Autumn Sings the Blues

I was not super delighted with every aspect of Valancy's lightning flash in the last chapter... but in this chapter, I'm perfectly delighted with pretty much everything!

I'm especially loving the mental image of Valancy and Barney driving across town, their car fast and noisy, she with her hair flying all over the place and he smoking his pipe... it's giving Bonnie and Clyde crossed over with Kate Beaton's velocipedestrienne:

Only... Valancy, please do not think Barney is asking you out simply because he pities you!

Sure, it makes sense that Valancy would think so, you don't survive 29 years of being belittled without severe injuries to your self-esteem... but clearly Barney enjoys her company for real, even if he doesn't "look at her as a woman"... which he probably also does, and she's just not seeing it either! Whatever the case may be, I believe only a monster would take someone to the movies and to eat Chinese food afterwards if their sole motivation was pity – and by now, I think we can be fairly certain that whatever Barney might be, he is not a monster.

Wonder which movie they saw together?

~

Translation note:

At this point, in Finnish, Valancy and Barney are still addressing each other with the formal you. I keep mentioning this because something about it makes me feel insane. Imagine cruising through town, leaving a devastating trail of scandal behind you, while only addressing each other in the most polite of parlances! These two are the most courteous hellraisers I have ever had the honour of encountering.

I skipped ahead a little bit to make sense of this, and yeah, the translator's choice does track with when Barney first addresses Valancy by her first name in the original English. From my modern-day perspective, it's hard to imagine that even a hundred years ago, people in their 20s and 30s would've been this formal with people their own age that they were genuinely friendly with (so no wonder that Valancy thinks that Barney pities her...) – but of course, I wasn't there, so what do I know. Maybe they did, and maybe to them, there was nothing stilted or ridiculous about it at all.

Valancy's probably never had a tender chicken in her life.

These days, we think of "chicken" as a relatively inexpensive meat that comes with woody, flavorless breasts the size of a dinner plate. it took a lot of chicken breeding to get to that.

In the 1910s and 1920s, chickens were raised for eggs. A chicken became dinner only after it had ceased to lay in a satisfactory manner. Since we don't hear about collecting eggs as one of Valancy's chores, it's most likely that the Stirlings had no chickens. They would instead have purchased mutton or maybe veal at the grocery store -- both of those being popular cheap-ish meats.

It's possible that the Chinese restaurant is raising chickens for its menu. Or it's possible that the "velveting" technique for keeping chicken meat tender while it's being fried did wonders for an old hen.

VELVET GOLDMINE

What kind of owl laughs?—I guess maybe laughter applies to the bubbling hitch in their "who's" sometimes.

So the part about love.

"She was no longer unimportant, little, old maid Valancy Stirling. She was a woman, full of love and therefore rich and significant—justified to herself. Life was no longer empty, and death could cheat her of nothing. Love had cast out her last fear."

For all its romance, the phrasing here emphasizes all the harsh realities of the sentiment. Love as social capital, as escape from poverty. Love as the snare that creates a woman as she exists in the world; love as what binds a person with womanhood, binds her to a man.

At the same time, though, I can't help but think about Courtly Love Undressed by E. Jane Burns, which cites "Throwing Like a Girl" by Iris Marion Young in its third chapter. The ideas I'm bringing up are moreso Young's, but the Burns book was my real introduction to the politics of heterosexual romance, even if the book itself is tied up (sewed up?) in the laughably nonsequitur topic of French courtly love song in the High Middle Ages. It treats on the many ways women, fictional and real, utilize clothing—gifting it, sewing it, donning it—as ways to move into a the position of "amorous subject" rather than fetishized object or mirror for a man's desire. And I think about that a lot. I think about becoming a subject that experiences the world rather than an object to whom things happen.

Becoming a subject is empowering, but it is also humiliating, as is described in tales of courtly love. Male suitors are wretched. They are often described (or describe themselves) as trapped or wounded by their female lover who spurns them. But the woman remains disadvantaged by her lack of interiority: often she wounds or kills her amors by doing nothing at all but be beautiful.

(Obviously this isn't always the case, or else Courtly Love Undressed wouldn't exist lol)

I'm sure there are nuances to this. But I am starting to fashion myself as an "amorous subject" these days, as someone who experiences all this humiliation, but also as someone who experiences the pride of unselfish feeling, the real delight of living in a body. The joy of being a woman looking away from herself.

I love Barney’s opening quote. Y’all, I am trying so hard to be rational about this man, and I am failing miserably. I can be rational about Gilbert Blythe, who I know many would consider the Perfect Man Montgomery created, and yet.

But enough of the self-flagellation. It’s probably time for me to accept that I am not nor will I ever be normal about Barney Snaith and instead talk about why I am not normal about him, which should make for at least somewhat more interesting conversation.

The reason why I love this quote is because it immediately removes so much pressure and makes things so comfortable. There’s no obligation to be anyone but oneself. I know social scripts exist for a reason, but they can also be exhausting, and to have a safe place to just not have to deal with them can be such a relief, and I imagine it was even more so in Valancy’s day.

(Are all of Montgomery’s most interesting characters autistic? Maybe. Am I autistic? Also maybe. All I know is, the way their brains work makes sense to me in a way a lot of other people’s brains don’t.)

And on that note, the John Foster quote. It speaks to me deeply—so deeply it scares me. Is that my ideal friendship? Yes it is. Can I live my life only with people who meet that ideal? I don’t know.

It was a dance “up back” at Chidley Corners; and dances at Chidley Corners were not, as a rule, the sort of assemblies where well-brought-up young ladies were found.

Manuscript version:

It was a dance “up back” at Chidley Corners; in the heart of Muskoka country; and dances at Chidley Corners were not, as a rule, the sort of assemblies where well-brought-up young ladies were found.

The bolded part was crossed out and NOT AN INDEPENDENT CLAUSE, SEMICOLONS WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.

[from: Błękitny Zamek, Prószyński & S-ka 2000, illustrated by Katarzyna Karina Chmiel; all ilustrations from this edidion can be found here!]

In the first chapter of the book club, I made a post about Valancy following the patriarchal idea that it should hurt her that a man has never desired her, making her an old maid.

Here, though, we see this flip on its head. Whereas before she "did not mind so much being an old maid" where she is not married, here Valancy is throwing off the patriarchal description altogether. It doesn't matter that she is just as unmarried and undesired (to her knowledge) as before. She is the one who has experienced love and desire for Barney. It is her own feelings, "justified to herself" which throws off any shame or hurt she has of being an unmarried, undesired woman.