Book Review: "The Blue Castle" by L. M. Montgomery (1926)
The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1926)
Overall: 5/5
Non-spoiler Review:
Prior to its reprinting in the ‘90s, The Blue Castle was likely the least well-known of Montgomery’s works and even today tends to be read mostly by Montgomery fans. Which is a shame because it’s a genuinely entertaining read and has a lot to say about the female condition of early 1900s Canada (and to an extent North America in general).
On the surface The Blue Castle is a unabashed Cinderella story. The narrative revels in comeuppances and the heroine is well-rewarded after decades of enduring a toxic family living situation. If that sounds a bit too Hallmark movie rest assured The Blue Castle delivers on catharsis and pathos. And unlike classic Cinderellas the protagonist Valancy earns her happy ending and even is willing to abandon it at the end when she believes herself to have gained it by deception.
The premise, Valancy Stirling, an unloved, much harried spinster is diagnosed with a fatal heart condition. Deciding that she needs to make her last months count she starts ignoring social convention and lives by her own whims.
If you’ve ever had unpleasant or even toxic relatives this is the book for you. After Valancy stops being afraid of her family (remember she thinks she’s going to die soon) her actions are utterly cathartic. Every small rebellion, every witty comeback, culminating in her leaving her mother’s house is a triumph.
As an aside the titular Blue Castle comes from Valancy’s imagination and honestly it’s refreshing to see a Victorian/Edwardian woman’s imagination being lauded as a positive coping method. Montgomery often portrays her child and adolescent protagonists as using their imagination to cope with hardship, but usually shows adults as having zero imagination or having outgrown it. Granted Valancy uses her Blue Castle less as the novel goes on, but it’s because her reality became better so she doesn’t need to rely on her coping method as much.
Honestly, I don’t understand why someone hasn’t turned this into a movie or miniseries because it has all the right ingredients for success: a heroine you can root for, snappy dialog, period fashions, cinematic vistas, and a ten car pile-up of misunderstandings that rom-com type movies delight in but none of which are misogynist or mean-spirited.
SPOILERS
At face value it seems like the book can’t possibly be feminist because the poor spinster ends up rich and married to the man she loves. What’s more heteronormative and classist than that?
Keep in mind that Montgomery wrote that she felt that “marriage was a necessary choice for women in Canada” as without independent wealth and means an unmarried woman would be thrust into poverty upon the death of any relatives she was living with. This is important to understand the choices in The Blue Castle especially.
Early in Valancy’s rebellion she leaves home to care for the handyman’s dying consumptive daughter, Cissy Gay, a former classmate of hers. The issue? Said former classmate is a fallen woman whose illegitimate child perished a year prior. The novel is refreshing in that it avoids the two most common depictions of fallen women of the time. The first depiction is the moralistic one, deriding the silly woman for succumbing to temptation and insisting that she would have been saved if only she had not been so weak of character. The second depiction is the voyeuristic one, usually chosen by writers who feel sin is the true face of humanity and that anyone who believes otherwise is naive. Montgomery swerves and avoids both paths. Rather than casting Cissy as either a corrupted innocent or a temptress a more honest everyday story emerges.
Cissy met a young man while working at a hotel one summer. They became physically intimate and Cissy became pregnant. While Cissy asserts she didn’t know those particular activities would lead to her condition, she’s not painted as a defiled virgin. Indeed spinster Valancy does know which activities lead to babies implying that it was Cissy’s lack of female relatives that resulted in her lack of sex education rather than ignorance being the absolute default for unmarried women. Neither Valancy nor the narration fault Cissy for exploring her sexuality with her first love, there’s no ‘she should have known better’ hanging over the reader’s shoulder.
To Cissy’s lover’s credit he’s callow but not cruel. When he learns of the pregnancy he offers to marry her, but Cissy perceives that it’s out of pity and not love. Cissy declines his chivalry as she feels it would be misery to be married to someone she loved, but didn’t love her back. Her father never kicks her out or makes her feel ashamed about the situation. Again, there are no immediate villains or tempters in this scenario, just people who made mistakes and tried to do what they felt was right. But Cissy is shunned by the townsfolk to the point of being a complete social pariah.
The tragedy as Montgomery presents it is not that Cissy was seduced. The tragedy is that the townsfolk didn’t respect her or her choices. If they had, she probably wouldn’t have died. The lack of a social support network coupled with her poor health after her son died signed Cissy’s death warrant. The novel squarely puts the blame on society and even the heroine is not given a pass as Valancy realizes that she was so afraid of social censure it did not occur to her to reach out to Cissy after the baby’s death. Cissy’s funeral scene is awash Valancy’s disgust for the social hypocrisy as the townsfolk suddenly decide death absolves poor Cissy of her sins. Even Valancy is forgiven for her ‘insanity’ of caring for a dying friend and that’s not an exaggeration. Her relatives actually attempted to have Valancy institutionalized and lament it would have been possible back in their day.
With no reason to keep her away from home and no way of supporting herself Valancy decides to double down on her own recklessness. She proposes marriage to a local ne’er-do-well who she got to know during her stay at Cissy’s. Neither of them are in love with each other, though Valancy is self-aware enough to realize she has a crush on him, and after Valancy explains she has less than a year to live (and is unwilling to return to her family) Barney accepts. While no love scene is depicted on the page, it’s clear in the narrative the two are physically intimate. Again this sounds quaint by modern standards, but remember this was published in the 1920s by the author of Anne of Green Gables. A woman decides she doesn’t want to die a virgin so she propositions a man she’s attracted to - that’s pretty sex positive and liberated for the time! The marriage part is explained as necessary in that her family could legally have her taken away from him otherwise - remember women were still in perpetual guardianship of their male relatives unless married - otherwise it’s implied they would’ve cheerfully lived together in sin if that was a viable option.
In short, Cissy’s death was not about punishing a sexually curious woman, it was about how misogyny can literally kill, and her passing led directly to Valancy taking control of her own sexuality. That’s pretty damn feminist for a Cinderella story set in rural Edwardian Canada.
I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s fairly short, it’s free, and it’s entertaining even without all the early feminist icing on top. The cliches are done in a way that’s much more fun more than tedious and there are some “twists” that are foreshadowed though that doesn’t make the reveals less enjoyable. Come for the period romance, stay for the comeuppances.
Available for free at Project Gutenberg Australia
Available for cheap on Kindle & Nook