Joasia Redfern (Blue Castle PL)

Welcome to Canada? Welcome to Canada, dear me!

I was literally feeling like this when I (almost) flawlessly passed security check (my pillow was sucked by a machine and I needed to ask someone for help with it ;-;):

(too niche to crossover Detroit: Become Human with Maudience??)

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, I'M COMING

WAAAAIT FOR MEEE

I'M COMINGGGGG

– @moonlightredfern

YES AND I'M LIKE AGSOXVSIANATSUWKAV!!

(maybe a little egotop to mark myself but who cares, it's my conference program, I can do whatever I want with it🩵🩵)

Someone has a cru-ush! Valancy is so down bad for Barney, it's adorable. And so, *so* relatable that the experience is so alien to her that the first time she feels drawn to him she thinks she's ill. Girl, as a deeply repressed queer woman who feels feelings primarily as physical sensations, I get you so much.

Barney, meanwhile, is being a little ridiculous, racketting by every night until he finally gets the nerve to talk to Valancy. I'm sure he thinks himself very logical and emotionally disconnected from it, and that he has convinced himself that he's just making sure for himself that this woman come to look after Cissy is truly trustworthy. But he's not fooling anyone but himself and Valancy. Boy's as intrigued by her as she is by him.

This chapter is primarily an exploration of Barney Snaith. After so many Stirling chapters of him haunting the narrative, we finally actually meet him and find out that, as Valancy suspected, he's not so bad after all. He's thoughtful and practical and intelligent. He runs errands for the women and tells stories in the evenings and is Friend To The Animals. In all honesty he's maybe a little too perfect, but it works.

I'm interested in the subtle theme we're working of Valancy's imagined Blue Castle vs the actual things that make her happy. Her childhood dreams were all very grandiose and impressive. Marble and silk and expensive perfume, with dashing knights and daring quests and swooning maidens. Now that she can have what she wants in the real world, she gravitates towards the pedestrian and the practical. Her happiness is a tumble-down cottage with lots of dirty rooms to clean and her quests are for dinner ingredients. Her literal prince charming has appeared at last and she sends him to buy codfish.

And the text acknowledges that! Valancy is aware of the discrepancy! But she is not, I think, upset by it. At the end of chapter 1, when she lost the keys to her castle, she vowed to never live in fantasy again. So now she is living her truth, freed from the restrictions of her family and her fantasies alike. And her truth is that she likes caring for people and living simply and being allowed to think and feel and say what she likes.

Valancy insists Barney listen to a passage of John Foster and then:

"Isn't that beautiful?" "Punk," said Barney.

I don’t have coherent thoughts right now but accept my enthusiasm and kudos <333

Eeeexactly!

"She could be alone whenever she liked, go to bed when she liked, sneeze when she liked."

Valancy is collecting greatest happinesses! So far she has achieved Mrs. frederick's happiness of living a life of loving service and her own of sneezing whenever she likes. I'd say let's see if she can get them all, but I don't think even Valancy will discover necromantic powers so that she can bring back Georgiana's brother.

"In the long, wondrous, northern twilights, when Cissy was asleep and Roaring Abel away, she could sit for hours on the shaky back verandah steps, looking out over the barrens to the hills beyond, covered with their fine, purple bloom, listening to the friendly wind singing wild, sweet melodies in the little spruces, and drinking in the aroma of the sunned grasses, until darkness flowed over the landscape like a cool, welcome wave."

I've been very focused on visual descriptions, with my color tracking, but the thing that makes LMM so good at painting word pictures is that she engages all the senses beautifully. In this one sentence we have everything but taste, and it serves to fully bring us into Valancy's world.

In a previous read of this book I compared its structure to that of a fairy story where a mortal ventures into fairyland. I still think that's an apt comparison, and that makes Abel's house the halfway point between the two worlds. He has one foot in each realm: his home is located at the entrance to fairyland but his work keeps him tied to the mortal realm.

(Lucy Maud would have been *so good* at magic realism and grounded fantasy. I wish I was better at pastiching her so that I could try my hand at what it might have been.)

I do love Cissy and Valancy's friendship. Cissy is perhaps a touch too angelic, but I understand why. Earlier today I saw yet another contemporary criticism of Les Miserables floating around, where the writer listed off real convicts who had done good deeds and graciously allowed that perhaps LM may not be quite so fanciful as most believed. And LM is a book that spends *so much time* showing you how its two "sinners" (Jean Valjean and Fantine) came to find themselves in their situations. They are both of them very clearly victims of impossible situations. JVJ turns to theft in order to feed literal starving children (who do, in fact, die when he is imprisoned). Fantine is tossed aside by a richer, more powerful man she believed loved her and sacrifices absolutely everything she had to provide for the child he left her with. Victor Hugo spends so, *so* many words explaining them and humanizing them and encouraging us to sympathize with them and pity them, and still the reactions to his book are people going "okay, but he broke the law though."

LMM does not have half a million words to make us feel sympathy for Cissy Gay. She *has* to make Cissy as innocent as she possibly can for her audience to connect with her story. And we know from contemporary reactions that even that was not enough for many readers!

Spoilery OP tags behind the cut...

Valancy gets to sneeze whenever she likes!

Apparently Valancy is good at cooking, so her comment about adding a dash of cayenne to the salad at the last Stirling dinner seems even sharper, like yes she's talking shit but she also knows what she's talking about.

"In the long, wondrous, northern twilights––"

This immediately made me wonder, so I checked: on June 9th in Muskoka, the sun rises at 05:31 and sets at 21:02, so they have a total of 15 hours and 32 minutes of daylight. The nighttime comprises 4 hours and 59 minutes of the different shades of twilight (civil, nautical, and astronomical) and 3 hours and 29 minutes of true night.

For comparison: on June 9th in Helsinki, Finland, the sun rises at 03:58 and sets at 22:41, so a total of 18 hours and 43 minutes of daylight. The nighttime is 5 hours and 17 minutes of twilight, without any true night at all.

(It's almost silly how subjective this daylight stuff is. I know that some people living in northern Finland – or in the northernmost parts of Canada, for that matter – think that we here in southern Finland are weaklings for getting seasonal affective disorder even though here, the sun both rises and sets every single day of the year. On the other hand, I genuinely felt a lil bit distressed at how dark the evenings were when I once visited northern Germany – between Helsinki and Muskoka in the summer daylight graph – in July. Anything's normal once you get used to it, I guess.)

So: Valancy and I are getting a nearly identical amount of long, wondrous, northern twilights in June – they're just situated a bit differently, so that sticking to a regular sleep schedule prevents me from enjoying mine almost completely.

~

Both Cissy and Valancy are doing a bang-up job carpe-ing their diems here. If I was Valancy, I think I would be starting to absolutely lose it about now, both about my own time running out now that I've figured out that life doesn't have to be awful all the time, and about my newfound bestie being at death's door. Not these ladies, though! They're just out there, making each day count, not falling into anxiety attacks about their impending untimely deaths.

Then again, I'm sure having a literal deadline makes it easier for Cissy and Valancy to deepen their friendship. There's too little time for the more typical, glacially paced progression where you first spend weeks or months or even years talking about lighter topics before finally delving into more personal subjects – it's either leveling their friendship up every single day or never getting to experience the sort of deep-heart connection they are both longing to have.

In any case, it's really sweet that Valancy gets to find out that Cissy liked her when they were younger (I don't blame her for not figuring it out earlier, I agree with the tags @bewareofitalics put on my chapter 16 post that said Valancy was so used to being not being liked that she didn't even notice when someone actually liked her), and it's admirable how she dares to be so vulnerable and tell Cissy about her Blue Castle.

~

Translation note:

This rubber plant just can't catch a break.

I love you.