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    A Study Guide for Jean Stafford's "The Interior Castle"
    A Study Guide for Jean Stafford's "The Interior Castle"
    A Study Guide for Jean Stafford's "The Interior Castle"
    Ebook53 pages56 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jean Stafford's "The Interior Castle"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jean Stafford's "The Interior Castle", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMar 22, 2018
    ISBN9781410388650
    A Study Guide for Jean Stafford's "The Interior Castle"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Jean Stafford's "The Interior Castle" - Gale

      17

      The Interior Castle

      Jean Stafford

      1946

      Introduction

      The Interior Castle is one of Jean Stafford's most famous short stories. She began working on the story in 1940, two years after the car accident in which her face, like the face of Pansy Vanneman, was smashed. Stafford's then fiancé, the poet Robert Lowell, had been driving the car when he turned at high speed down a dead-end alley in Boston. Stafford, who was not wearing a seat belt because they were not yet standard in automobiles, flew face-first into the windshield, badly breaking her nose and several bones in her face and skull. Despite this, they were married in the summer of 1940 and moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Lowell began his graduate studies and Stafford went to work at Southern Review.

      While they were in Louisiana, Lowell converted to Catholicism in part because he was influenced by a group of writers known as the Agrarians, including Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon—all of whom found a seriousness of purpose in Catholicism that influenced their writing. Stafford struggled with faith, and it was during a time of such struggle that the Carmelite nun Teresa of Ávila's famous work The Interior Castle was recommended to her; it was from this work that she took the title of her story.

      Stafford came back to the story manuscript several times before finally finishing it in 1946 as her marriage to Lowell was coming to an end. It was published in the winter issue of the Partisan Review just as she was entering Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, where she was treated for a nervous breakdown. The story's theme of transcendent retreat was one that appears in several of Stafford's works, including her novels Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion. The Interior Castle appears in The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).

      Author Biography

      Stafford was born on July 1, 1915, in Covina, California. The family moved from California to Boulder, Colorado, where Stafford's father, John Stafford, wrote Wild West stories under the names Jack Wonder and Ben Delight. Boulder appears, thinly veiled, in much of Stafford's work as Adams, Colorado. Stafford attended the University of Colorado and then received a scholarship to the University of Heidelberg in Germany. In the autobiographical author's note written for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, she noted that as soon as I could, I hotfooted it across the Rocky Mountains and across the Atlantic Ocean. She might have escaped, but the effort left her with a lifelong sense of dislocation and an incurable homesickness.

      After Heidelberg, Stafford taught briefly at Stephens College in Missouri, before marrying the poet Robert Lowell in 1940, when she was twenty-five. It was Lowell, two years earlier, who was responsible for the accident that broke bones in Stafford's face, an experience that forms the source material for The Interior Castle. Coming home from a date, Lowell crashed the car into a wall, throwing Stafford through the windshield. Lowell would become a major American poet, although the marriage did not last, and the two were divorced in 1948.

      After a brief and unsuccessful marriage to the editor Oliver Jensen, Stafford found happiness with the humorist A. J. Liebling in 1959. Stafford struggled throughout her career, as did many women writers at that time, with the idea that being a writer was incompatible with being a real woman—that is, a wife, mother, homemaker. In a letter to Lowell in 1947 she noted that "there is no thing worse for a woman than to be

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