In the Zoo by Jean Stafford
"In the Zoo" by Jean Stafford is a poignant short story that explores the lives of two sisters, now adults, who reunite every other year in Denver. During their visits, they reflect on their challenging childhood spent in a boarding house run by the overbearing Mrs. Placer. This setting, marked by resentment and manipulation, was not conducive to happiness, as Mrs. Placer imposed her negativity on the sisters and her tenants. The girls found a glimmer of joy in the company of Mr. Murphy, an alcoholic who kept a small menagerie of animals in his backyard, offering them a sense of freedom and companionship amidst their oppressive environment.
The story delves into themes of escape and survival, as well as the impact of a toxic upbringing on personal development. The sisters’ bond is a central focus, demonstrating resilience in the face of adversity. Their beloved dog, Laddy, becomes a symbol of their fleeting happiness, only to be tragically transformed into an aggressive creature under Mrs. Placer’s control. Ultimately, the narrative culminates in the sisters’ departure from their troubled past and their shared laughter as they parody their former caretaker, revealing a cathartic release from their childhood traumas. The story captures the complexity of familial relationships and the struggle for personal identity in a constricting environment.
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In the Zoo by Jean Stafford
First published: 1953
Type of plot: Domestic realism
Time of work: The early twentieth century
Locale: Adams, Colorado
Principal Characters:
The narrator , a young orphanMrs. Daisy Murphy , her married sister, the mother of two childrenMrs. Placer (Gran) , their childhood guardianMr. Murphy , the town drunk of Adams, who keeps a small menagerieLaddy (Caesar) , a dog that Mr. Murphy gives the narrator and Daisy
The Story
Two sisters, now grown and living apart, visit each other every other year at a convenient railroad hub, Denver. There they go to the zoo and reminisce about their childhood, especially about Mr. Murphy, who kept a small collection of animals in his backyard, and their foster mother, the awful Mrs. Placer.
Mrs. Placer ran a boardinghouse, and she liked her tenants and the girls to call her Gran. She and the boarders had a favorite activity: nursing resentments. At the end of each day, sitting down to their "ugly-colored" meal, Mrs. Placer and the guests reviewed the evils, plots, thoughtlessness, sins, and slurs that they had the misfortune of experiencing that day. The girls, cowed, tried silence as a defense, but Mrs. Placer invariably managed to uncover some real or imagined slight that the two timid, unpopular orphans suffered. She would, for example, announce to her audience that the awful teacher said that the narrator could not carry a tune in a basket.
Mrs. Placer's poisonous litany continued through years of boardinghouse conversations. It was the teacher's fault that the girls could not learn fractions. A girl with braces who actually played with the girls did so only in order to lord it over them because they did not have the money to have their own teeth straightened. Steeped in this atmosphere, the narrator recalls, she and her sister grew up like worms. Despite their indoctrination, one thin filament of an impulse toward happiness survived, finding its outlet in Mr. Murphy's menagerie. An alcoholic who drank all day and played solitaire, Murphy was friendly and completely undemanding with the girls. He kept a small fox, a deodorized skunk, a parrot, a coyote, and two capuchin monkeys, which the girls spent hours watching. Mrs. Placer knew about the visits but allowed them, taking pleasure in excoriating Murphy.
Murphy gave the girls a present of a puppy. Moreover, he told them how to convince Mrs. Placer to let them keep it by pointing out that the dog would make a good watchdog. Mrs. Placer's morbid and paranoid imagination worked as Murphy anticipated. She raised a dozen objections to the girls' having a dog: It would be unhousebroken, flea-ridden, mangy, incorrigible, and destructive. She suspected Murphy of trying to fob off a young cur that would prove to be a trial to everyone, pulling up the garden, smelling of skunk, and biting everyone. Then the girls brought up the magic word. In the eyes of Mrs. Placer and her chorus of boarders, the dog then underwent a transformation. It sat alertly beside its mistress, its ears pricked, ready to lay down its life in her defense. Surely, there were many burglars, Peeping Toms, gypsies, and Fuller Brush men with evil intentions of all kinds lurking to threaten Mrs. Placer. She told the girls that they could keep the puppy.
Named Laddy, the dog proved intelligent and genial, behaving well around Mrs. Placer and her boarders. The girls doted on his beauty and adored his company. The dog accompanied them to school in the mornings, "laughing interiorly out of the enormous pleasure of life." He enjoyed his masculine pleasures of hunting and running around with fellow dogs on outings that sometimes occupied him for three-day weekends. The girls loved him for that, too.
It was Laddy's sign of masculine independence, however, that attracted Mrs. Placer's disapproving attention. Gradually, she transformed their dog, Laddy, into her dog, which she called Caesar. She turned Caesar into an aggressive guard dog, ready to bite paperboys and door-to-door salespeople. The police officer came repeatedly to her house with complaints, finally warning her that the dog would be shot if he committed another major crime.
When Murphy learned what happened to the dog, he went, with his monkey Shannon on his shoulder, to Mrs. Placer to complain. As she opened her door, the dog leaped at Murphy, but his victim was not Murphy but Shannon, whose neck he broke with one bite. In a voice that would not have deceived an idiot, Mrs. Placer said, "Why, Caesar, you scamp! . . . Aren't you ashamed?"
Early the next morning, Murphy fed the dog poisoned hamburger, killing him. Crazed by grief, he mourned the loss of Shannon, singing at his grave every day, marking it with a plaster Saint Francis. Unable to watch his agony, the girls retreated to cry and dream of escape. Over time, they became more clever at avoiding Mrs. Placer's malicious concern for their well-being. Eventually, they grew up, got jobs, and, in Daisy's case, found a husband. They did escape.
The narrator returns her narration to the present as the two women recall more of their lives since their unhappy childhood. After Mrs. Placer died, the sisters sold the boardinghouse to the first person who came along.
The story ends with the narrator bidding good-bye to her sister and boarding a train. The sisters enjoy parodying their foster mother, speaking of the hidden immoral evil in those around them and of their certain martyrdom. On the train, the narrator begins to write a letter to her sister that is also in the voice of Mrs. Placer. She enjoys a devastating and unholy laugh.
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.