The Interior Castle (34 page)

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 girl, 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.

Molly, repulsed by the physical world in all its corruption—its “fatness,” as she named it—wanted to waste away to spirit. Stafford once again blended religious and psychological perspectives on her character’s spiritual, social, and sexual alienation. Molly was the austere novitiate and the incipient anorexic, the fanatic creative soul and the confused preadolescent. Stafford’s skill in this colloquial novel was to evoke Molly’s metaphysical dilemma in idiosyncratic detail, to seize on the comic particulars of her tragedy: “
For the most part, [Molly] was not conscious of her body (she was never conscious of it as a
body
and had never spoken this word aloud and almost died when one of her sisters would jokingly say, ‘Don’t touch my body’; Molly thought of herself as a long wooden box with a mind inside).”

Similarly, Molly’s category of “fatness,” which applied to the rest of the world—all body and no mind—was at once her own droll childish curse and a metaphor with well-established religious and psychological associations. St. Teresa’s style and teachings seemed to lurk behind Stafford’s portrait of asceticism. In the ongoing war between the flesh and the spirit, the world and the word, the concrete and the abstract, Stafford, like Teresa, was a committed materialist as she wielded her pen. The flesh must be acknowledged in all its grossness and weakness. Concreteness was crucial in her account, and the strength of a symbol lay in its specificity. However archetypal their journey might be, Molly and Ralph were two children whose souls and pains were imagined by someone who had never forgotten what the loss of childhood felt like.

“
In some respects it is a better book than
Boston Adventure
,” Philip Rahv wrote to her after he had read
The Mountain Lion
, and his praise called attention to what a model of New Critical tautness the novel was:

Stafford “had gone all the way back,” but what is remarkable is the distance she maintained from the “angry, wounded child.” As the first part of
Boston Adventure
had shown, childhood was a subject that liberated Stafford’s great gift: irony. She told an interviewer years later that “
My theory about children is my theory about writing. The most important thing in writing is irony, and we find irony most clearly in children. The very innocence of children is irony.” And echoing her New Critical teachers, she added, “Irony, I feel, is a very high form of morality.” In
The Mountain Lion
Stafford had mastered a wide range of irony, from the broad social satire with which she developed the Bonney/Kenyon dichotomy to the self-irony she granted Molly. As a child writer, Molly was blessed, or rather burdened, with a double dose of alienation—from the world and from herself. “
I know I’m ugly. I know everybody hates me. I wish I were dead,” Molly told Ralph not histrionically but “in a cold, level voice.” That moment of awful self-condemning clarity culminated in the proclamation that echoed throughout Stafford’s fiction: “I haven’t got a home.”