from Hawksnest [Flagg’s Virgin Island estate]—and the fact that
I am never without the pictures of Ed Gibney in my engagement book. If one can accept the
premises that the trouble is psychogenic (and it’s very hard for me to do so; she said, ‘You
wrote a story about psychological deafness so why can’t you accept this?’ and my reply, the
only possible one, was, ‘Yes, but I didn't believe it’), things fit neatly into place—the
hysterectomy and immediately afterward my first experience with a baby. But it’s too neat
and even if we’ve found the cause, how can the symptoms be removed?

Though it’s too neat—too neat, even, for her to believe—the door between Stafford’s art
and life nevertheless opens, making a small account for those inexpressible transmissions
between body and mind. Could it be possible, then, that fiction—that one’s imagination—could
be so powerful as to presage real life?
Flagg closes her essay by recounting the last time she sees Stafford. It’s 1977 and
Stafford has had a stroke and lost her “powers of speech” (76):
‘Come clean sister. I'm on to your game,’ Gibney says to Stafford. ‘It’s Beatrice Trueblood’s
story again. Okay, so you didn't believe it—you wrote it, and now you’ve done it. You can’t
speak because you find everything unspeakable. You can’t talk because you see no one fit to
talk to.’
She [Jean] nodded her wonderful ravaged head and laughed. Her laughter was eloquent and
unimpaired. (76)

67

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Creator Crockford, Petrina (author)

Core Title Savagely spiritual: illness and the imagination in the fiction of Jean Stafford

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Degree Conferral Date 2023-08

Publication Date 07/10/2023

Defense Date 04/28/2023

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Tag illness,Jean Stafford,medical humanities,OAI-PMH Harvest,twentieth century fiction,women in fiction

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