The Blue Castle. L.M. Montgomery
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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