THE INTERIOR CASTLE
by Jean Stafford, 1953

Although Jean Stafford published 5 collections of short fiction, 3 novels, and more than 60 articles and reviews during her career, she is perhaps best remembered for her Collected Stories, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. Described by one biographer as "the earliest absolute first rate story to come from her pen," "The Interior Castle" was first published in Partisan Review in 1946, later anthologized in five collections, including The Best American Short Stories of 1947, and collected in Children Are Bored on Sunday in 1953.

In her work Stafford created a fictional landscape that ranged from the Colorado desert to coastal Maine and the neighborhoods of old Boston. She always presented characters with the adroit perception of a literary psychologist subtly revealing the dramatic terms of human perception. A frequent pattern in Stafford's stories is the depiction of a private and highly idiosyncratic subjective interior encroached upon by some dimension of the publicly shared sociocultural universe.

Her protagonists often suffer the disenchantment of failed expectations in a world quite inhospitable, if not openly hostile, to individual desires. In "A Country Love Story," for instance, a wife trapped inside a bickering marriage finds solace only within the subjective fantasy of an imaginary lover. In "Polite Conversation" a young woman is buried in her own mind under the unbearable weight of "neighborly" expectation. In "The Hope Chest" a loveless but longing monologue spins in the head of a lonely spinster confronting isolation at the end of her life. It is interesting that these stories are grouped with "The Interior Castle" in a subsection of Collected Stories called "The Bostonians, And Other Manifestations of the American Scene," an ironic title considering the manners, expectations, longing, and repression the stories portray of middle-class American life.

In "The Interior Castle" Stafford writes from a source she claimed rarely to tap for fictional incident—her own life. The story details the pain and fear the protagonist Pansy Vanneman endures during hospitalization and surgery to remove bone fragments from her shattered nose, an operation Stafford herself underwent following an automobile accident in 1939.

Staying in a "bland and commonplace" hospital surrounded by a freezing landscape as "pale and inert [as] a punctured sac," Pansy chooses to remain so stubbornly immobile in her bed that the sterile room and landscape seem to become extensions of herself. Without so much as rumpling the sheets, she takes great pleasure in baffling the nurses with her staunch passivity, boldly circumscribing an external bodily shell and retreating literally and metaphorically into her "interior castle."

The crass and boorish hospital staff follows misdirected perceptions that lead them to see only the surface of Pansy's being and not her soul, something that causes Pansy to withdraw deeper into the glimmering "jewel" of her consciousness.

A central thematic question concerns the extent to which human subjectivity can be bridged and the degree to which one human being can truly know the interior of another. The hospital staff, including the primary antagonist, Dr. Nicholas, reveals the limitations of the single mechanism available to humans for bridging the intersubjective gap. By observing her passivity, the staff can only infer that Pansy is a "frightful snob" living in a "final coma" and that "she might as well be dead," a series of conclusions derived from surface observation and all completely erroneous given the vitality of Pansy's interior monologue. The truth is that she is far from comatose, but the mechanism of inference is inadequate for knowing that fact.

Angered, Pansy retreats inward to pure consciousness, that "innermost chamber of knowledge … perhaps … the same as the saint's achievement of pure love." Within herself her spirit seems complete, unfettered, and pure, a state so desirable that Pansy induces deliberate pain to achieve it. It is not that she values pain inherently but that pain transports her to a consciousness akin to the saintly ecstasy of love.

As with most of Stafford's work, it is difficult not to view this story as an articulation of feminine consciousness. By seeking fulfillment in subjectivity and struggling against a reduced status as an object, Pansy is emblematic if not prototypic of women repressed in a male-dominated society. Her retreat into the castle of consciousness establishes a universe grounded solely in the present, a state free from interpreted memory. There Pansy is not intruded upon to "love anything as ecstatically" as she loves the spirit "enclosed within her head."

A tragic ending unfolds when this protective castle crumbles under the violent intrusion of Dr. Nicholas's scalpel, a rapelike action that puts the surgeon "at her brain" and disrupts subjective integrity in a way that jars Pansy into distastefully pragmatic submission. The time will come, she unhappily realizes, "when she can no longer live in seclusion … [but] must go into the world again and … be equipped to live in it." The nose itself is symbolic of this movement, for Pansy "banally acknowledges that she must be able to breathe."

"The Interior Castle" is a challenging and difficult story. Stafford's technique remains close to the surface, and it refrains at every turn from offering easy generalizations to help the reader interpret events. Thus, form brilliantly reinforces meaning by making the story itself "unknowable" by easy inference. As a subjectivity its heart can be known only by those willing to struggle with uncovering the spirit beneath its observable surface. The story does not beckon readers who resemble Dr. Nicholas, "young and brilliant" by appearance but "nose-bigots" beneath the surface, ensconced in a mechanistic psychology that keeps them blandly unaware of the human spirit within.

Of course, Pansy Vanneman herself falls victim to the limitations haunting her antagonists—emotional inferences about the "heartless" and "evil" Dr. Nicholas. This reveals Stafford's artistic genius as well as the truly enormous difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of moving to the place her art suggests, that is, from observable surface to spiritual depth. In this even her protagonist must fail.

—Paul Sladky