The Interior Castle

The cruellest month, April, said Eliot.  I don't think the story I am presenting this month of April could necessarily be described as cruel.  But in keeping with Eliot's broader evocation, "The Interior Castle" is an unsettling narrative.   

II.

There has been a car accident.  Pansy Vanneman is hospitalized from the injuries she sustained as a passenger.  The time of year is winter, and a routine has set in.  "Pansy could not remember another season in her life so constant, when the very minutes themselves were suffused with the winter pallor". <1>

Miss Vanneman thus, "hour after hour and day after day she lay at full length...perfect and stubborn was her body's immobility"; her "resolute quiescence" has the nurses thinking her a "frightful snob".  The lady is well aware of the impression she is making.  "Pansy, for her part, took a secret and mischievous pleasure in the bewilderment of her attendants". 

Lying there on a hospital bed, Pansy has also taken to obsessing  about her own brain.  The rumination has led her to increasingly weighted conclusions.  "She believed that she had reached the innermost chamber of knowledge and that perhaps her knowledge was the same as the saint's achievement of pure love." <2>

Six weeks pass.  Pansy is to be operated on by Dr. Nicholas, the surgeon.  "They strapped her ankles to the operating table and put leather nooses round her wrists. Over her head was a mirror with a thousand facets in which she saw a thousand travesties of her face."  During the operation, the doctor needs to "penetrate regions that were not anesthetized and this he told her frankly".  Then, the instruments are used.  "The knives ground and carved and curried and scoured the wounds they made; the scissors clipped hard gristle and the scalpels chipped off bone. ...  Mercy! Mercy! cried the scalped nerves."

III.

Pansy Vanneman has received injuries serious enough that she must rely on the care of a hospital medical staff.  Such a reliance exposes her vulnerability in the situation.  As it happens, the surgeon that must apply the scalpel to her, including areas beyond the anaesthesia, is male (Dr. Nicholas). <3>  It happens too that physical pain and suffering effects the mind; the greater and more prolonged the pain and suffering, the deeper and more pronounced the effects on mind and soul.  "The Interior Castle" is composed with an elegant precision by Jean Stafford, rendering a tale of potent, icy power.
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<1>Stafford, Jean. "The Interior Castle". The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford. University of Texas Press, 1993. 
<2>Saint Teresa of Avila's "The Interior Castle" (1577).
<3>Compare, as an example, with Katherine Anne Porter's account of her character Miranda's hospital stay, in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider". ("The Light Of Being". BMT, February 2017.)