The Blue Castle. L.M. Montgomery
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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 —