The Interior Castle Read Online Free PDF

dinners,” which they did their best to make decadent affairs (held at midnight, mothers’ permission required). As part of her antiphilistine style, she disdained physical fitness and made resistance to gym a vigorous cause. Her chief extracurricular activity, predictably, turned out to be the school newspaper, the
Prep Owl
, which she joined at the urging of the editor, who was impressed by several pieces she submitted.
    Those signs of confident independence, though, were far from the whole story. The sense of unbridgeable loneliness and insecurity that she later traced all the way back to her babyhood was clearly a burden particularly during adolescence. At home, Stafford could now claim more of the solitude she wanted, since her siblings were leaving one by one (Mary Lee to teach school in Hayden, where she promptly got married; Marjorie to teach on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma; Dick to college), but she was evidently more, rather than less, unhappy. With her friends from school—she had some, not many—she tended to be reserved, skirting real intimacy. She apparently felt more comfortable when conversationwas impersonal, and although she had a ring that she reportedly bestowed on whatever male classmate was currently in favor (Higman had it for a while; so did the editor of the school paper), she was interested in intellectual companionship, not romantic involvement. Her suitors didn’t challenge her desires. Behind Stafford’s detachment seems to have lurked a defensive secretiveness about her life at home, above all about the man in the basement. Almost none of her friends ever saw the inside of her house.Anyone who walked with her from school was firmly discouraged from accompanying her all the way home.
    But if scrawny, tobacco-chewing John Stafford in the flesh was a secret she did her best to keep hidden away, in spirit her father was still a dominant force for her, especially in her writing. In an editorial in the
Prep Owl
in 1931, her junior year, Stafford displayed a maverick style that was clearly modeled on his and aired the kind of aggressively unconventional views of which he would have approved. Her denunciation of the philistine aspirations of the social elite of the school, which she presented under the pseudonym Vox Populi, created a stir, and everyone at Boulder Prep guessed who had written it. Stafford was brutal about the rest of her schoolmates, especially the girls, whom she called
    a race of social-climbing sniggering hypocrites.… [T]hey fear individuality.… [If I were a mother] I would dress my daughter in sack cloth and ashes and compell her to read Pilgrim’s Progress.… I’m strong for university education for women but not for women like these because they don’t want education. They’re going to make sorority, to probably flunk out of school to give their lives a collegiate air and to return fine and polished young Americans.
    Stafford was taking on not only her classmates (given that she still had a year to go, it was proof of her willingness to be unpopular), but also her conformist mother and sisters, who saw nothing wrong with sororities. In fact, her struggle with her family had been the implicit, and sometimes very explicit, theme of much of her writing ever since she had begun producing stories (probably in junior high school, though few are dated). She specialized in melodramatic declarations of pained isolation from a conventional world, which usually meant the female side of her family. Yet very early on, she also seemed to appreciate the disproportion of her estrangement and to see the juxtaposition of her histrionic alienation and her perfectly friendly family as an occasion for irony at her ownexpense. Even as the self-important Vox Populi, she used exaggerated rhetoric to make herself sound slightly ridiculous—just the kind of nut she knew her classmates would dismiss. In her youthful stories about a family named Smith, which closely resembled her own,