by Ann Hulbert
Your major change—the Ralph-Molly conflict instead of Ralph–Uncle Claude—does wonders to the book and, as I wired you, the ending comes off beautifully. I see the whole book now as Ralph’s struggle—the struggle to escape from the Bonney side of the family, from his mother, from Covina—all of which he manages to do when Grandpa Kenyon dies & Uncle Claude takes him to Colorado. But of course he doesn’t escape from the one thing that really troubles him & which he scarcely admits or perhaps even realizes (except subconsciously)—Molly.…
Those weeks at Lord Weary’s Castle have been really profitable, Jean.
Giroux emphasized what few readers do: that Ralph’s story was really in the foreground, rather than Molly’s. At least that was the way Stafford had originally structured the novel, as Giroux’s letter indicated. And in fact, it was true of the finished novel as well, in which Molly’s character emerged largely through Ralph’s perceptions of her. Yet as Stafford revised and Molly loomed larger, it was that “creature of funny precocity and awful pathos,” as the poet Robert Fitzgerald characterized Molly in a review, who gradually usurped the more memorable place in the novel. Much of her power derived, in fact, from her peripheral and passive position. And Molly’s pathos was awful rather than sentimental because Stafford successfully distanced her, even as she granted her a growing role. It was a difficult feat. As Stafford revealed in a distraught letter to Lowell written a year later from the hospital, where she had gone in a state of nervous collapse, Molly was a creature far too close for comfort. In the midst of psychological turmoil, Stafford saw the book, that girl, and her own life as inextricably and tragically connected:
Gradually I became Molly. I was so much Molly that finally I had to write her book (in which it was my brother, you will note, that destroyed me—the guilt was still operating so strongly that I left the father out. In almost all my stories the father is either dead or is cruelly driven away; only in that little story “Reunion” is there a blameworthy father and even he is exonerated by detesting his daughter because she caused her mother’s death). All the self-mutilations came back; for I had mutilated myself constantly when I was a little girl in order to gain pity and love. My father was too cold and awkward to give me affection; my brother soon resented me because I tagged along everywhere; my mother was too busy; my sisters found me too young; is it any wonder that I wanted to marry Laddy [the Staffords’ dog]? And on one of those last nights in Maine, you will remember that I ground out a cigarette on the back of my hand: I was then completely Molly. I had gone all the way back, I was an angry, wounded child again.…
Precisely that agonized identification was what Stafford avoided in the novel itself, where a kind of merciless sympathy was at work. As one critic has noted, it is a “double bildungsroman”—the intertwined stories of siblings who journey from childhood union to adolescent conflict to a final resolution, in this case tragic. For Stafford, this pairing was a variation on the device of doubling that already in her first novel had been a key to dramatizing the idiosyncratic development of her autobiographical protagonist. Both Nathan and Hope served as foils to Sonie, characters who lived out alternate fates while she watched from the sidelines, frustrated—and yet also in her peculiar, self-punishing way fulfilled—by her own marginal status. Using these second selves, Stafford had found a way to avoid the monstrous solipsism of Sonie’s predecessor, Gretchen Marburg.
In The Mountain Lion the doubling was much more explicit. These two bespectacled misfits were equally sickly, ugly, precocious, and unconventional, and they shared pride in their pariah status, defiantly scornful of their conformist mother and two older sisters (Mr. Fawcett had died years before). But Ralph, two years older, was beginning to feel the pull of a world beyond their idyll of estrangement, whereas Molly was unable to imagine any other life. Her devoted solidarity with Ralph increasingly seemed to him an imposition rather than a gift, and he felt guilty for his apostasy:
He looked at his weedy sister with dislike as she crouched on her heels, plucking the lilies all around her, and when she looked up at him, her large humble eyes fondling his face with lonely love, he wanted to cry out with despair because hers was really the only love he had and he found it nothing but a burden and a tribulation.
Through Ralph’s ambivalent vision—he was disoriented by the distance he felt opening between him and his sister—Molly’s hopeless loyalty emerged as a moving mixture of the noble and the neurotic. As the novel progressed and Molly slipped further into her own isolated world, Stafford used the peculiar pair to offer different perspectives on her alienation, the view from the outside and from the inside. Ralph, growing into a newly vigorous body and strong desires, watched his sister barricade herself within her eccentric mind, denying maturity. If Stafford had wanted to test that quality she feared she didn’t have, compassion, she couldn’t have set more exacting conditions for herself. She succeeded in making Molly—“this scrawny, round-shouldered tall thing, misanthropic at the age of twelve,” saddled with brains and bitterness and “a savagely satiric nature”—a tragic figure. In Stafford’s pages, the suffering of children could not be more serious.
Doubling was the principle of the entire, studiously symmetrical novel—which itself was a curiously inverted reflection of her first novel. As Giroux’s letter indicated, the basic dichotomy of The Mountain Lion was between the Bonney merchants and the Kenyon men, between effete California and rugged Colorado. The division oriented the world for Ralph and Molly, who started out the novel eagerly awaiting the annual visit of their favorite relative, Grandpa Kenyon—and who were devastated when he collapsed, dead, on the front porch. The rest of the novel traced their troubled shuttling between the two poles—between their tame California home and the Colorado ranch where they began to spend summers with Grandpa Kenyon’s son, Uncle Claude.
It was the redskin-paleface distinction of Boston Adventure viewed this time from the Twainian, rather than the Jamesian, perspective. And this time the raw frontier won out over the cultivated city. Sonie yearned for an escape to the orderly capital; Ralph and Molly dreamed of escaping from the “sissy life” presided over by their mother and sisters and their ancestors on the Bonney side of the family, about whom they had heard much moralizing lore. To them, Grandfather Bonney, their mother’s father, represented all that was hypocritically genteel. Their bond with Grandpa Kenyon, their mother’s stepfather (Grandfather Bonney died young, and Mrs. Bonney made an “unseemly second marriage”), was an incongruous one: two gawky, sickly children smitten with a leathery old man—a rough rancher from Colorado who was for them “half legendary,” ruddy like an Indian and imposing like a “massive, slow-footed bear.”
The echo of Hermann Marburg, who entranced Sonie with tall tales of the West he had never seen but yearned after, was clear. But Stafford thoroughly revised the scene of childhood. An almost too idyllic walnut farm in California supplanted the hell of Chichester. In place of Shura Marburg stood fussy Mrs. Fawcett, her clucking no comparison to her predecessor’s manias. And this time the father was gone from the start. Stafford commented on the omission, but in fact The Mountain Lion marked a step closer to the charged subject, for Ralph and Molly were looking for a father—unlike Sonie, who found a mother substitute in Miss Pride. Once again, Stafford’s Twainian style allowed her to address, however indirectly, her own search for some accommodation with her father.
Not surprisingly, there was no easy resolution to the quest, particularly for Molly. The most fundamental alteration in Stafford’s revised version of childhood lay in the fates of the siblings. In Boston Adventure it was the brother, poor Ivan, who was sacrificed so that Sonie could go on and confront maturity. He was the victim Sonie might have been, and though she couldn’t protect him (a male, he was for Shura a devil by definition), she herself could and did weather the turmoils of their childhood. In The Mountain Lion it was Molly who was sacrificed so that Ralph might emerge into the wider world. This time it was femaleness that was at least part
of the handicap, for the world to which Ralph awakened was masculine terrain—the rugged West of ranching and hunting. It was not a place where women thrived, especially odd creatures like Molly, who became more weedlike and solitary as Ralph grew more fit and handsome. Haunted by his innocent, fiercely asexual sister, Ralph couldn’t resist trying to corrupt, and ultimately destroy, her. The end of the novel, at once contrived and compelling, had a mythic western setting: during a hunt for the golden mountain lion that had become his own and Uncle Claude’s grail, Ralph accidentally shot his sister instead.
But it is a mistake to read the novel in programmatically feminist terms, as critics have been increasingly inclined to do (to Stafford’s evident impatience, judging from her marginal comments on one such reading—a reconsideration of the novel in The New Republic in 1975). To be sure, Stafford was interested in the broader social and sexual implications of her story. The setting was carefully chosen. In developing the contrast between the rough-hewn West and the refined East (which included California on Stafford’s map), Stafford was commenting on a disunity in the American identity, a conflict of social values that warps personal identity. Molly and Ralph were caught between a masculine ideal of the frontier that entailed a destructive crudity—a “virile opacity” Stafford called it at one point—and a feminine ideal of the civilized establishment that implied hypocrisy and an absence of real culture. The time, too, was subtly but constantly emphasized: this was the mid-1920s, prewar America, a country that didn’t quite realize it was on the brink of maturity. Old traditions were vanishing, and there was a sense of drift. Uncle Claude’s immature pastime was stalking the mountain lion, an animal then almost extinct; Mrs. Fawcett’s plan for a grand tour with her eldest daughters was an effete farce. Growing up for Ralph and Molly meant a struggle to find a path amid inadequate possibilities.
On one level, their fates fit the patriarchal paradigm. Molly died in an accident that was also, as critics have pointed out, an initiation ritual for Ralph. She was a symbolic element in his life—the feminine side of his nature that he had to suppress if he was to come of age in the world, the childhood that he had to destroy in order to enter maturity. The tragic ending marked a kind of fulfillment for him, while it sealed Molly’s decline. Unlike Ralph, who found consolation for his estrangement from Molly in comradeship with Claude, she had nowhere to turn after their breach. The only kinship she could feel was with Magdalene, the blasphemous old black cook at the ranch, “always smoldering with an inward rage or a vile amusement over something sexual or something unfortunate,” who she decided must be her mother. Full of rage herself, Molly added name after name (including Ralph’s) to her “list of unforgivable” people: “She hated them all for the same reason, but she could not decide what the reason was. You could say, Because they were all fat.” Molly was determined to deny the corrupt world of the flesh.
Finally she added her own name. “She burst into tears and cried until she was hungry, and all the time she cried she watched herself in the mirror, getting uglier and uglier until she looked like an Airedale.” The self-loathing that had always lurked beneath her contempt for others surfaced in a death wish, which the novel proceeded to fulfill. Molly could thus be cast as the perfect prototype of the female protagonist who was rejected by the world, and then rejected herself, “bereft in an unadulterated masculine environment and denied the guidance and example of acceptable female models,” as one critic has put it.
Yet Ralph and Molly’s story was more complicated. In bringing Molly toward the center of the novel, Stafford was not merely filling in the hopeless half of a double bildungsroman and clarifying a message about gender. She was trying out another portrait of the artist, a variation on Sonie’s strangely frustrated career. To consider Ralph’s and Molly’s aspirations, as opposed to their fates, is to see the novel in a rather different light. In fact, Ralph was far from the conventional hero whose path into the active world was clearly marked out for him by society and family. He was not like George Eliot’s assertive Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, who expected and received the entrée into the wider world that his sister, Maggie, vainly dreamed of. On the contrary, Ralph’s view of himself and of his relations with Molly and with the world was notable for its unaggressive ambivalence.
Ralph’s situation was, unexpectedly, closer to the predicament of an undirected female. He was acutely aware of a division within himself, a desire for independence alongside a continued yearning for a deep, dependent bond with his sister. His consciousness, the reigning one of the novel, was highly other-directed, empathetic rather than assertive: caught between his conventional family and his eccentric sister, he was painfully aware of (and confused by) their opposing perspectives. Nor could he easily accept Uncle Claude as his alternate model. The more time Ralph spent with him, the more reservations he had about the rough maleness that defined his uncle’s circumscribed world: “Ralph was troubled by the loss of his desire to enter Uncle Claude’s world completely.” Male bonding became even less appealing when sexual maturity crept up on Ralph: “Because his own masculinity was, in its articulation, so ugly, and he could therefore take no pleasure in himself, neither could he respect it in anyone else.” Ralph was oppressed by his lack of clear direction and drive, felt there was something wrong with him—not least because Molly had in abundance the ambition he lacked, when it should have been the other way around. “If he did not become Uncle Claude’s partner, what would happen to him?” he wondered at one point. “He had no variety of ambitions as had Molly who, in the course of a week, would plan to be a salesman for the Book of Knowledge, a grocer, a government walnut inspector, a trolley conductor in Tia Juana; of course her real vocation was writing and these were to be only sidelines.”
Molly was not simply a victimized female, a misfit crushed by society’s narrow expectations of feminine development. This was a portrait of the artist as a young girl, whose alienation transcended the defensive aloofness of a precocious, unpopular female child. She was the inner-directed rebel who was ready to proclaim her independence with a brutal finality Ralph could rarely manage: “ ‘My literature is more important to me than you are, Ralph Fawcett,’ she said coldly and left the room, pausing in the doorway to make donkey’s ears and say ‘Hee haw.’ ” The literary vocation extracted a high price, and Stafford was inclined to emphasize the burdens of art more than of gender, though she acknowledged those too. Molly’s obsession with reading and composing strange stories and odd poems (on that favorite theme of Stafford’s, heads: “Gravel, gravel on the ground / Lying there so safe and sound, / Why is it you look so dead? / Is it because you have no head?”) was considered inappropriate behavior for a dutiful daughter. “Everyone said she had the brains of the family, but as Mrs. Fawcett was not interested in brains, she thought this a handicap rather than otherwise and often told Molly there were other things in life besides books.” But it was not clear that Ralph would have met with much more approval had he displayed a similarly idiosyncratic imagination and vocational obsession.
The artistic temperament, as Stafford told it, was necessarily in tension with conventional society. It had its source in a sense of ostracism, and as it developed, the distance only increased. If the novel had a message, it was that the cost of growing up female and artistic was far greater than the cost of being a boy ready to make his peace with a conventional future. As in Boston Adventure, Stafford emphasized that self-destructiveness, a readiness to forsake ordinary comforts and calm, seemed to be an inextricable part of artistic aspiration. Where Sonie admired but shrank from the disorderly bohemian life, tempted instead by Pinckney Street propriety, Molly took the high, hard road. The child’s uncompromising desires—to love and be utterly loved, and to be utterly devoted to her writing—spelled lonely unhappiness. Disappointment in love fueled her literary ambition, and her literary zeal alienated her further from Ralph, from everybody.
The painful cycle seemed to be especially destructive because Molly was a gir
l, more dependent on love and more suspect for her unconventional ambitions. Yet Stafford gave plenty of evidence that had Ralph been the poetic one of the pair, the predicament would not necessarily have been any easier. A creative, reclusive boy on Uncle Claude’s ranch would have violated expectations even more dramatically than Molly did. It would have been, if anything, less acceptable for Ralph to cling to the imaginative purity of childhood—as the artistic temperament so often dictates. Thus although Ralph succeeded in growing up and Molly was defeated, Stafford suggested an unconventional reading. Of the two children who started out in search of integrity in a hypocritical world, one, Ralph, faced a future of terrible guilt at the end and the other, Molly, had been liberated.
Liberation by death is not a triumph by worldly standards, of course. But Molly was not a worldly creature. Her vocational rigor, as Stafford emphasized in Molly’s central and exceptional scene—her bathing ritual—was religious in spirit. The detachment that art required, Stafford implied here as she did with Sonie, was near not only to neurotic isolation (Ralph worried that Molly was going crazy) but also to religious retreat. Molly’s bath was her refuge from the eyes of the rest of the world—she carefully pulled the shade “though there was nothing outside but night” and blocked the keyhole though no one would come peeping at the ranch—and also from her own eyes. Her regimen was straight from a medieval nunnery (though Freud clearly hovered over Molly’s rites). She cloaked herself in a wrap while she undressed, then slipped on a maroon bathing suit, and when she finished bathing, “she dried herself and bound her stomach with a piece of outing flannel. She wrapped it so hard and pinned it so tight that it gave her a pain and she had to lie down on the floor to get her slippers because she could not bend over. Then she put on her long-sleeved, high-necked pajamas, and the nightcap she had made over her drenched hair. It was her desire to have tuberculosis.” Molly’s self-mortification could also be more public and dramatic. When Ralph punctured her dream of marrying him someday, she poured acid on her hand. “The pain was not severe; it was the knowledge that the pain was eating her” that revolted this child whose body was so ill at ease in the world.