The Healthiest Girl in Town by Jean Stafford
"The Healthiest Girl in Town" by Jean Stafford is a short story set in a Western town in 1924, where the community is heavily influenced by the presence of patients seeking relief from tuberculosis. The protagonist, Jessie, is an eight-year-old girl who stands out in a society dominated by illness due to her robust health. Raised by her widowed mother, a practical nurse, Jessie grapples with feelings of isolation, especially when she interacts with the Butler sisters, two sickly and spoiled girls who ridicule her for her lack of ailments. Throughout the story, Jessie navigates her sense of self-worth amid their taunts and ultimately asserts her own identity by embracing her health. This narrative highlights themes of pride, illness, and the psychological complexities of social status. Stafford's use of humor and irony invites readers to reflect on societal perceptions of health and illness, positioning Jessie's journey as both a personal and communal exploration. Overall, the story captures the struggles of maintaining one's dignity in the face of societal expectations and the often absurd nature of competitive suffering.
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Subject Terms
The Healthiest Girl in Town by Jean Stafford
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1951 (collected in The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, 1969)
Type of work: Short story
The Work
“The Healthiest Girl in Town” is one of the stories based on Stafford’s years in Colorado. It is set in 1924 in a Western town whose principal industry is “tuberculars,” that is, people who have come there hoping for a cure for tuberculosis or, at least, for an extension of their lives. Naturally, the town is dominated by anecdotes of sickness and death. In this atmosphere, Jessie, the eight-year-old narrator, feels like an outsider. Blessed with a strong constitution and sensibly raised by her widowed mother, a practical nurse, Jessie cannot manage to get interestingly ill.
This problem becomes acute when she is thrown into the society of two spoiled, sickly girls, Laura and Ada Butler. Although she despises them on sight, Jessie is forced to play with them because her mother has a new position nursing the senile grandmother of the family.
The Butler girls seem to want Jessie at their home merely so that they can have someone to torment. They comment on her mother’s inferior position and suggest that Jessie’s own low status in society is proven by the fact that she has no ailments. Finally, they inquire into the death of Jessie’s father. Although it was gangrene that killed him, Jessie is inspired to say that the cause of his death was leprosy. Immediately, she realizes that she is trapped. If she admits that she lied, the girls will never let her forget it, but if she sticks to her story, she is firmly convinced that both her mother and Jessie herself will be exiled to the Fiji Islands.
Following up their advantage, the Butler girls summon Jessie to take their nauseating “cure” for leprosy. She, however, has had enough. Defiantly, she insists that her father was shot, that he was as tall as the room they are standing in, and—the only truth in her tirade—that she has been called “the healthiest girl in town.” She now has as much pride, or “vanity,” in her health as the Butler girls do in their illness. Never again, in her visits to their home, does Jessie let them make her feel inferior.
Because it moves toward a discovery, in this case that health is not to be despised, “The Healthiest Girl in Town” is typical of Stafford’s short stories. Not all of her stories, however, have the comic tone that is here evident. When she did choose to use comic irony, Stafford won high praise from critics, who did not hesitate to compare her to Mark Twain, America’s greatest humorist.
Bibliography
Austenfeid, Thomas Carl. American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Goodman, Charlotte Margolis. Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
Hulbert, Ann. The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
Roberts, David. Jean Stafford: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988.
Rosowski, Susan J. Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Ryan, Maureen. Innocence and Estrangement in the Fiction of Jean Stafford. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
Walsh, Mary Ellen Williams. Jean Stafford. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Wilson, Mary Ann. Jean Stafford: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1996.