Читать книгу The Blue Castle - L.M. Montgomery - Страница 7
ОглавлениеBy 1926, when The Blue Castle appeared in print for the first time, Lucy Maud Montgomery had already published several books and established herself as a successful author. In 1908, L.C. Page of Boston had published her first novel, the famous Anne of Green Gables, which, within a year of appearing, had gone through six editions and had sold 19, 000 copies.1 Throughout her life, she published consistently and prodigiously, producing hundreds of short stories and poems. Her second novel, Anne of Avonlea appeared in 1909, followed by Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), The Story Girl (1911), Chronicles of Avonlea (1912), The Golden Road (1913), the third novel in the Anne series, Anne of the Island (1915), The Watchman and Other Poems (1916), Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), an autobiographical piece, The Alpine Path (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), Rilla of Ingleside (1920), and the first two novels of a three-part series: Emily of New Moon (1923) and Emily Climbs (1925). Then, wishing to go off in a new direction and perhaps, unbeknownst to her, looking for an outlet for her personal life experiences, Montgomery wrote The Blue Castle.
Up until this point, writing had always been extremely important to Montgomery, not only as a career, but as an outlet through which she could record the enormous personal difficulties she faced. In fact, Montgomery first began recording her thoughts and feelings in a journal when she was sixteen — a practice she maintained for the rest of her life. Her journals and letters to her long-time correspondents, Ephraim Weber of Alberta, and George Boyd MacMillan of Scotland, 2 record Montgomery’s transformation from a young, lonely girl to a celebrated author who was voted, in a 1999 CBC millennium poll, the most influential Canadian writer of the twentieth century, and in 2000 was pronounced, by Maclean’s magazine, to be one of twenty-five Canadians who inspired the world.3
Success did not come easily for Montgomery, however. She was deprived of a mother at the age of two, abandoned by her father, and left to grow up with, and later take care of, two very conservative, elderly grandparents. She trained to become a teacher and taught at Bideford, Belmont, and Lower Bedeque, P.E.I., before attending Dalhousie University for a year and working as a copy editor for the Daily Echo in Halifax. She became engaged to Edwin Simpson, a Baptist theological student, but shortly after fell deeply in love with a young farmer, Herman Leard, causing her to break her engagement. Despite her strong feelings for Leard, she believed she could not marry him because of their differences in class and background and so, with great pain and remorse, she rejected his attentions. Shortly after, Montgomery became engaged to the Reverend Ewan Macdonald, with whom she began a very troubled marriage in 1911.
The couple lived in Leaskdale, Ontario (60 miles northeast of Toronto), where Macdonald had accepted a ministry, and their first son, Chester Cameron, was born in 1912. In the following four years, as she continued to adjust to the role of minister’s wife, Montgomery experienced a difficult second pregnancy and had another son, Hugh Alexander, who died at birth. A year later, Montgomery’s last child, Ewan Stuart, was born.
In addition to the death of her second son, Montgomery experienced several losses during these years, including that of Herman Leard (1899), her father (1900), and her grandmother (1911). In 1919, Montgomery was devastated by the sudden death of her cousin, Frede Campbell, and only a few years later (1924), her beloved aunt, Annie Macneill Campbell, also died.
All through this, as she continued to write, Montgomery had to come to terms with her husband’s declining mental health. In addition to suffering recurring delusions and bouts of deep clinical depression, which led to a series of nervous breakdowns, Macdonald lived with the conviction that he was predestined to be damned to eternal hellfire. While he managed to keep working as a minister, it fell to Montgomery not only to care for her husband, but to disguise his condition and maintain a façade of stability and happiness for their children and the congregation.
On a more pragmatic level, during these years Montgomery was also participating in a legal battle with L.C.Page, first, for withholding royalties, and second, for publishing a revised collection of her early short stories without her authorization, a case she won in 1923. Her husband was also involved in a legal contest over a car accident, which he lost. In addition, both he and Montgomery were working to convince their congregation to vote against the union of the Presbyterian and Methodist churches.
Shaped by these events, suffering ill health, devastated by the outbreak of World War I, and experiencing increasing loneliness and misery in her marriage, Montgomery interrupted writing the third novel of her spirited Emily series to produce her first book aimed at an adult audience; it was The Blue Castle.
Upon first reading, as many reviewers have pointed out, The Blue Castle is not convincing as a serious romance novel nor as an “amusing ... little comedy.” 4 The book opens on Valancy Stirling’s twenty-ninth birthday as she comes to terms with being an “old maid.” Living with her bitter and closed-minded mother, and constantly ridiculed by her extended family, Valancy realizes that she has had no life and has nothing to look forward to. As a result, she needs little convincing, when told by a doctor that she has only a year or so left to live due to her heart condition, to break free from all those who victimize her in order to pursue happiness. That entails shunning social conventions and moving in with the town’s outcasts, alcoholic Roaring Abel and his daughter, Cissy, an unmarried mother whose illegitimate child survived for only a year after its birth. At the same time, determined to experience marriage and sexual gratification, she proposes to Barney Snaith, whose mysterious background has everyone in town convinced he is a convict or worse.
What makes the novel appear unsuccessful is the way in which Valancy changes her personality so suddenly when she discovers the terminal nature of her illness, and the way in which all of the pieces of the novel are so neatly resolved at the end. After Snaith spirits Valancy away to his island in Muskoka, which resembles the castle of Valancy’s dreams, they fall in love. Snaith is revealed to be Valancy’s favourite author, John Foster, who is, of course, also heir to a great fortune. Eventually Valancy discovers that her heart condition is not fatal, which ultimately clears the way for the couple to live happily ever after. It is all too simple — and therefore suspicious — especially coming from such a serious and ambitious author as Montgomery. Over the years, then, it is understandable why critics have either ignored the work or given it tepid reviews. Furthermore, the fact that it doesn’t fit into the genre of children’s books, by which Montgomery had established her career to date, seems to have confused reviewers.
One of the first reviews to appear was in Punch (1926), which immediately established The Blue Castle as “sentimental fiction.” On September 18, 1926, The Saturday Review of Literature warns, “The imaginative reader may suspect that Valancy’s malady will not prove fatal, that in revolt she will tardily ripen and thrive, win the man of her heart to belated mating, and live happily ever after. But all these foregone eventualities are gracefully unfolded, with not a little broad humor and a merciful restraint. The story is, of course, one exclusively for feminine readers.”
The New York Times Book Review, September 26, 1926, reports that Montgomery’s new book, “Although perhaps a little more mature in its spirit than the earlier books, is unmistakably from first page to last an L.M. Montgomery novel, compact of sentiment, rosily trimmed with romance, peopled with beings drawn solely out of the imagination, but telling a well-made story with humor and pathos.” 5 Both The Times Literary Supplement6 and The Canadian Bookman7print reviews that interpret Valancy Stirling as a Cinderella figure. The latter goes so far as to say “there is a certain pettiness that puts us out of sympathy with the character of Valancy, the verbal lengths to which she goes in her rebellion seeming rather illogical. Within its limits, however, the novel is not below the ordinary fare.”
Despite these reviews, over the next several decadesThe Blue Castle seems almost to disappear from view. Then, in an article published in the Kingston Whig-Standard on December 25, 1987, Maureen Garvie accused Australian author Colleen McCullough of plagiarizing Montgomery’s text in her novel The Ladies of Missalonghi, 8 which caused a renewed interest in the book and an outcry among Montgomery fans.
There are, indeed, a great deal of similarities between the two novels — in plot, theme, and characterization. However, no legal action was pursued. Mary Rubio confirms that when interviewed McCullough admitted that she had read Montgomery’s books a great deal as a child, and she allowed that she had probably internalized many of the patterns of her books which unconsciously came through in The Ladies of Missalonghi. Certainly, one positive outcome of the case was that it served to remind readers of the existence of The Blue Castle and generated a renewed demand for critical treatment of it by contemporary Montgomery scholars.
Since then, Mary Henley Rubio, Elizabeth Epperly, Elizabeth Waterston, Gabrielle Ahmannson, and Irene Gammel, among others, have turned their attention to reassessing Montgomery’s works in their social and cultural context. They argue that Montgomery has not been given the serious academic attention she deserves because she has been consistently dismissed as a children’s author, or a popular writer, or a romance novelist — literary forms that, until recently, have not been treated seriously by academics and critics. Reassessing the importance of these genres as literary forms that reflect women’s realities in the early part of the century, Elizabeth Epperly suggests that “Montgomery may be said to hold up a mirror to her culture which ‘captures and reflects expectations and dreams of her culture — especially those of girls and women.’”9 Rubio goes further, describing The Blue Castle as “an unadulterated and bitter assault on the patriarchal system of Montgomery’s era, one which oppressed women psychologically and economically.” 10
By considering these various positions, and placing them in context with Montgomery’s personal journals, The Blue Castle becomes a far more complex, multi-layered text — one that tackles such charged issues as patriarchal repression inherent in orthodox religion, the viability of transcendentalism, the vulnerability of childhood psyche, female sexuality, alcoholism, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. In it, not only are the difficulties and constraints of women’s lives in the early part of the twentieth century explored, but Montgomery’s own intimate struggles as a woman, a wife, and a writer in a small community are revealed.
The Blue Castle was first published in August of 1926 by McClelland & Stewart Limited in Toronto;11 it was printed for the second time in December of the same year. Since that time, it has gone through more than seventy-five print runs. In addition, the novel has been produced as a play in both Poland and Canada.12 In fact, after being translated into Polish by a young Jewish girl who was in hiding from the Nazis, The Blue Castle premiered in Cracow in 1982, and according to Rubio, “has continued playing continuously as one of Poland’s most successful stage plays since then.” 13
Most important, however, is that the novel was inspired by many actual people and events in Montgomery’s life.14 The most obvious of these is the setting — The Blue Castle is set in Bala, Muskoka, as opposed to P.E.I., where all of her other nineteen novels are placed. This was because Montgomery was inspired by the place when she spent two weeks there with her husband and children during the summer of 1922. Of that time, on September 24, 1922, she writes the following to Mr. MacMillan:
One evening I sat all alone for two hours on the verandah … I was in a mood I recognized at once as the perfect one for dreaming. So I dreamed. I picked out an island that suited me … I built thereon a summer cottage and furnished it deluxe. I set up a boat house and a motor launch. I peopled it with summer guests — all kindred spirits. Dear old Aunt Annie — my cousin Frede who died in 1919 but who lived again in my dream — my cousin Bertie McIntyre whom I have not seen for six years, and you. There you all were, as our “house party” guests. We spent a whole idyllic summer there. I lived it out in every detail. We swam and sailed and fished and dived and sat out summer sunsets on moonlit porches … and always we talked — the soul-satisfying talk of congenial souls.15
This letter is revealing on a number levels: what is most evident is the sense of comfort and charm that nature holds for Montgomery. It is from that natural space that she draws her inspiration and is able to experience a sense of harmony with the world. What is also evident is that while she exists in that natural sphere, where she is most content, notions of time and location are transcended; people she loves, who have died or who are absent, can be present again.
This idea is central to much of Montgomery’s work, and to The Blue Castle in particular. Reasons for this might lie in her interest in the writings of American poets Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. All these writers advocate, in various ways, a search for spirituality that is more personal and cosmically based than the conventional religious orthodoxy — one that can be found through participating in a symbiotic relationship with nature and the universe. This same belief system is obvious in much of the poetry of the Confederation poets, particularly Archibald Lampman, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Bliss Carman. In fact, Montgomery was very familiar with the work of the latter. She recommended that Ephraim Weber read The Making of Personality — a collection of essays inspired by Carman’s conversations with Mary Perry King, who had begun a Delsartean school in the U.S. that promoted unitrinianism, which, for Carman, contributed to the “healing, as he perceived it, of the individual personality. Personality was, for him, a unitrinian but also a metaphysical concept.” 16 Montgomery suggests that Weber would enjoy Carman’s work.
Indeed, in much of Montgomery’s correspondence with Weber, she challenges the viability of orthodox religion and explores the possibility of transcendentalism, the occult, reincarnation, and various other forms of mysticism. These letters reinforce Sylvia DuVernet’s claim that Montgomery did not believe in a personal God. “Her choice was more nearly God as cosmic energy, manifested in the mind and heart of man and nature. She was, as she saw herself, anything but an orthodox Christian.” Consequently, DuVernet associates the inspiration of The Blue Castle with Montgomery’s belief in a cosmic balance between people and the universe, between all things in the universe, and therefore all relationships between people. She suggests further that this is the source of Montgomery’s attraction to the “constellation Vega of the Lyre, sky-symbol of harmony which is mentioned in Washington Irving’s The Alhambra, a text Montgomery especially enjoyed.” 17 In fact, as Elizabeth Epperly pointed out to me recently, Irving’s work is a major influence on Montgomery’s way of seeing and imagining — a theme she is pursuing in her forthcoming book entitled Through Lover’s Lane: L.M. Montgomery’s Photography and Visual Imagery.18 The connection to Montgomery’s novel is made when Barney mentions the Alhambra to Valancy and draws the reader’s attention to one of Montgomery’s favourite places for day dreaming.
In The Blue Castle, Montgomery’s theosophical ideas are suggested in her treatment of Valancy’s rose bush. If, as DuVernet has suggested, “The mystery of all nature and knowledge lay, for Montgomery, as for the Rosicrucian adepts, in the heart of a blooming rose,” 19 then it is not coincidental that Valancy’s life changes after she hacks down the rose bush that cousin Georgina had given her five years before. She reports, “She loved roses. But — of course — the rosebush never bloomed. That was her luck. Valancy did everything she could think of and took the advice of everybody in the clan, but still the rosebush would not bloom. It throve and grew luxuriantly, with great leafy branches untouched of rust or spider; but not even a bud had ever appeared on it.” 20 After Valancy leaves town and pursues life and love outside the confines of social acceptability on Barney Snaith’s island, she returns to discover the same rose bush “blooming! It was. Covered with blossoms. Great, crimson, velvety blossoms. Fragrant. Glowing. Wonderful.” 21
The idea that Montgomery was a Romantic mystic is further reinforced in The Alpine Path in which she describes aspects of her own fantasies in the following manner:“It has always seemed to me, ever since early childhood, that, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never draw it quite aside, but sometimes a wind fluttered it and I caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond — only a glimpse, but those glimpses have made life worth while.” 22
Again, it is in Bala that Montgomery sets her Blue Castle — a place where the line between fantasy and reality blurs. In the novel, Valancy describes her second home as the Blue Castle in Spain where she,
Had lived spiritually ... 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.23
The parallel here between Montgomery’s Alhambra and Valancy’s Blue Castle is obvious. Furthermore, the way in which Montgomery uses imagination and fantasy as a means to escape her own unhappy reality, in the same way that Valancy does, justifies a more intense study of the interrelationship between the two. This is reinforced by Montgomery’s dedication of The Blue Castle to Ephraim Weber, whom she believed understood “how fair the realms imagination opens to the view and knew, too, how much more beautiful and satisfying our own secret Blue Castles are to any mansion we may build or have built for us in ‘real life.’”24
In The Blue Castle, Barney Snaith is actually John Foster, the nature writer who, for Valancy, has “yielded glimpses of a world into which she might once have entered, though the door was forever barred to her now.” 25 Foster has his own secret room behind a closed door — his Bluebeard’s Chamber — into which Valancy is not allowed. One day when he is away, Valancy opens the door believing that she will find evidence of her husband’s secret, magical, chemical experiments; instead, she discovers that he is a writer. In this way, Montgomery perhaps suggests the magic of writing — the miraculous creation of something out of nothing, and the incredible ability to make that which is fiction real. Thus, not only does Valancy find herself married to a magician or alchemist, she invokes the idea that Montgomery, herself, as the writer who has created Valancy, is also a mystic.
Applying this idea to Montgomery’s own life — particularly in the context of the union between Valancy and Barney — makes it even more difficult to reconcile Montgomery’s own choice of husband. She acknowledges that “The life of a country minister’s wife has always appeared ... as a synonym for respectable slavery — a life in which a woman of any independence in belief or character, must either be a failure from an ‘official’ point of view, or must cloak her real self under an assumed orthodoxy and conventionalism that prove very stifling at times.” 26 It seems that Montgomery was unwilling to become “a failure from an ‘official’ point of view,” and so chose to hide her true self and character and become the proper minister’s wife. The question of where she chose to hide her true self and character is then what is important and the answer lies in her writing. And in terms of her personal ideas about courtship, sexuality, and marriage, The Blue Castle holds the keys since it represents the patriarchal restrictions that women experienced during the early part of the twentieth century.
If we combine these latter ideas it becomes interesting to speculate about whether Montgomery actually uses The Blue Castle as a way to rewrite her own existence as woman and wife. This is reinforced by Montgomery’s own journal entry that reveals:
This power of mine [for imaginary adventures] has been all that has saved me many times in my life from absolute break-down. I can imagine things so vividly that it seems to me almost exactly the same as if I were living them, and it has the same, or largely the same stimulating physical effect on me as the real adventures would have — I really thrill and glow and delight and exult — and so I have always been able to escape from “intolerable reality” and save my nerves by a double life.27
As her journals reveal, Montgomery’s childhood was fraught with loneliness and isolation. To escape this reality, Montgomery did what many of her characters do — retreated to imaginary realms where she was at once happy and in control of her life. In this regard, Jane Cowan Fredeman points out, “Montgomery uses ‘fairyland’ as a metaphor both for the golden days of childhood and for the font from which creative artists, separated from the common run, continue to draw their imaginative powers.” 28 In much the same way as for the British Romantic writers, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake, that “fairyland” is only available to the innocent — to children and animals, and to those who have heightened imaginary powers, such as writers and artists, who can access it by letting go of the self and of the everyday world.
Fredeman further argues that “in [Montgomery’s] novels, the reader finds not only more or less elaborate descriptions of the heroine’s fantasy worlds but also constant and frequent harsh intrusions by adults who have lost fairyland and by a tribe of children who have never entered it.” 29 In The Blue Castle, however, Calvinistically correct Mrs. Frederick Stirling and her clan can never participate in that mystical place because they are not innocent enough, nor in tune enough, with nature, nor are they able to let go of their conscious egos long enough, to be able find their way. Furthermore, they do not see the need to escape their worlds, so do not search for the means.
The fact, then, that it is the town drunk — Roaring Abel Gay — with whom Valancy identifies in this regard, is particularly ironic. She “wondered to herself if Roaring Abel’s periodical sprees were not his futile protest against the poverty and drudgery and monotony of his existence. She went on dream sprees in her Blue Castle. Roaring Abel, having no imagination, could not do that. His escapes from reality had to be concrete.” 30 It is even further ironic that the only other person who understands the magic in Valancy’s Blue Castle is Abel’s daughter, Cissy, who after a summer away from home returns pregnant and unmarried and is shunned by the town.
What is particularly relevant about this is the fact that for Montgomery, fantasy and imagination are connected with the idea of escape — and that the escape can take place on a different level of consciousness that is invisible to observers. This is reinforced when Mrs. Frederick Stirling asks Valancy where she is going with her suitcase, to which Valancy responds: “I am going to look for my Blue Castle.” 31 It is at this point that Valancy begins to formally acknowledge the existence of her imaginary realm and a desire to make it real — to make it visible. If we connect this idea to Virginia Woolf ’s assertion that every woman should have a room of her own, Valancy’s room has been the Blue Castle — it has been an imaginary room. After reading Foster’s text, The Magic Wings, Valancy realizes that the only thing that has kept her in her imaginary room is fear — Foster writes, “Fear is the original sin…Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something. It is a cold slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading.” 32 After coming to this understanding Valancy “made a discovery that surprised her: she, who had been afraid of almost everything in life, was not afraid of death. It did not seem in the least terrible to her. And she need not now be afraid of anything else.” 33 At this point in the novel she not only wishes to exchange fantasy for reality, she is prepared and determined to do it.
It is extremely interesting to remember that if we accept the idea that Valancy and Montgomery are interrelated, we also accept that Montgomery, herself, articulates her own fears and frustrations through Valancy. Having acknowledged the misery of her existence, and her fear of life, Montgomery gives Valancy the courage to change it. Montgomery does not do anything to change her own life. As of the time, then, that Valancy leaves her mother’s house, she and Montgomery symbolically disconnect — Valancy moves forward out of her imaginary space into the natural sphere; Montgomery stays back. But I will return to this idea shortly.
As she leaves the town behind, Valancy becomes particularly attuned to the nature that surrounds her — as if she is walking towards and into it. Her experience with the world around her echoes the writing of John Foster, a man who has also turned his back on social convention and is determined to please himself. Indeed, from this point forward in the book, nature increasingly surrounds and affects Valancy. And as she moves toward it — into it — she concurrently enters a realm in which the mystical is more visible and accessible to her — a realm in which only special people with whom Valancy can relate reside. This is immediately made clear to Valancy when she first sees Cissy Gay:“Could this be sweet Cissy — this pitiful little thing that looked like a tired broken flower? She had wept all the beauty out of her eyes; they looked too big — enormous — in her wasted face. The last time Valancy had seen Cecilia Gay those faded, piteous eyes had been limpid, shadowy blue pools aglow with mirth. The contrast was so terrible that Valancy’s own eyes filled with tears.” 34 That Cissy is described as a “tired broken flower” is significant, especially given Foster’s teaching that “It is a pity to gather wood-flowers. They lose half their witchery away from the green and the flicker. The way to enjoy wood-flowers is to track them down to their remote haunts — gloat over them — and then leave them with backward glances, taking with us only the beguiling memory of the grace and fragrance.” 35 Like wildflowers and fairies, Cissy Gay has to be tracked down; she lives away from the eyes of society, at the end of a dirt road that is strewn with white daisies, and she is quiet and mysterious. Furthermore, she has been “picked” before her time (before marriage) and as a result, after having borne her child, is withering away.
As Valancy spends more time in nature, she too is mystically affected. When Barney first really notices her he wonders, “Was this elfin girl the little, old-maidish creature who had stood there two minutes ago? Surely there was magic and devilry going on in that shabby, weedy old garden.” 36 This scene is reproduced when Barney returns to claim his bride. Valancy “wore her green dress and her green hat because she had nothing else to wear. She did not look or feel at all bride-like — she really looked like a wild elf strayed out of the greenwood.” 37 It is in this state and at this point that Valancy’s imaginary world and her real world combine. And they do so in the physical reality of Barney’s cabin.
There was a diaphanous, lilac mist on the lake, shrouding the island. Through it the two enormous pine-trees that clasped hands over Barney’s shack loomed out like dark turrets. Behind them was a sky still rose-hued in the afterlight, and a pale young moon.
Valancy shivered like a tree the wind stirs suddenly. Something seemed to sweep over her soul.
“My Blue Castle!” she said. “Oh, my Blue Castle!”
They got into the canoe and paddled out to it. They left behind the realm of everyday and things known and landed on a realm of mystery and enchantment where anything might happen — anything might be true. Barney lifted Valancy out of the canoe and swung her to a lichen-covered rock under a young pine-tree. His arms were about her and suddenly his lips were on hers. Valancy found herself shivering with the rapture of her first kiss.38
What is significant here is that it is at this point that the two bodies touch, and through the joining of their lips, become one. Their sexual union takes place in the wilderness; they consummate their relationship in the natural sphere where mystery and spirituality abound — where there is no social convention, no sanctioned church nor a traditionally accepted God.
The depiction of Valancy and Barney’s union stands in stark contrast to that which is offered to Valancy four days later by Cousin Georgina, when she discovers Edward Beck would like to marry her so that she might look after his nine children. In shock at the news that Valancy had married Barney, Georgina exclaims, “To marry a man you know nothing about,” to which Valancy answers, “I know more about him than I know of Edward Beck,” and Georgina rationalizes, “Edward Beck goes to church.”39
Again, if Valancy symbolically represents Montgomery, then the choices that she makes are extremely important when set in contrast to Montgomery’s own life. This is especially true when we remember that the church and marriage are tied inextricably for Montgomery given that her husband was a minister and that she had been unhappily married to him for fifteen years when she was writing The Blue Castle. According to Mary Rubio, “About the age of fifty, when she was writing The Blue Castle, Montgomery could remember her own twenty-ninth year when she felt others’ pity for her failure to catch a man. She could see how her own desperation to marry, and her limited choice in Cavendish, had propelled her into her own unsatisfactory marriage.” 40
Indeed, Montgomery’s journals suggest that marriage was an extremely difficult and lonely experience for Montgomery. Yet, it was what was expected of a woman in her time and so Montgomery was obliged, as a writer, to provide closure to her stories with the man and woman getting married and living happily ever after. Still, she did not submit to this conclusion happily, which is why Rubio speculates that Montgomery delayed writing Emily’s Quest — the third in the Emily series in which it was time to marry off the heroine — in order to produce The Blue Castle.41 In fact, Montgomery’s journals suggest that writing The Blue Castle provided Montgomery with an escape from the drudgery of her life. In her journal of Sunday, February 8, 1925, for example, she writes, “On Wednesday I finished a novel, The Blue Castle — a little comedy for adults. I have enjoyed writing it very much. It seemed a refuge from the cares and worries of my real world,” 42 and further, she is “sorry it is done. It has been for several months a daily escape from a world of intolerable realities.” 43
Knowing that Montgomery rewrote her journals for public consumption, and that she saw the task as a means to relive parts of her life, then it is essential to consider the portions of her journal devoted to a young farmer from Bedeque, Herman Leard, who awakened Montgomery’s sexual being, but who was incompatible with her at all other levels. Montgomery reluctantly chose social acceptability. But it was a difficult choice and in her journal she records the following conflict:
I dreaded unspeakably the loneliness of the future when I should be alone, absolutely alone in the world, and compelled to make a new home alone in some strange place among strangers. There were moments when I could not face that alternative either. Viewed in the abstract, without reference to any particular man it honestly seemed to me a choice of evils — and which was the least? I balanced them one against the other — but could come to no decision. In some moods — my morning moods — I am inclined to think that I would be wiser to keep my freedom and trust life. In other moods — my evening and three-o’clock-at-night moods — I am inclined to marriage. In one mood loneliness seemed the greater evil, in another a companionship from which I could never escape even if it should prove uncongenial.44
In this entry, Montgomery articulates the ultimate conflict facing a woman who must choose between the bondage of spinsterhood, which includes loneliness and social rejection, and the burden of marriage, which while involving social acceptability also implies imprisonment to another. Montgomery reveals herself as having to choose between the worst of two evils — in either case she knows she is doomed — a feeling she experiences even more profoundly on her wedding day:
I found myself sitting there by my husband’s side: my husband. I felt a sudden horrible inrush of rebellion and despair. I wanted to be free. I felt like a prisoner, a hopeless prisoner. Something in me, something wild and free and untamed, something Ewan had not tamed, could never tame, something that did not acknowledge him as master, rose up in one frantic protest against the fetters which bound me. At that moment, if I could have torn the wedding ring from my finger and so freed myself, I would have done it. But it was too late.45
Montgomery had experienced sexual passion with Leard, and had recognized its limitations in the absence of intellectual and social equality. She had also experienced intellectual and social equality with Ewan Macdonald, and had recognized their limitations in the absence of sexual gratification. In contrast, Valancy finds complete fulfillment in Barney Snaith.
Despite the suggestion of a fairy-tale ending for Valancy and Barney, the reader is left with a sense of discomfort at the conclusion of The Blue Castle. Perhaps this is because while the relationship between Valancy and Barney represents Montgomery’s own dream of a happy marriage we know that her reality was extremely different. Furthermore, it is significant that in order to find and maintain such happiness, Valancy and Barney must continue to turn their backs on society and its conventions and remain on their island.
Another reason for the discomfort might lie in what Rubio has identified as a counter-discourse that Montgomery embeds in the arranged romantic marriage of her heroines, a discourse that “showed that marriage could pose grave dangers to a talented woman’s autonomy, happiness, and self-fulfillment.” 46 To pursue this idea, it is important to recognize that even at the end of The Blue Castle, Valancy and Barney are not equal. Therefore, while Valancy reports that she “thought they were splendidly free,” 47 that freedom is achieved by Valancy only through marrying Barney Snaith. He, in turn, has the same freedom totally independent of Valancy simply because he is male.
What makes this worse is that it is Valancy’s own feelings for Snaith that imprison her. She claims: “She knew quite well now that she loved Barney. Yesterday she had been all her own. Now she was this man’s. Yet he had done nothing — said nothing. He had not even looked at her as a woman. But that didn’t matter. Nor did it matter what he was or what he had done. She loved him without any reservations. Everything in her went out wholly to him.” 48 Not only is Valancy enslaved by her feelings, she does not wish to be free; she is subordinate to Snaith. While such subjugation might be acceptable to Valancy while she believes she has only a short time to live, it raises a strong sense of conflict in her when that belief is removed. When Dr.Trent reassures her that her heart is fine, rather than being relieved or happy, Valancy is confused and disturbed. Even “Dr.Trent thought she was odd. Anybody would have thought, from her hopeless eyes and woebegone face, that he had given her a sentence of death instead of life.” 49 In a sense, he has. In Valancy’s and in Montgomery’s minds, marriage is equivalent to death — death of the individual, independence, and freedom. While her relationship with Barney has an end in sight, it is beautiful. With that end taken away, it seems more like a prison sentence. She reports, “She must go on living, longing for it. Everything was spoiled, smirched, defaced. Even that year in the Blue Castle. Even her unashamed love for Barney. It had been beautiful because death waited. Now it was only sordid because death was gone.” 50 At this point Valancy realizes she has assumed the role of all wives — she has committed herself to a life of subjugation to her husband. As a result, the freedom in the real world that she had briefly experienced recedes, while her need for an imaginary realm to escape to once more arises. The Blue Castle ends with Valancy smiling through her tears and reclaiming that mystical space in which Montgomery continues to reside:“She was so happy that her happiness terrified her. But, despite the delights before her … she knew perfectly well that no spot or palace or home in the world could ever possess the sorcery of her Blue Castle.” 51
NOTES
1. Mary Rubio & Elizabeth Waterston, Eds. Writing a Life: L.M. Montgomery. (Toronto: ECW Press, 1995).
2. Montgomery began corresponding with Weber and MacMillan through a literary circle started by Miriam Zieber of Philadelphia. Weber’s first letter to Montgomery is dated 1902; MacMillan’s first letter was dated 1903. In both cases, the correspondence to and from Montgomery continued until her death.
3. FAQ, Montgomery Institute, University of P.E.I.
4. L.M. Montgomery, Ephraim Weber: Letters 1916-1941. July 18, 1826.
5. The New York Times Book Review, September 26, 1926, 33.
6. The Times Literary Supplement, September 30, 1926.
7. The Canadian Bookman 8, no. 10, (October 1926).
8. Colleen McCullough, The Ladies of Missalonghi. (London: Arrow Books Limited, 1987).
9. Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L.M. Montgomery’s Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 249.
10. Mary Henley Rubio, “Subverting the Trite: L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Room of Her Own, ’” Canadian Children’s Literature 65. (1992), 32.
11. “It was printed by Warwick Bros & Rutter, Limited Printing and Bookbinders Toronto.” The second print run was done by The Hunter-Rose Co. Limited, Toronto.
12. The Blue Castle was first performed in Charlottetown, P.E.I. (Theatre P.E.I) on May 10-20, 1993. Lyrics and music were by Hank Stinson, and Ron Irving directed it. This first performance generally received poor reviews. The following year Stinson and Kelly Robinson took over the direction and the play was received favourably.
13. Mary Henley Rubio, “Subverting the Trite: L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Room of Her Own, ’” Canadian Children’s Literature 65. (1992), 33.
14. In terms of names of animals in The Blue Castle, the two crows on Barney Snaith’s island are called Nip and Tuck, which are also the names of Ephraim Weber’s two horses. Furthermore, Barney has two cats called Banjo and Good Luck; Montgomery also had a cat called Good Luck. Barney has an owl which he calls Leander; Montgomery’s uncle had the same name.
15. L.M. Montgomery, My Dear Mr. M.: Letters to G. B. MacMillan. Edited by Francis W.P. Bolger and Elizabeth R. Epperly. (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited, 1980), 108–9.
16. Sylvia Du Vernet, Theosophic Thoughts Concerning L.M. Montgomery. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 11–12.
17. Ibid., 12.
Montgomery sent a copy of Washington Irving’s The Alhambra to MacMillan. On August 2, 1915 she writes to MacMillan stating that when she opens the covers of the book she feels as if she “stepped through an enchanted gateway … shutting me in ‘the land where dreams come true.’” Furthermore she reports that one of her greatest wishes is to visit The Alhambra. While this does not actually happen for Montgomery, Barney assures Valancy that she will see the Alhambra with him because “it’s the nearest thing to the Blue Castle of your dreams I can think of ” (Ibid., 263).
18. Elizabeth Epperly, Through Lover’s Lane: L.M. Montgomery’s Photography and Visual Imagery. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
19. Sylvia Du Vernet, Theosophic Thoughts Concerning L.M. Montgomery. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 53.
20. L.M. Montgomery. The Blue Castle. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1926), 47.
21. Ibid., 169.
22. L.M. Montgomery, The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career. (Toronto: Fitzhenry, 1975), 76.
23. L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1926), 4–5.
24. L.M. Montgomery, Ephraim Weber: Letters 1916-1941. November 16, 1927.
25. L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1926), 12–3.
26. L.M. Montgomery, The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery Volume 1: 1889–1910. Ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1985), 321.
27L.M. Montgomery, The Selected Journals of L.M. Montogomery Volume 2: 1910–1921, Ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1985), 368.
28. Jane Cowan Fredeman, “The Land of Lost Content: The Use of Fantasy in L.M. Montgomery’s Novels,” in L.M. Montgomery: An Assessment, edited by John Sorfleet. (Guelph: Canadian Children’s Press, 1976), 60.
29. Ibid., 61.
30. L.M. Montgomery. The Blue Castle. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1926), 60.
31. Ibid., 97.
It is also significant at this point that as she reaches out for life Valancy throws out the glass potpourri that contains dried flowers: “It smashed gloriously against the schoolgirl complexion on the old carriage-shop. ‘I’m sick of fragrance of dead things, ’ said Valancy.” (Ibid., 55).
32. Ibid., 34.
33. Ibid., 45.
34. Ibid., 103.
35. Ibid., 104–5.
36. Ibid., 111–2.
37. Ibid., 158.
38. Ibid., 163.
39. Ibid., 168.
40. Mary Henley Rubio, “Introduction,” in Harvesting Thistles: The Textual Garden of L.M. Montgomery: Essays on Her Novels and Journals, edited by Mary Henley Rubio, (Guelph: Canadian Children’s Press, 1994), 6.
41. Mary Henley Rubio, “Subverting the Trite: L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Room of Her Own, ’” Canadian Children’s Literature, 65 (1992), 31–2.
42. L.M. Montgomery. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery Volume III: 1921-1929, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 218.
43. Ibid., 222.
44. L.M. Montgomery, The Selected Journals 1, 322.
45. L.M. Montgomery, The Selected Journals 2, 68.
46. Mary Henley Rubio, “Introduction,” in Harvesting Thistles: The Textual Garden of L.M. Montgomery: Essays on Her Novels and Journals, edited by Mary Henley Rubio, (Guelph: Canadian Children’s Press, 1994), 5.
47. L.M. Montgomery. The Blue Castle. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1926), 187.
48. Ibid., 111.
49. Ibid., 183.
50. Ibid., 185.
51. Ibid., 218.
