The bit that did make me chuckle was the inventor of the much-talked -of purple pills turning up in a grand purple car!
I love everything about Barney's dad. The one thing that is not completely predictable is that when the wealthy father turns up looking for his long lost son, you kind of expect (I did anyway) that he was going to be harsh, stern, demanding, expecting Barney to live up to some stuff standard of rich-boy behavior that free-spirit Barney simply can't live by. But in fact he's an old sweetheart -- quite silly but also good at heart, and all he wants is his son near him. And Barney's unhappiness and eventual retreat from society was caused not by any cruelty or coldness on his father's part, but by other wealthy children and young people being unkind to him because his family was "new money" -- and new money made in such an undignified way that it made him a target of scorn.
I had entirely forgotten all the twists and turns of the Barney's father plotline and it was fun and refreshing to read. He is my favourite minor character along with Roaring Abel. It was only on this rereading that I realized that, having read this novel several times in my youth and then not at all for at least the last 25 years or more, I had in fact written a character very similar to Roaring Abel in one of my own books, and not even realized he was the inspiration.
Speaking of unacknowledged inspiration reminds me -- has anyone heard of the controversy over Colleen McCullough's 1987 novel The Ladies of Missalonghi, which ignited a small controversy when it came out as some people accused McCullough of plagiarizing The Blue Castle. There are many striking similarities between the plots of the two novels (also some very striking differences!) and ultimately McCullough's justification was that she had read The Blue Castle many years earlier, remembered and unconsciously copied some of the plot (mainly the idea of the unhappy, unpopular spinster marrying the handsome stranger because of a mistaken diagnosis giving her only a year to live -- though apparently in Missalonghi, Missy deceives her husband intentionally rather than accidentally). This article gives an overview of the controversy.
Thanks for the article. It's interesting the author saw Missy in Missalonghi as subverting romance by being manipulative without noting past heroines such as Becky Thatcher and Scarlett O'Hara were also manipulative and scheming to get their man and survive.
Becky Sharp. Can I use the excuse we're down to the last weeks of the school year and the beginning of hot weather and my primary school students' behaviour has been quite draining! My brain is already in holiday mode.
I kept hoping Emily would not settle for less as an adult the way Anne had done. But the demands of genre are quite inflexible (certainly back then) and much of the success of a romance trope is that happy-ever-after ending. Cissy's life story would have been too sad and realistic for readers then or even now. What I miss in LM Montgomery is that tongue-in-cheek irony we get in Jane Austen who manages to imply that her heroines get what they deserve in marriage, some companionship certainly and a great deal of witty conversation and respect as well as romantic love, but some disappointment too and the occasional regret.
I feel like Montgomery's view of romance is pretty complicated, for someone who wrote stories that mostly end with wedding bells and a happily-ever-after. She was single herself until the age of 37, with one brief and passionate romance during her single years that ended sadly. Apparently her marriage was not very happy either. She was well-versed in the life of the single woman in her place and time and I think this really comes through in the opening chapters of The Blue Castle. It's not surprising, given the conventions of the type of fiction she was writing, that she gave her heroines the "happy ending" that her own marriage did not provide -- but I think it's interesting to explore the ways she did this, and how The Blue Castle does or does not fit the romance pattern.
Warning: Mild spoilers ahead from pretty much every other Lucy Maud Montgomery novel, but I think the books are written in such a way that most of this is NOT really spoilery, as you can see the end from the beginning much as you can in The Blue Castle
One thing that makes this novel stand out is that Valancy falls in love with and marries the handsome stranger whose background is unknown to her. The three heroines about whom Montgomery wrote series novels -- Anne, Emily, and Pat -- all end up marrying childhood friends, usually after years of denying that there could be any romantic interest in this old friend! It suggests that Montgomery's romantic ideal is the well-known, the familiar, the home-like, the relationship that has a strong foundation in friendship.
The "happy endings" themselves are interesting too. In the Emily of New Moon series and in Pat of Silver Bush and its sequel, the heroines marry their old friends Teddy and Jingle -- but only after many years of denial, misunderstanding, and some estrangement, and when the heroine herself has experienced such loss and suffering that there's a bittersweetness to the eventual realization that she does love and will marry her old friend. Both those series end with that realization and we get no further glimpse of what their married lives are like.
Anne of the Island ends this way too, though Anne is younger and seems to have a lot more positive opportunities ahead of her when she finally falls in love with Gilbert, than either Emily or Pat do at the ends of their stories. And because of the pressure from publishers and the public to keep on writing about Anne, Anne is the only Montgomery heroine that we follow for several books after her marriage. Generally, Anne and Gilbert seem to settle fairly happily into marriage and parenthood, though there are a few wistful references to Anne having given up earlier dreams of becoming a writer in favour of raising a family (there's no sense at the end of Emily's Quest that Emily will make the same sacrifice -- Teddy seems pretty on board with having a by-then-famous writer as a wife). And there's a fascinating section at the end of Anne of Ingleside which is entirely devoted to a difficult time in Anne's marriage when she experiences misunderstanding, jealousy, and self-doubt. The scene where Anne and Gilbert, as grown-up married people and parents of a large family, talk through and make up this misunderstanding is really the end of Anne's romance, since Anne of Ingleside is the last book written largely from Anne's point of view: Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside are much more about Anne's children. So it's interesting to me that the central romance thread that runs through six books, ends with a middle-aged couple having a misunderstanding, a few weeks of slight estrangement, and then making up the quarrel. It's not a typical ending for romance by any means!
It's also worth nothing that the last book dealing with Anne's family, Rilla of Ingleside -- which I think is Canada's best novel about the WW1 home from -- ends with literally every member of the younger generation (the ones who survive the war, anyway) married to a childhood sweetheart or close friend. Once again, LMM digs hard into "the true romance is the friend you didn't realize you loved all along" theme.
So The Blue Castle is a real outlier here -- but I actually love the way this romance ends, with the little flash forward into Valancy's and Barney's future life together. They're going to be rich; they're going to have multiple houses; they're going to travel a lot. Is there any mention of them having children? I don't have the book by me right now but I can't remember that there is any mention. This might be the one book where LMM really lets loose with the wish-fulfillment ending -- that the sad, forgotten spinster who everyone pities not only finds true love, but finds it with someone handsome and rich who will give her a life of beauty and luxury, rather than the rather dreary life of a minister's wife that Montgomery herself experienced (and did not seem to find much more rewarding than spinsterhood!)
I also wonder how she might have written this novel in an era where it was more acceptable to write openly about sex. She never does, of course, but Valancy and Barney are pretty clearly doin' it (there's only one bed in his house, and no suggestion that this is a chaste marriage in name only). A lot of Valancy's glow-up, apart from getting out of her mother's awful house, was probably due to having regular, enjoyable sex. Good for her.
I'm seeing the marriage as sexless on account of Valancy's supposed condition. And it wouldn't fit with the plot if she became pregnant. Improbable I grant you, but indicated.
That's a very different take on it from mine! Now I'm curious to know other readers' thoughts -- do you think Barney and Valancy's marriage is consummated?
I assumed it was - didn't he give her a passionate kiss on arrival at their new home? I assumed things went from there. My copy has had to go back to the library so I can't refer to it.
I take @Firenze 's point, though. I presume Valancy wouldn't have wanted to get pregnant while she believed she was terminally ill - she wouldn't be around for the baby and childbirth would probably have killed her.
There definitely is a passionate kiss ... which I took as the author's way of discreetly assuring us that further intimacy would follow. And Valancy thinks something to the effect of being grateful that Barney didn't suggest they live as brother and sister, or something like that, which also seemed to me to be a veiled reference to the idea that it would be a fully consummated marriage.
But the argument that she would have wanted to avoid pregnancy in her supposed condition does have some weight, I'll have to admit.
I guess the good thing about writing as if sex doesn't exist, is that you don't have to have your characters wrestle with questions like that!
Comments
I love everything about Barney's dad. The one thing that is not completely predictable is that when the wealthy father turns up looking for his long lost son, you kind of expect (I did anyway) that he was going to be harsh, stern, demanding, expecting Barney to live up to some stuff standard of rich-boy behavior that free-spirit Barney simply can't live by. But in fact he's an old sweetheart -- quite silly but also good at heart, and all he wants is his son near him. And Barney's unhappiness and eventual retreat from society was caused not by any cruelty or coldness on his father's part, but by other wealthy children and young people being unkind to him because his family was "new money" -- and new money made in such an undignified way that it made him a target of scorn.
I had entirely forgotten all the twists and turns of the Barney's father plotline and it was fun and refreshing to read. He is my favourite minor character along with Roaring Abel. It was only on this rereading that I realized that, having read this novel several times in my youth and then not at all for at least the last 25 years or more, I had in fact written a character very similar to Roaring Abel in one of my own books, and not even realized he was the inspiration.
Speaking of unacknowledged inspiration reminds me -- has anyone heard of the controversy over Colleen McCullough's 1987 novel The Ladies of Missalonghi, which ignited a small controversy when it came out as some people accused McCullough of plagiarizing The Blue Castle. There are many striking similarities between the plots of the two novels (also some very striking differences!) and ultimately McCullough's justification was that she had read The Blue Castle many years earlier, remembered and unconsciously copied some of the plot (mainly the idea of the unhappy, unpopular spinster marrying the handsome stranger because of a mistaken diagnosis giving her only a year to live -- though apparently in Missalonghi, Missy deceives her husband intentionally rather than accidentally). This article gives an overview of the controversy.
I feel like Montgomery's view of romance is pretty complicated, for someone who wrote stories that mostly end with wedding bells and a happily-ever-after. She was single herself until the age of 37, with one brief and passionate romance during her single years that ended sadly. Apparently her marriage was not very happy either. She was well-versed in the life of the single woman in her place and time and I think this really comes through in the opening chapters of The Blue Castle. It's not surprising, given the conventions of the type of fiction she was writing, that she gave her heroines the "happy ending" that her own marriage did not provide -- but I think it's interesting to explore the ways she did this, and how The Blue Castle does or does not fit the romance pattern.
Warning: Mild spoilers ahead from pretty much every other Lucy Maud Montgomery novel, but I think the books are written in such a way that most of this is NOT really spoilery, as you can see the end from the beginning much as you can in The Blue Castle
One thing that makes this novel stand out is that Valancy falls in love with and marries the handsome stranger whose background is unknown to her. The three heroines about whom Montgomery wrote series novels -- Anne, Emily, and Pat -- all end up marrying childhood friends, usually after years of denying that there could be any romantic interest in this old friend! It suggests that Montgomery's romantic ideal is the well-known, the familiar, the home-like, the relationship that has a strong foundation in friendship.
The "happy endings" themselves are interesting too. In the Emily of New Moon series and in Pat of Silver Bush and its sequel, the heroines marry their old friends Teddy and Jingle -- but only after many years of denial, misunderstanding, and some estrangement, and when the heroine herself has experienced such loss and suffering that there's a bittersweetness to the eventual realization that she does love and will marry her old friend. Both those series end with that realization and we get no further glimpse of what their married lives are like.
Anne of the Island ends this way too, though Anne is younger and seems to have a lot more positive opportunities ahead of her when she finally falls in love with Gilbert, than either Emily or Pat do at the ends of their stories. And because of the pressure from publishers and the public to keep on writing about Anne, Anne is the only Montgomery heroine that we follow for several books after her marriage. Generally, Anne and Gilbert seem to settle fairly happily into marriage and parenthood, though there are a few wistful references to Anne having given up earlier dreams of becoming a writer in favour of raising a family (there's no sense at the end of Emily's Quest that Emily will make the same sacrifice -- Teddy seems pretty on board with having a by-then-famous writer as a wife). And there's a fascinating section at the end of Anne of Ingleside which is entirely devoted to a difficult time in Anne's marriage when she experiences misunderstanding, jealousy, and self-doubt. The scene where Anne and Gilbert, as grown-up married people and parents of a large family, talk through and make up this misunderstanding is really the end of Anne's romance, since Anne of Ingleside is the last book written largely from Anne's point of view: Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside are much more about Anne's children. So it's interesting to me that the central romance thread that runs through six books, ends with a middle-aged couple having a misunderstanding, a few weeks of slight estrangement, and then making up the quarrel. It's not a typical ending for romance by any means!
It's also worth nothing that the last book dealing with Anne's family, Rilla of Ingleside -- which I think is Canada's best novel about the WW1 home from -- ends with literally every member of the younger generation (the ones who survive the war, anyway) married to a childhood sweetheart or close friend. Once again, LMM digs hard into "the true romance is the friend you didn't realize you loved all along" theme.
So The Blue Castle is a real outlier here -- but I actually love the way this romance ends, with the little flash forward into Valancy's and Barney's future life together. They're going to be rich; they're going to have multiple houses; they're going to travel a lot. Is there any mention of them having children? I don't have the book by me right now but I can't remember that there is any mention. This might be the one book where LMM really lets loose with the wish-fulfillment ending -- that the sad, forgotten spinster who everyone pities not only finds true love, but finds it with someone handsome and rich who will give her a life of beauty and luxury, rather than the rather dreary life of a minister's wife that Montgomery herself experienced (and did not seem to find much more rewarding than spinsterhood!)
I also wonder how she might have written this novel in an era where it was more acceptable to write openly about sex. She never does, of course, but Valancy and Barney are pretty clearly doin' it (there's only one bed in his house, and no suggestion that this is a chaste marriage in name only). A lot of Valancy's glow-up, apart from getting out of her mother's awful house, was probably due to having regular, enjoyable sex. Good for her.
I take @Firenze 's point, though. I presume Valancy wouldn't have wanted to get pregnant while she believed she was terminally ill - she wouldn't be around for the baby and childbirth would probably have killed her.
But the argument that she would have wanted to avoid pregnancy in her supposed condition does have some weight, I'll have to admit.
I guess the good thing about writing as if sex doesn't exist, is that you don't have to have your characters wrestle with questions like that!