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Her Ruined Head
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Journal Article
Her Ruined Head
2021
Overview
Jean Stafford’s short story “The Interior Castle” (1946) and novel The Mountain Lion (1947) theorize the entanglement of literary and physical form in midcentury representations of women’s disability. Fluctuating between her modernist predecessors’ interest in the relation between mind and body in the construction of a “self” and her contemporaries’ exploration of grotesque embodiment, Jean Stafford’s work thematizes the defaced female form. Drawing on her own experience in a disfiguring car crash, Stafford registers defacement as a form that enables, if not enforces, experimentation. Through depictions of “ruined” heads, Stafford’s writing reconfigures the common understanding of disability as an individual defect into a vision of disability as a locus of critique. However, Stafford’s investment in fictions of Cartesian dualism and ambivalence about the productivity of pain challenge the applicability of bodymind as a heuristic.
