I Capture The Blue Castle

L.M. Montgomery does something refreshing with The Blue Castle: she writes the anti-romance story.

Um, let me dial down that sweeping statement just a bit...

This is a romance story, straight up. There is passion, flushes of cheeks, silent stares, dinners that look out on a enchanting lakeside landscape, the archetypal brooding, enigmatic mountain man that can blow a back out and chop a tree with ease (and who in my mind looked liked a rugged Henry Cavill...rowr). It's riddled with all the romance book clichés that conjure up wistful, windswept cover women, promises of a love affair to end all love affairs, and "heaving bosoms". Still, even sainted with these hallmarks, The Blue Castle is the type of romance story that doesn't fuss in the proverbial as it not only deals with matters of the heart, but also concerns itself with how the heroine finds love within.

For a book written in 1926, set in a time before World War I, it was a pretty bold choice to have a heroine who is 29 years old, unmarried, and loathing it. Women aren't supposed to show this on their face, no, they're supposed to grin and bear the spinsterhood, be the subservient shut-in. Valancy Stirling is a archetype character that doesn't want to accept such complacency, and I already love her for this.

Blue Castle was Montgomery's first novel written for adults, and its obvious that Valancy Stirling is no Anne Shirley, L.M. Montgomery's most iconic literary creation. She's jaded and cynical, bereft of hope and just plain miserable, relegated to being the spinster of her family and seeing no prospects for her future. She lives with an overbearing mother, and whiny elder cousin who hover over her like an infantile invalid, and dictate her daily existence. tl;dr: they are insufferable. Her other family members are equally insufferable, with one creepy uncle (isn't always there always that one creepy uncle?) who makes her the butt of his sexist and lame jokes, all while holding the rest of the Stirlings hostage with his ample will if they dare so challenge his opinions. Oh, and to add to the #firstworldproblems, Valancy is often compared to her beautiful (but dingbat) cousin, Olive whose simple existence frustrates Valancy because why is always about Marsha, Marsha, Marsha?!?

For this, Valancy is truly living in a private, socially claustrophobic hell, as she has resigned herself to never living for herself and living out her days unloved and untouched by a man, even though she desires such. Her only escapes are the nature books of a John Foster whose prose Valancy knows by heart --- this to the chagrin of her mother who finds them "racy reads" (cause oak trees make one horny?) --- and in dreams of a "blue castle", a fictitious place where she can be free to be the woman she wishes to be.

"They never knew that Valancy had two homes–the ugly red brick box of a home, on Elm Street, and the Blue Castle in Spain. Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in that castle. Jewels that queens might have worn; robes of moonlight and fire; couches of roses and gold; long flights of shallow marble steps, with great, white urns, and with slender, mist-clad maidens going up and down them; courts, marble-pillared, where shimmering fountains fell and nightingales sang among the myrtles; halls of mirrors that reflected only handsome knights and lovely women–herself the loveliest of all, for whose glance men died. All that supported her through the boredom of her days was the hope of going on a dream spree at night. Most, if not all, of the Stirlings would have died of horror if they had known half the things Valancy did in her Blue Castle."

These escapes to this imagined "blue castle" bring some ease to Valancy in her lonely hours, but once departed from them Valancy begins to feel chest pains and becomes worrisome to their cause. Not wanting to involve her family, she take matters into her own hands to visit in secret Dr. Trent, a noted heart specialist, who lives in the same (fictional) Ontario town of Deerwood as the Stirlings, and who has been denounced by her family as a no-nothing "quack". Seeing Dr. Trent only provides a devastating blow of news for Valancy, but such news allows her to shed her conventional constraints and truly live life for herself, and well, "do crazy shit".


"Crazy shit" includes dragging family members for filth during a Sunday dinner, lodging with the town drunk Roarin' Abel in order to care for his ailing "fallen woman" daughter, Cissy Gay, taking her hair out of a old-fashioned bouffant, wearing colorful ~skin revealing~ clothing, dancing with dicey characters at dancehalls, and being seen associating with a roguish rapscallion named Barney Snaith, who lives in an isolated lakeside dwelling and rides around in a contraption called *clutches pearls* an automobile.

Valancy being able to bring her "blue castle" to life through these "mis"-adventures left me with a stupid smile on my face while reading. Just having her revel in the days and nights with Barney in his home, surrounded by spirited dogs and the scenic Canadian lakeside, was a bliss you wanted for her, and you root for her all the way for her to maintain this paradise even at her family's behest. Though there is a predictability with a story such as this when it comes to her mysterious illness and Barney's romantic intentions, the passion Valancy has to reclaim her life and blossom outweighs the obvious.

The charm of Blue Castle rests largely in Valancy (re)discovering herself and the delicious surprise and naked fear it holds for her. Since she's been dictated to for so long, her emancipation is more a progression of 'shedding of dead skin', beginning first with casting off her familial station to see the real her, and what she's capable of. Once she gets started throwing a finger at the conventions and hypocrisies of her times it becomes difficult for her to lay on a pillow of gentility. She's awake, alert, and sees the power in her autonomy.

"'I've been trying to please other people all my life and failed,' she said. 'After this I shall please myself. I shall never pretend anything again. I've breathed an atmosphere of fibs and pretenses and evasions all my life. What a luxury it will be to tell the truth! I may not be able to do much that I want to do but I won't do another thing that I don't want to do. Mother can pout for weeks--I shan't worry over it. 'Despair is a free man--hope is a slave'"

Such assertion soon show the wrinkles in her family's fiber, exposing their rudeness and narrow-minded views, along with shattering the status quo of those particular members who hang onto some created superiority. As hilarious as these interactions with her family are, Valancy's assertions telegraph a new familial order for a new social era. As the famous opening line of Leo Tolstoy's classic Anna Karenina states, "each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" and Valancy's asserting independence unveils how the Stirlings are far more unhappy than they let on, as with Valancy they are losing their grip on the conventional standing they've thrived on, and weakening in the face of societal change. Such perception of the shift of generational powers elevates this book from being simple fictional fluff into a real poignant critique of the family dynamic and how it was to change within the new 20th century, with a "war to end all wars" just around the corner to further alter the course.

Blue Castle also serves as a all-encompassing metaphor for what would become the first wave of women's liberation. How women weren't revolving themselves around patriarchal expectation, but wanted to gnaw at the cigar of life in a way that represented their own personal convictions. Even a simple switch of a dress is Montgomery hinting at the change of the cultural guard as women of Valancy's era and station soon began to bob their hair, hike their skirts up, and assert their right at the ballot box.

Still, I prefer a more abstract meaning for what the "blue castle" is, as for me it's less about a place of belonging or of thwarting social norms, but more so about what can be captured, a conquering of a fear when it all seemed so daunting and unreachable. I felt my eyes sort of mist a bit when I read this line, this at a part where Valancy has her epiphany after she is handed down her fatal diagnosis:

"Fear is the original sin' suddenly said a still, small voice away back --- back of Valancy's consciousness. 'Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something'. Valancy stood up. She was still in the clutches of fear, but her soul was her own again. She would not be false to that inner voice. 

It's such a simple ease of a paragraph, but it unpacks so much, so much of the mental boxing match that goes on whenever we're confronted with wanting to emerge from our confining shelters, but find ourselves reluctant as fear and self-doubt whisper in our ears.

Sexy Cancer Stick Time in Now Voyager 

Valancy's emerging from her lonely, dowdy cocoon pings familiar of one Charlotte Vale, the heroine of Olive Higgins Prouty's misbegotten 1941 classic, Now Voyager. Most may be more familiar with the wonderful 1942 classic film starring Bette Davis (in one of her non bitch-on-wheels roles), its iconic last line ("Oh, Jerry let's not ask for the moon, when we have the stars"), and the way it made cancer sticks look sexier than they never were.

Like Charlotte Vale, Valancy Stirling is the romantic hero I've wanted to read within the pages of contemporary fiction, but have failed to find on a consistent basis. She's the woman who never was beautiful and was often resigned to fade into the wallpaper, but who in a turnabout will to not want to settle, instead, blossomed beyond expectation. Her beauty was in treasuring her self-discovery. She may desire and vie for a man --- that xy chromosome is hard to resist after all --- but by deepening her love for things outside herself to better love herself, she doesn't become defined by a man when he does stroll into the picture. She is her own person, fulfilled.

Speaking of man: let's talk about Barney! I think I came into this believing he'd make the sugar walls quiver as any literary bae should, but he didn't and at first I thought that Montgomery failed here. Why didn't I swoon? (...and why didn't she choose a sexier name? "Barney" evokes for me an uber-positive crooning purple dinosaur of my youth) For a moment I slipped, and forgot that Blue Castle is not about Valancy fixating her gaze on the elusive Barney, hence why I thought him underwritten. He does in flashes come off as a kinder, milquetoast Edward Rochester as he's enigmatic and brooding with some noted outbursts, but he's far from brittle, and mentally abusive.

Mostly, he's just about as misunderstood as Valancy is as his reputation in town is resident boogeyman, this all because he doesn't fall in line and march forward. We do find out his elusiveness is for a reason as he too is trying to come from under his own familial influence, and figure out his station in life as much as Valancy is discovering the power in hers. He feels that isolation and casting off the convention overcoat is how to find true contentment, alone and shared. Still, he is as lonely as Valancy, and when the two fuse their wanted lives together is where their bond is strengthened, and for the better.

The method in Montgomery exploring loneliness, identity, and fear in within these two in such a realistic way is some quiet brilliance. There was no need draw a scene of passionate love making, or saying those three little words, we need more of the showing, not the telling. I feel much more of a kinship to characters when their drawn like this. 

Even in this 21st Century world where a singular woman is less abhorred, and even at times celebrated, there is still an emphasis on partnership of desirability, even more so with social media at our finger tips. You like me? You really like me? Then follow, subscribe, like, red heart me, don't swipe left, don't unfollow. We all want to be desired, to be loved, validated, not looked at as if we're gargoyles that should be perched on a cathedral awning. This is just human nature. But to achieve love and validation at the personal level is more profound, much more romantic. Montgomery truly understood that love becomes much more powerful when it first comes from within --- and that that is the best castle to capture and occupy. 

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from the margins 

218 pages // First published 1926 // Rating: ****

Recommends It For... the Bridget Jones' and Muriel Heslops' alike, so they can meet their Mother Valancy, the proto-awkward romantic of the pre-modern era to thwart what was expected of her.