(Added May 2023)
“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 horrible to live with fear. It is a slimy serpent coiled around you. And it is above all, degrading.”
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Continuing our mini-series on runaways, meet Valancy Jane “Doss” Stirling, a dreadfully proper little soul whose great escape into the great big world falls under that category of “proper” known as High Time.
The book is loosely structured like a play in four acts. Let us call this:
Act I: A study in depression. Melancholy. Alienation. The blues. (The “blue castle” of same is a fantasy world.)
Act II: “The great escape.” This act contains most of the comedy.
Act III: “Wuv, twue wuv, and mawwiage.” Gentle, nature-loving (and chaste, chaste) romance.
Act IV: Melodrama. Denouement.
The locale: Deerwood, a microscopic town in Ontario, on the edge of “up back” and the stony farms of the austere northern woods. This is the only one of Montgomery’s novels to be set in this province.
The setting: the 1910s. (Note that some reviewers believe it is the 1920s just because it was written in the 1920s. We disagree. The narrative declares that women did not bob their hair back then, not even in the big cities. “When [her mother] heard [that Valancy had cut her hair], she nearly erased Valancy’s name from the family Bible.” Also, the narrative declares that the term “watchful waiting” had not yet been invented.)
The antiquated gimmick: multiple, including what TV Tropes calls the Secret Identity and at least two permutations.
The modern gimmick: the author Montgomery employs what was then an avant-garde storytelling technique called the Mind-Body Connection. In contrast to “Raymie was sad. He was shaken”, frequently Valancy’s emotions are sublimated into physiological responses: i.e., changes in the behavior of activity of the visceral motor (autonomic) system. To phrase it in layman’s terms, her suppressed negative emotions are killing her. (“She knew by certain unmistakable signs that another of her attacks was coming on. It must not find her here.”)
The cast: Doss. Her mother and other impoverished Stirlings. The golden cousin Olive and the rich Stirlings. Cousin Georgiana and Uncle Herbert, the closest thing to sympathetic Stirlings (but unwilling to be caught in the act). Scary preacher. Busy doctor. Three town sinners.
And we begin. Valancy-called-Doss is the human equivalent of a starched-and-ironed-and-mothballed garment that is hoarded in a closet for a “special occasion” that never came. Or perhaps we may compare her to a silver set waiting for a table; the metal remained, but unused pieces became tarnished. Her mind is ever dulled by judgmental words of the twenty other Stirlings. Her spirit is stored in a case called Fear.
Valancy “must” wear a pompadour hairstyle because she has a funny-shaped head. She “must” not wear colorful or pretty clothing because she has washed-out, colorless skin. She “must” not be in a room all by herself—not even her own room—unless she is asleep. And she “must” believe these family instructions, or she will be sorry. Oh, yes, they will make her sorry. For you see, Valancy is approaching the ancient age of 29 unmarried years old, and she still lives “at home” with two reduced widows: her severe mother and the vividly-named Cousin Stickles. By all appearances, these three unwanted women will sit in the front room, and knit and sew, and live off their dwindling savings—“beans were cheap and filling”—until they die.
It doesn’t help that the Lord the Stirlings say they worship is not portrayed any better.
“Valancy hated piecing quilts. But Valancy must be at work and fancy work materials were too expensive. Idleness was a cardinal sin in the Stirling household. When Valancy had been a child she had been made to write down every night, in a small, hated, black notebook, all the minutes she had spent in idleness that day. On Sundays her mother made her tot them up and pray over them.”
Is it a surprise that one of the first things that Valancy does is to find a new church? (“The little old preacher was so simple and sincere. She went because he believed exactly what he preached, and somehow it made a tremendous difference.”)
“Gad, she had been such a sallow, faded little old maid.” (—Valancy’s doctor.)
Ahem. There are old maids, and there are old maids. For the four people on Earth who have never seen it, It’s a Wonderful Life includes a compare-and-contrast of a radiant wife and mother to a preserved-in-formaldehyde alternate-universe counterpart. Not content to portray old-maid Mary Hatch without love, for some reason they portray her without any other desirable human quality. She has no prospects. (On a planet of four billion, no other man saw how wonderful she once was?) She has no courage; what she demonstrates goes beyond cowardice into air-raid sirens of hysteria. (To be fair, we don’t know if George Bailey is the first drunk to chase her up and down the street, or if he is the fiftieth and she simply could bear no more.) She has no common sense. (Why did she run from one drunk into a bar full of them?) And for some reason, in the alternate universe she can’t even see! They actually portray it that if she had gotten married, she never would have needed glasses.
The alternate-universe Mary has one lonely virtue—she is a librarian. However this actually is portrayed as a negative thing. Granted there probably are not a lot of customers in Pottersville. But in the end Old Maid Hatch is portrayed as not being smart or steady enough to be a real librarian. It’s just busywork. (Well, at least it explains why she never a job working for Sam “Yee-Haw!” Wainwright. He was always looking for smart people to hire; in the alternate universe, she wasn’t one of them. Also, Sam was sweet on her and might have married her.)
Think how stunted old-maid Valancy Stirling’s life must be, if old-maid Mary Never-Became-Bailey at least has a job.
On the other hand, think how stunted Old Maid Hatch’s life must be. We previously saw Mary as a vibrant youth. We never saw the process that withered her. We did see the process that withered Valancy. Therefore we notice if Valancy can change her life without waiting (literally, decades) for a man to change it for her.
In contrast, L.M. Montgomery writes “old maids” with some sympathy. If they have brought misfortune upon themselves it clearly is mentioned (so that the characters know what to do to fix it). She does the same with old bachelors. The author develops the characters as people first—so that if and when the characters get married, the audience knows what they have to offer.
Montgomery also shows “old maids” who are free to do great deeds, such as to adopt Anne Shirley [Marilla Cuthbert] or pay her way to college [Josephine Barry]. Montgomery even comments on the society that praises and punishes:
“I like being independently wealthy. And some of them just wanted my money. It isn’t all bad! A married woman could never be as cantankerous as I am free to be. But it’s not a life I recommend for you. Make some room in your world for romance, Anne-girl.”
So when two crude store clerks are told that Valancy Stirling is one of the local “old maids”, and they snicker “Curable or incurable?” we know that the narrative is taking Valancy’s side against the world. She’s going to need that support.
One day Valancy’s doctor annihilates her with a bombardment of bad news. (Hello. How are you today? You have a terminal condition. Don’t purchase unripened fruit. I won’t accept a post-dated check. This is about how much time you have left, if you are extremely careful for the rest of your life. Have a nice day.)
Valancy “Doss” Stirling never heard of bioethicist Leon R. Kass. The Gentle Browser now has:
“Could life be serious or meaningful without the limit of mortality? Is not the limit on our time the ground of our taking life seriously and living it passionately? To know and to feel that one goes around only once, and that the line is not out of sight, is for many people the necessary spur to the pursuit of something worthwhile. ‘Teach us to number our days,’ says the Psalmist, ‘that we may get a heart of wisdom.’ To number our days is the condition for making them count.
“[Finally,] there is the peculiar human beauty of character, virtue, and moral excellence. To be mortal means that it is possible to give one’s life, not only in one moment, say, on the field of battle, but also in the many other ways in which we are able in action to rise above attachment to survival. Through moral courage, endurance, greatness of soul, generosity, devotion to justice—in acts great and small—we rise above our mere creatureliness, spending the precious coinage of the time of our lives for the sake of the noble and the good and the holy. We free ourselves from fear, from bodily pleasures, or from attachments to wealth—all largely connected with survival—and in doing virtuous deeds overcome the weight of our neediness; yet for this nobility, vulnerability and mortality are the necessary conditions … Mortality makes life matter.”
Valancy discovers that she who has been afraid of everything in life, is not afraid of death. She resents death. She has been “careful” her whole life. She perceives how unfair it is that she must die when she has never truly lived. Therefore she decides to live like she is dying … which, for a character in the 1910s, includes such unorthodox activities as bobbing her hair, reading a book on Sunday, moving her bed from one side of the bedroom to the other, and getting her first job.
And what is that first job? Why, it is to become housekeeper and hospice nurse in the hovel of the Town Sinners™.
The Stirlings invoke every weapon of fear. Uncle Benjamin will write Valancy out of his will (assuming she was in it, she counters). Uncle James upbraids her employer for enticing a “weak and foolish girl.” The scary preacher tries to convince Valancy that it is sinful for a 29-year-old grown woman to move out of her childhood home. But in the end, all they have are words. Not coincidentally, Valancy hints that words are all they have of their religion.
“I told her, ‘Your reputation will be gone forever if you go to wait on a bad girl like Cecelia Gay.’
“She said, ‘I don’t believe Cissy was a bad girl. But I don’t care if she was.’
“I burst into tears then, and she said, ‘Oh, come now, Mother, be a good sport. I’m going to do an act of Christian charity. And as for my reputation, we all know I have no matrimonial prospects anyway, so what does it matter?’”
During Valancy’s interval of holy service to the town outcasts, she meets the love of her life (another Sinner™). She asks him to marry her. He says Yes, having nothing else going on. Thus we have Act III of the novel. The “scandalous couple” spend most of Valancy’s last days (and entire chapters) strolling in the woods or boating on the rivers. If Sam Gribley of My Side of the Mountain described nature as a place of freedom, hope, and peace, here Valancy describes nature as representative of the planting, watering, tending, and blooming of marriage and love.
And then, the fourth Act. We call it “melodrama” because of the plot twists. Nowadays some of these would be considered clichés, even tiresome to a jaded audience. But the fact is that clichés come and go: some are as classic as Shakespearean comedy. Others require more suspension-of-disbelief than some audiences might concede. For example: Valancy’s husband has not one, not two, not three, not four, but five secrets. (That we noticed, anyway.) It’s also convenient that none of the secrets are bad ones; that is to say, even the worst one does not reflect badly on him.
Any one of those secrets would have been excitement enough. Valancy discovers four of those five secrets—and leaves him. Crushed, she concludes that the “proper” thing for a “proper” soul to do is to legally abandon her husband, and to grovel to her mother as befits a destitute “fallen woman.” Her husband is aghast at how hastily his wife returns to her old idols and ways.
(Valancy replies that this is an interesting observation from a man who has similarly impoverished his spirit by nurturing his idol of Pride.)
Is it a spoiler if we give away the fifth secret, and no other? After all, it is the only one that matters.
He loves her back.
She did not run from something. She ran to something, all the way to him.
But you already knew that.
Recommended.
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For five to ten other reviews of The Blue Castle, see https://consumedbyink.ca/2017/11/06/5-reasons-why-i-shouldnt-like-the-blue-castle-readingvalancy/
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The blue castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942). First published Toronto, c1926. Some sources insist c1924.
Audiobook editions exist. Multiple ISBNs.
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{End.}
potluck2point0 