The Blue Castle. L.M. Montgomery
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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