The Interior Castle

by Ann Hulbert

  Against Miss Pride, the heroine of Sonie’s childhood, however, Stafford juxtaposed another force, or direction, in Sonie’s adolescence: her Jewish neighbor in Chichester, Nathan Kadish. He represented the path of rebellious creativity, which had almost as much allure for Sonie as the route to social success, so commandingly staked out by the well-connected Bostonian. Precocious Nathan’s combative dedication to learning, which was his way of high-mindedly rejecting Chichester, thrilled Sonie. He dogmatically lectured her about his life’s course, much of which he cribbed from George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man, which he pressed on Sonie, too. She was captivated but confused: How could this iconoclastic vision of culture and self-definition fit with her ambitions toward Pinckney Street?

  I had not read much of [Confessions of a Young Man] yet, but its effect on me was already marked, and I was anxious for the next week-end to come so that I might tell Nathan that I understood why it was he wanted to go to Paris. Shivering in the icy room, I thought of the book and wished that I were a young man, queer enough to keep a tame python, clever enough to educate myself at the Nouvelle Athènes where the painters and poets gathered nightly as a learned and bibulous academy. I thought how simple my actions would be if I were a great, confident pagan egoist like George Moore. Would I not, if I were a young man, leave Chichester and my foolish mother? But I was not fitted for such a life, not only because I was a girl, but because I was an ignoramus. I nearly cried aloud thinking of the sloth of all these past years that had prevented me from reading less than a tenth of what Nathan had read. Here, only two years older than I, he was a store-house full of books. Even at my own game, he surpassed me, for he spoke and read German with twice my facility. To be educated was the privilege of our class, he had told me. That was the weapon whereby we could conquer the bourgeoisie. I did not know precisely what he meant. Whenever I dwelt upon his words, I could only imagine myself dazzling Miss Pride with my culture; I had no desire to overthrow her, only to make her welcome me.

  It was a tension that Stafford knew firsthand in life and that she came back to often in her fiction—fascination with wealth and status in conflict with dedication to independence of mind. Sonie understood that she was pulled between two contrasting poles: “Between these two astronomies, the young man’s whose earth was plural, and Miss Pride’s whose solitary world was Boston, round which the trifling planets revolved at a respectful distance, I could not choose, for both were true.” Here Stafford drew more directly from her own life, as she introduced another character to serve as a possible bridge between the two: Dr. Philip McAllister, a young Bostonian who mixed Miss Pride’s breeding with Nathan’s rebelliousness. He seemed the fulfillment of Sonie’s ideal, the independent insider who aimed to disconcert but not to destroy the smug establishment, and who thus could offer a potential solution to her dilemma—much as Lowell did for Stafford. In one of Sonie’s Boston reveries, Stafford conjured up this ideal young man in terms quite clearly reminiscent of Lowell. Sonie’s dream man was a literary radical—a reader of Donne, a writer of unconventional poetry—who posed an overt challenge to the old lady with her impossibly provincial views.

  But Stafford finally didn’t allow a constructive synthesis, though at first it seemed she might. A man with a taste for transcendence, Philip McAllister enabled Sonie’s liberation from Chichester by helping her to commit her mother to a mental hospital. In Boston, however, he failed her. There he was too late in warning her against Miss Pride’s tyranny, distracted from Sonie’s troubles by his fascination with, and then marriage to, Hopestill Mather.

  True to the injunction that art ought to be impersonal, Stafford had cast Sonie’s predicament in ambitiously encompassing terms in Book One. Though the facts of her own life were discernible, she was notably successful this time in transforming them into inevitable forces in her characters’ lives. The parents represented the most extreme metamorphosis. Sonie’s crazed mother was a kind of demonic inversion of Stafford’s own long-suffering, matter-of-fact mother. The father figure, violently embittered in his disappointment, had to disappear early in the novel: he was so daunting, Stafford recognized later, that she couldn’t confront him straight on in her fiction. The domineering, aristocratic woman was the mother Stafford didn’t have but acquired through marriage, and to whom she then felt masochistically susceptible: Mrs. Lowell lurked not very far behind Miss Pride, an emblem of social power and ruthlessness and an enemy of creative energy. (Miss Pride’s aesthetic views seemed to echo letters from Mrs. Lowell, who considered serious writing a thoroughly unsuitable pursuit for a well-bred Bostonian. “I think he writes doggerel,” was Miss Pride’s assessment of Eliot. “I have never quite got his connections clear. All I know of him is that he was born in Saint Louis, even though he really was an Eliot”) The younger men, too, could be assigned their counterparts: McAllister as Lowell, Nathan as Hightower. Moreover, the deeply ambivalent view of Boston reflected not simply Stafford’s personal dilemma but a preoccupation of her husband’s as well. At any rate, that was how Lowell sometimes told it, as he worked alongside Stafford on poems in which he couldn’t quite decide whether the Puritans were forces of enlightened rebellion or of benighted authoritarianism and inhumanity.

  IN BOOK TWO, “Pinckney Street,” Stafford shifted the scene from Chichester to Boston and settled the question. This was her Proustian anatomy of corruption, though as Dr. McAllister explained to Sonie, the drama of decadence among the Bostonians was wan: “Boston was something in the days when hell was immediate, altruism was ruthless, and justice was Mosaic. Now, cured of its chills and fevers, its blood watered down, it was no longer exciting. Still puritanical, it tried to imitate Sodoms and Gomorrahs in their decenter fashions, but the result was only dowdiness.” The inward, subjective perspective gave way to a more objective approach as her heroine matured. Delivered to the Boston of her dreams, Sonie now had to face the disintegration of her ideal. She had escaped the wild frustration of the powerless, her parents, only to discover the more decorous desperation of the powerful.

  On one level, “Pinckney Street” was the more manageable part of Stafford’s enterprise. It was scathing social portraiture in a well-established tradition, a novel of manners about an often-caricatured corner of America. And though Stafford hadn’t penetrated Boston society very deeply, she had been formatively exposed to it, directly and indirectly. In short, it was less a challenge to her mythic imagination—as “Hotel Barstow” had been—and more a task for her analytic, satiric powers. And certainly she had those in abundance. Stafford’s principle was once again juxtaposition, this time between crowded social scenes, in which Sonie was more observer than participant, and intimate encounters, in which Sonie watched—and was in turn watched by—Miss Pride, Philip, and, most important of all, the renegade Hopestill Mather (a name as unsubtle as Miss Pride’s). Miss Pride’s niece and ward, Hope was the offstage object of Sonie’s envy throughout Book One. In Book Two she became her dark alter ego.

  Precisely because she was so naturally gifted at lampooning the “pilgrims’ heirs” in Boston, Stafford had more trouble managing the tension for Sonie between creativity and gentility in Boston than she did in Chichester. As a child, both Sonie’s outlandish imagination and her yearning for aristocratic rigidity cohabited uneasily but credibly. It wasn’t hard to see how this imaginative girl’s vision of escape featured the repressive Miss Pride, whom she saw as admirably rigid. But in Boston, it was more difficult to balance Sonie the social aspirant and Sonie the detached outsider. Perceptive satire came so readily to her (as Hope acknowledged, “It takes an outlander to trap us alive”) that her continuing myopic adulation of Miss Pride strained credulity.

  Stafford did her best to deal with this problem by developing in Book Two the tension that she had introduced in “Hotel Barstow” between Sonie’s social and artistic aspirations. Although Nathan had drifted out of the foreground temporarily, George Moore was still at her bedside, unsettling her Boston reveries. “I r
ead him constantly … out of the desire to prove to myself that the ‘best’ Nathan had wanted for himself and for me was in reality only second best.” Sonie was clearly struggling. Her yearning for propriety and order had to do battle with a zeal for vital experience that she found hard to suppress:

  My talents were not artistic, not creative. I felt that they were assimilative and analytical, that what I saw in Boston, what I had seen in Chichester I understood, but that I could not reassemble my impressions into something artful. I could not ennoble fact. It was experience of the most complex order that I desired, and while there were times when … I wished my knowledge to include the cafes and ateliers and quays of George Moore’s Paris, the wish was diluted as I turned home and thought of my room, of Miss Pride, and of our conversation over the sherry glasses. She, I thought, was worth all the freedom and all the abandon, worth, indeed, all the triumphs.

  It was in the intimate scenes, which directly or indirectly centered on Hope, that Stafford tried to fine-tune Sonie’s perspective on Pinckney Street and her own fate. By setting up a doppelgänger relation between Sonie and Hope—two black sheep, one the insider, one the outsider—she found a way to have both drama and detachment in her story’s plot and in her protagonist’s psyche. It was a structural and thematic strategy she used again in her fiction after Boston Adventure. Through Hope’s melodramatic relations with Miss Pride and Philip, Stafford gave Sonie vicarious exposure to the real, brutal Boston, while still sustaining Sonie’s own eerily distanced and submissive presence amid the clan.

  Hope was not a realistic character any more than Sonie’s parents were. She was an emblematic figure, the product of psychological and spiritual pressures that arose from a larger social situation. Hope was the culmination of bad blood and rebellion in the Brahmin enclave—the daughter of a philandering, drunken brute who died when thrown from his horse. But as with the Marburgs, Stafford spared no effort on the vivid particulars; for all the caricature, she was also drawing on a reality even stranger than eccentric stereotype. (She included an outlandish detail from the Lowell family history that surfaced in a poem of Lowell’s a decade later: to spare the ears of her husband, Hope’s poor mother was forced to play on a dummy piano, a punishment actually visited upon Lowell’s Great-Aunt Sarah, as he wrote in “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” in Life Studies.)

  Hope’s story was a familiar one of self-destructive revolt. To the horror of her family, she disappeared to New York, where she spent time with psychoanalysts and fast-living bohemians who were more dedicated to drink and general decadence than to art. Her fate among them was the predictable one. She got pregnant by a cad beneath her station, a Machiavellian social climber with plenty of money but no class and no conscience. She returned to Boston and successfully plotted a solution to her dilemma. She maneuvered her way into marriage to Philip, ousting Sonie from her position as the doctor’s confidante and companion (and, though Sonie hardly dared admit it to herself, aspiring lover). And then Hope’s rapid decline began, as Philip, his love transformed to hate, exacted his revenge with the Puritan rigor that had lurked in his idealistic character from the start. In the end Hope, a passionate horsewoman, committed suicide in the Mather tradition. She goaded her horse to throw her late in her pregnancy.

  As Elizabeth Hardwick observed in “Poor Little Rich Girls,” a piece she wrote for Partisan Review after the novel came out, Hopestill Mather was a “literary convention [out of] the novels of the twenties”: she was the “romantically wayward” and theatrically jaded flapper. Hardwick assumed that the convention was being unselfconsciously employed. By Sonie, it was, at least up until the end of the novel. She saw Hope, the aristocratic rebel, in her most symbolic dimensions, because that was how her untutored, ambitious imagination worked on the facts of Boston. But Stafford’s own perspective is less easily pinned down, a problem posed by many of her exaggerated portraits: Just where does the irony begin? In part, she seemed to share Sonie’s rapt immersion in Hope’s lurid life, and her fascination is not hard to account for. As she herself wrote to an old college friend much later, “Hopestill in my book is Lucy. Miss Pride (and I did not connect these things until the other day) is named Lucy.” Behind the Bostonian decadence, and Hope’s suicide, was the frightening memory of Lucy McKee and Stafford’s own loss of distance and control in that relationship. No wonder irony sometimes eluded her.

  Yet Stafford was also very much in control of her characters and of the relations among them. If Hope on occasion escaped her grasp, for the most part Stafford successfully, and consciously, exploited her as a literary convention. The stereotypical quality of Hope’s character highlighted the contrast between her and Sonie, whose reverse aspirations—to join precisely the Bostonian gentry that Hope revolted against—were played out so unconventionally. If Sonie had been the typical arriviste, she would probably have shared some of Hope’s salient qualities: feverish energy, manipulative skill, and a calculating understanding of power, along with some vision (however delusory) of autonomy. There is a natural kinship between those literary favorites, the highborn rebel and the lowborn arriviste. But Stafford’s purpose was to subvert the conventions in Sonie’s case. She was not simply the provincial who triumphed in the city either by mastering its manners or by seeing through them. She did both, and yet she remained convinced that she was the one who had been mastered and seen through. Disillusioned, she was still in thrall. Peace and powerlessness exerted a seductive appeal for this heroine.

  Where Hope was finally driven to death as the escape from the merciless sway of Boston—the conventional, dramatic response—Sonie’s reaction to Boston was highly unconventional and hardly dramatic in the standard sense of the term. Miss Pride’s ruthless pursuit of power was belatedly revealed to Sonie (our class, Hope helpfully whispered, lives for power). Betrayed by her ward, Lucy Pride had hired her secretary not really to write her memoirs, but to tend her through the terrors of a lonely old age. Sonie was indentured unto the death of the indomitable lady, the same fate she had faced in Chichester with her own, real mother—and then faced again when she learned from the doctors in the asylum that Shura was improving and might be released. All at once, the world closed in on Sonie, as two crabbed women claimed her freedom, and her only choice, as she saw it, was between enslavements.

  Until, that is, she stumbled upon a strange escape in reverie. Late in Book Two, Stafford turned to the “red room” of the surgical story she had written in Baton Rouge, inserting whole sections of the meditative vision she had developed there. This time the suffering that impelled retreat to the inner sanctuary was not physical (surgery on her flesh) but mental. Sonie was not a patient in need of release from vivid pain, but a nurse in need of respite from less tangible oppression. The setting for Sonie’s first visionary experience, however, was similar. She was in the cool, white asylum visiting her mother—the undistracting surroundings that permitted that first step on St. Teresa’s path, the willful cultivation of memories. Instead of the surgeon’s knives, it was Miss Pride’s eyes that propelled Sonie into the more terrifying culminating instant when the will retreated and the corner was turned. That moment arrived in the midst of one of Hope and Philip’s cruel cocktail parties, at which the hosts quietly tortured each other and the guests feigned obliviousness. Sonie slipped into her sanctuary, only to discover that she was trapped by her mistress’s gaze:

  The eyes, like a surgeons knives, were urged into my brain. The edges of the knives screamed like sirens; their sound curled in thin circles round my hot, pink brains. I crouched in a corner of the room, down behind the bookcases, safe, I thought. But I was plucked up by the burning yellow flares that went in a direct path like a sure blade. Miss Pride blinked her eyes. The room vanished. I had not moved but I felt an overwhelming tranquillity as if my brain were healed again, was sealed and rounded and impervious, was like a loaded, seamless ball, my hidden and wonderfully perfect pearl.

  Once again, there was an ambivalence at
the heart of the escape, for it was a kind of imprisonment of its own. In liberating herself from external experience by retreating to her internal chamber, Sonie acknowledged that she was not just cutting herself loose but cutting herself off:

  I cannot say how long the “vision” of this red room lasted, but while it did, I experienced a happiness, a removal from the world which was not an escape so much as it was a practiced unworldliness. And it was a removal which was also a return. The happiness was not unmixed: as I gazed at the red evening sunlight winnowed through the brick chimneys of the court, I was filled with a tranquil, mortal melancholy as if I were out of touch with the sources of experience so that I could receive but could not participate.

  Sonie’s subsequent portrait of her room, a variation on a similar passage in Stafford’s original story, was, if anything, more chilling. “It was a sanctuary and its tenant was my spirit, changing my hot blood to cool ichor and my pain to ease. Under my own merciful auspices, I had made for myself a tamed-down sitting-room in a dead, a voiceless, city where no one could trespass, for I was the founder, the governor, the only citizen.” Where Stafford had previously left it at the cozy enough “tamed-down sitting-room,” she now ominously amplified the room of her own to suggest a postholocaust city. There was a high price to pay for escape.

  In her novel, unlike in her story, Stafford treated the room as a prelude not to spiritual readjustment—whether fulfilling or disillusioning—but to insanity. Sonie dreaded succumbing to her mother’s fate. The drama here was not simply one of mind over matter, of a patient coming to new terms with the material world through the experience of physical pain; it was one of mind versus mind. For the problem was that Sonie’s brain was not healed, “sealed and rounded and impervious.” Her imagination was all too permeable, confused between facts and fantasies. She knew all too well “the fear of my own mind which had conceived so awful a possibility.” More frightening than the confusion between subjective and objective worlds was the confusion between subjective worlds. By virtue of its penetrating power, the imagination itself was rendered vulnerable. It could see into other minds, and thus it had to assume that other minds could see into it. For someone as hypersensitive as Sonie, there was nowhere to hide from the tyrannical eyes. Sonie the child had watched the deadly gaze that locked her mother’s and her brother’s wild eyes. Sonie the young woman closed with this ominous, understated image of mind-forged manacles: Miss Pride “looked again as she had (done when I was five years old in Chichester; her flat, omniscient eyes seized mine, grappled with my brain, extracted what was there, and her meager lips said, ‘Sonie, my dear, come out of the cold. You’ll never get to be an old lady if you don’t take care of yourself.’ ”