Chapter 27. Musings on Edward Beck (I know I'm getting ahead, but I'm gonna have a hellish week and I don't know if I'll be able to be around for discussion on Tuesday. Putting everything under the cut for this reason, bear with me).
The Edward Beck subplot does for me what the "She was no longer unimportant, little, old maid Valancy Stirling. She was a woman, full of love and therefore rich and significantâjustified to herself." line does for others. Because there is what I take from the episode, but I'm entirely unsure whether that was what LMM intended with it.
So, Valancy has felt ugly and undesirable her whole life, specifically in a romantic sense. No man had wanted her. I have contended before in this reread that the Stirlings are disappointed at Valancy's spinsterhood, and yet they are the ones that have made her a spinster, not only by using her as a psychological punching bag all the time, but by secluding her, forcing her to dress and style herself unflatteringly, and by enforced childishness in their treatment of her in general.
Edward Beck has been going to the same church as the Stirlings, presumably, for many years, but has only noticed Valancy NOW. The moment Valancy is able to show herself as she is, she is immediately noticed. She's not inherently undesirable, on the contrary. And I think this is a good way to show that, instead of falling into the tired and kind of silly trope of "former wallflower suddenly has ALL MEN falling over each other to get her"!
But... I don't get the feeling that's what LMM is trying to do here?
It seems more like another element to put in higher contrast Valancy's felicity with the misery of her past life and its prospects. Marrying Barney has saved her from marrying Edward Beck (fun question: do you all think under other circumstances Valancy would have accepted his proposal?). And, fair, that is true, but it also feels particularly... mean? Like we should kind of hate him or censor him for it?
There are several factors at play. Sure, he's a much older man [insert all the commonplaces of age gap discourse] and Valancy is technically not yet 30, but I do think there's a reason why age 29 specifically was chosen. Makes me think of Little Women's "At twenty-five, girls begin to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never will be. At thirty they say nothing about it, but quietly accept the fact, and if sensible, console themselves by remembering that they have twenty more useful, happy years, in which they may be learning to grow old gracefully". While there's of course decades of distance between LW and TBC, I do think still nowadays we have a sense of 30 being a tipping point for many things in life, and not just for women and romance. But the association was much stronger then, I think. Point is, a widower picking for a second wife a +30 woman is not, in historical context, some kind of outrage or anything near so, even if she is still much younger than him. This does not really signal bad guy.
The many children of Edward Beck is another tell-tale sign. It reminded me strongly of how prominently in the misfortunes of the tale of Anne Shirley's early life the fact that she'd been taken in twice in families with several children featured. The narrator here also does seem to paint it as some sort of horror, even if, as cousin Georgiana points out, several of the children are grown up (but cousin Georgiana is a silly character --this time around I'm noticing a condescension and certain meanness about her character which I didn't remember before). I understand Anne's being a child and thinking the care of those children so burdensome, but it does feel a bit weird in this book when so far the "fat babies" desire has been strongly featured twice. Is the problem that they wouldn't be a woman's own biological children? I can't imagine that we are supposed to think the intention is to enter a mariage blanc, so there would be other children down the line probably?
So, LMM, what was that about? We even aren't told that he killed his spouse, which in the novel's context of three-spouse murderers --one of them a character we are supposed to really like and sympathize with-- is kind of an endorsement! :P
Besides, we are told Edward Beck is a rich man, and has a beautiful house; all those children aren't synonymous with poverty, and so there would also be help available in raising them if needed. Also, also, it is noteworthy that he doesn't talk about his interest in Valancy to Mrs. Frederick or uncle James; he picks whom we know to be the most sensible and kind member of the clan, and someone who can give her opinion without being able to (or even want to) put pressure on Valancy. That shows certain consideration and delicacy too, I think.
Perhaps I'm biased in the sense that I'm not a romantic in the classic sense. I love love, but outside of the theological realm and into the romantic realm, I don't think love and happiness are necessarily linked; and I myself would pick happiness over love if presented with the dichotomy. Like, Tolkien and Edith loved each other desperately, and I'm convinced they were also deeply unhappy as a couple (and I'm convinced this is the source of Tolkien's rather grim views on marriage and marital happiness), and that can happen much more often than people realize. I'm no Charlotte Lucas, but all the same, divine love may conquer all, but human love most certainly doesn't. I would much rather marry someone I could have a good life with, than someone I was in love with but with whom life would be particularly difficult, be it because of lack of common interests or life-views, be it because our personalities and quirknesses don't gel well, or because the give and take of the relationship would be permanently unbalanced against a partner.
The expert maudience may have more to say about LMMs experiences and whatever she might or might not have been working through re: her own feelings and marriage in this novel, but I get the gut feeling that there's "something" of that "something" in this tiny subplot. Like there is in Valancy's conviction that she'd rather be an old maid than be in a suboptimal marriage (something that doesn't really completely fit with her degree of desperation at the beginning of the novel, IMO). It feels like the kind of thing someone with more like the life experience of LMM (ironically, much much closer to cousin Olive's) would think in hindsight. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on how poor cousin Georgiana is treated from now on.
I havenât reread Chapter 27 yet, but I think the thing is Edward Beck doesnât love or even desire Valancy. He is just looking for an efficient woman to look after his children. Which is not morally wrong for him to want, but it was never what Valancy wanted. Valancy wanted Romance and love.
That much is evident, but I'm not asking why he isn't a viable option, rather, what is the point of his presence in the narrative? and why does it feel like the narrator wants me to hate and despise him when objectively speaking he's... just a dude?
I can understand if his function is: "Valancy was never undesirable, it was just her horrible life and horrible family". But if so, again, why frame the guy as deserving of derision and censure, and as identified somehow with the Stirlings? Are we supposed to see with relief this situation as a fate she has escaped with her rebellion? Edward Beck wouldn't have noticed her if she hadn't rebelled!
So while it is a very minor thing, and I'm not saying it ruins my enjoyment of the story or anything the like, I'm just sitting there like... why so mean. What did Edward Beck personally do to you. Why do we need to stab him with pens until he dies. What were you working through with this, LMM? XD
and that drove me to think about LMM, and her particular psychology and life experiences. She was very disappointed in love, and suffered a lot in marriage, having also a very passionate and dreamy nature. So perhaps she'd see as a horrible crime the simple fact that the guy liked Valancy well enough to make some inquiries to court her and see if she'd like to marry him, and didn't just immediately fall head over heels for her? Or is it that plus the kids?
It's also interesting/curious in the sense that Valancy is perfectly indifferent, because she's got what she wants and needs. Her Rochester-vs-St-John(as Mr. Brocklehurst)-call-through-the-moors moment in the narrative was chapters ago, when Dr. Stalling tried to command her to return home. But the narrator is definitely not indifferent about this guy. So there is an awareness in-story that he's not evil, not a threat, etc, etc, and yet...
My point about my being not romantic is that perhaps I see it this way because I don't see romantic love, even in a marriage as the be all end all of happiness, so my feelings about this kind of thing are much more moderate than those of others.
It doesnât feel to me like the narrative wants us to hate Edward Beck. It doesnât seem like the narrative â or Valancy â cares about Edward Beck as a person at all, and thatâs the point. He illustrates a few different things:
1) As you said, he fell for Valancy once she was on her own, being proactive, illustrating that it was the way Valancyâs family treated her and emotionally squashed her that made her unnoticed by men, not her appearance or her real personality.
2) His placement in the book is deliberately ironic, because I think he would have represented a step up for Valancy at the start of the book: from no many being interested in her ever to a wealthy one (albeit old, unattractive, and with nine kids) wanting to marry her. It would have won her respect in familyâs eyes and gotten her out from under her motherâs thumb. For Chapter One Valancy, cousin Georginaâs news would actually have been news! Which makes it all the more ironic to place this directly after Valancyâs marriage, highlighting how perfectly irrelevant he is to Valancyâs now that sheâs with someone she actually loves.
3) It highlights the differences between what Valancyâs family aspire to and what Valancy aspires to. Edward Beck is respectable, well-off, with the best house in town; Barney is disreputable with an old car and a two-room cabin in the middle of nowhere. Valancey loves Barney and adores having a two-room cabin in the middle of nowhere, which is incomprehensible to her family.
Edward Beck isnât a person in the plot, to be liked or disliked; heâs a waymarker of how far Valancy has come. He would have been an achievement at the start of the book; now heâs irrelevant to the point of laughability. Itâs the difference between offering a loaf of bread to a starving person and offering one to someone sitting in front of a feast.
There are two ways of not caring, I think. There's the not caring of "doesn't register" (Valancy) and then there's the violent not caring of Mr. Elton's "I don't care if she lives or dies". XD
For 2 I'm liking @mzannthropy's "the meeting that could have been an email" description of this chapter a lot. So I guess a better description of my feelings is... excess. The whole chapter has the undertone of a revenge fantasy. But Valancy already had a revenge fantasy situation for her family at the dinner where she told everyone off. She also kinda had one with cousin Olive the night of the Childley Corners dance, but I could count this one as being more properly complete, specially because Olive is presented as Valancy's foil and "rival" (how not Legally Blonde of LMM, sdjsdjsjd)... and I guess Edward Beck gets wrapped into this revenge fantasy, and that's why I feel he's a sort of scapegoat as an effigy of all men that are just random dudes. Which is where the intuition I wanted to send out as a test balloon to the more LMM wise folk comes in: the revenge fantasy is not Valancy's. She got her dust-pile. The person sitting in front of a feast doesn't look at the piece of bread with "as if!". Envy and spite tend to dissolve when you are happy and fulfilled, and even towards people that have harmed you, if they cannot harm you anymore, it can turn into a sort of pity. Which we are told is what Valancy feels for her family now! So... this revenge fantasy is for whom? "someone who had a very passionate nature and ended up married to a technically safe man but who ended up dragging her down even at the point of this novel, and much worse later on" is a good candidate for me.
3) I think is a double edged sword. As others have pointed out, we need a lot of signaling that Barney is safe, and we are given that and we know that Valancy will be fine. Also because the book is presenting an opposition between appearances and realities, so of course if Barney looks bad then by our expectation he has to be good, actually. But IRL by that description (that is, removing his kindness to Cissy) he could be the unabomber XD (I mean, if one of my friends today pulled a Valancy -I'm moving in with a guy I met a few weeks ago who lives in a tiny cabin in the woods and apparently has no past and no job and a secret room you cannot enter (is that a meth lab? :P)- I would absolutely be worried about her, and not because I'm a Deerwood Stirling.
Perhaps this is a corner where the blend between realism and fairy tale in this novel isn't particularly neat (?) Deerwood has so much of Real WorldTM (which is what makes the opening chapters so raw and poignant), that whenever we go back to it I cannot but see the characters appearing there as "real" (that is, working by the logic of real life) in a way Roaring Abel and Cissy and even Barney aren't (which, IMO, is of a piece with the tension created by the revelations about Barney at the end of the novel). Roaring Abel is fun and enjoyable in the measure in which he is a fairy-tale character. If you have had an alcoholic relative of the same brand, and were to take that part of the novel in a realist way, you would have to dislike the man. So there's a bit of a reverse to that working for me with Edward Beck, I guess.
I think you're picking up on Bitchy Maud Montgomery here, and while I think it could possibly, maybe, be inspired by her marriage, Edward Beck honestly seems too harmless for that. When I think of male characters inspired by LM Montgomery's marriage, they're nowhere near as flavorless.
LM Montgomery has a tendency to be very snobby about people who don't fit her preferred molds, and she does this very inconsistently. You encounter two types of characters in an LM Montgomery novel: kindred spirits, and people who are not kindred spirits. The latter category includes obvious candidates such as bullies, but it also includes perfectly normal people that the narrative looks down its nose at for no good reason. Dora and Jane Andrews are both examples of this. Throughout all of LMM's novels, there seems to be this condescension towards people whom she finds dull and simple, probably inspired by the fact that she was surrounded by people she did not relate to in real life. The loud implication in the narrative is that these people - dull, plodding, etc - have no inner life. I don't think we're necessarily supposed to hate Edward Beck, but I do think he is flavored with this authorial snobbery.
As for her marriage, I can see the thread you're tracing, but I can't help but wonder if any revenge fantasy here is more being free of people whom you find insipid. LM Montgomery characters whom I personally consider inspired by her marriage - which is obviously a highly subjective opinion! - are Dick Moore and Dean, both subconsciously more so than consciously. If you plaster up Edward Beck there, he just doesn't fit in my mind lmaooo
