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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

To be painted by Allan Tierney was all the cachet of beauty a woman could desire. […] Allan Tierney’s eyes lighted up.

Hmm-mm.

“I’ve had a caller,” said Barney the next afternoon, when Valancy had returned from another flower quest.

Side-note - it’s nice that they’re not joined at the hip and go out for their separate tramps around the woods.

“Allan Tierney. He wants to paint you, Moonlight.”

“Me!” Valancy dropped her basket and her arbutus. “You’re laughing at me, Barney.”

“I’m not. That’s what Tierney came for. To ask my permission to paint my wife - as the Spirit of Muskoka, or something like that.”

How did Tierney even find out who Valancy was?? I mean, I know it would’ve been easy enough, but still, he must have had to do a bit of digging.

“Beautiful women,” finished Barney. “Q.E.D., Mistress Barney Snaith is a beautiful woman.”

There is so much triumph in this, like he’s finally managed to get a point across that he’s been trying to prove to her for months. (Another one of my headcanons. You’re welcome.)

“...Oh, I’ve seen her - she’s a stunner - but you’d never catch Allan Tierney wanting to paint her. In the horrible but expressive slang phrase, she keeps all her goods in the shop-window.”

I. LOVE. Barney. Ohmygod. It’s stuff like this that makes him real and not some sort of fictionalised perfect dream-mystery-rescuer-hero-husband thing.

“...Tierney said something about the curve of your cheek as you booked back over your shoulder. You know I’ve often told you it was distracting. And he’s quite batty about your eyes. If I wasn’t absolutely sure it was solely professional - he’s really a crabbed old bachelor, you know - I’d be jealous.”

Hmm, you’d be jealous, huh, Barney? And also hey, here’s another headcanon - Tierney is gay. Whatcha think?

“I couldn’t tell him that. I didn’t know what you wanted.”

Good, good.

“...So even if you had wanted to be painted, Moonlight, your tyrannous husband would not have permitted it.”

Bad, bad. But honestly I think that if Valancy had really really wanted to be painted, Barney would’ve let her.

“Tierney was a bit squiffy.”

Oh Barney, you priceless idiot. I think this was/is the first time I’ve ever seen the word ‘squiffy’ in a book.

Valancy never flinched from the plain word. No ‘passing away’ for her.

Personal anecdote time: I’ve spoken to at least two people who simply cannot understand the word ‘death’. Or ‘died’. I was trying to tell one old lady that my dog had died, and I had to repeat ‘no, she’s died’ six times before I gave up and said ‘she’s passed away’ and she heard me first time.

They didn’t talk much, but Valancy had a curious sense of oneness. She knew that she couldn’t have felt that if he hadn’t liked her.

I know that feeling. Sort of.

“You nice little thing,” said Barney suddenly. “Oh, you nice little thing! Sometimes I feel you’re too nice to be real - that I’m just dreaming you.”

I remember reading this for the first time and immediately picturing it and all the what-ifs-fanfic-potentials in my head.

“Why can’t I die now - this very minute - when I am so happy!” thought Valancy.

Okay, yeah, but girl, imagine if you had just pegged it right there and then. That might’ve really ruined Barney’s day.

But now, sitting here beside Barney, with her hand in his, a sudden realisation came to her.

They were DEFINITELY already holding hands before he said that. Which means they maybe walked through the woods hand-in-hand. Which is way too romantic for this early on a Sunday morning.

“I’d rather be miserable in heaven remembering him than happy forgetting him. And I’ll always remember through all eternity - that he really, really liked me.”

“Barney knew the woods as a book and he taught their lore and craft to Valancy.”

Really subtle as always 💕

“She liked to be out in the rain and she never caught cold.”

I find this quite touching.

“Here they found berries that might have graced the banquets of Lucullus, great ambrosial sweetnesses hanging like rubies to long, rosy stalks.”

I guess he is a Roman general named Lucius Licinius Lucullus?

“They lifted them by the stalk and ate them from it, uncrushed and virgin, tasting each berry by itself with all its wild fragrance ensphered therein.”

The podcast Bonnets at Dawn read sexual imagery into this and I agree.

“When Valancy carried any of these berries home that elusive essence escaped and they became nothing more than the common berries of the market-place—very kitchenly good indeed, but not as they would have been, eaten in their birch dell until her fingers were stained as pink as Aurora’s eyelids.”

This is like what John Foster said about flowers.

“Once or twice night overtook them, too far from their Blue Castle to get back. But Barney made a fragrant bed of bracken and fir boughs and they slept on it dreamlessly, under a ceiling of old spruces with moss hanging from them, while beyond them moonlight and the murmur of pines blended together so that one could hardly tell which was light and which was sound.”

Valarney be doing it in the woods.

“And always, Sundays and weekdays, she was with Barney. Nothing else really mattered. And what a companion he was! How understanding! How jolly! How—how Barney-like! That summed it all up.”

I love how they are friends you know? They are friends first and foremost.

“Valancy had taken some of her two hundred dollars out of the bank and spent it in pretty clothes. She had a little smoke-blue chiffon which she always put on when they spent the evening at home—smoke-blue with touches of silver about it. It was after she began wearing it that Barney began calling her Moonlight.”

Did not Olive have a chiffon dress at the beginning of the book that her mother bragged about?

“Moonlight and blue twilight—that is what you look like in that dress. I like it. It belongs to you. You aren’t exactly pretty, but you have some adorable beauty-spots. Your eyes. And that little kissable dent just between your collar bones. You have the wrist and ankle of an aristocrat. That little head of yours is beautifully shaped. And when you look backward over your shoulder you’re maddening—especially in twilight or moonlight. An elf maiden. A wood sprite. You belong to the woods, Moonlight—you should never be out of them. In spite of your ancestry, there is something wild and remote and untamed about you. And you have such a nice, sweet, throaty, summery voice. Such a nice voice for love-making.”

This is incredibly romantic.

Also yay, they are having sex and Valancy has a sexy sultry voice.

“Shure an’ ye’ve kissed the Blarney Stone,” scoffed Valancy.”

What does this mean, dear Maudience? Not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don’t know?

“Holmes speaks of grief “staining backward” through the pages of life”

Apparently the guy is Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“Valancy found her happiness had stained backward likewise and flooded with rose-colour her whole previous drab existence. She found it hard to believe that she had ever been lonely and unhappy and afraid.

“When death comes, I shall have lived,” thought Valancy. “I shall have had my hour.”

I find this to be very poignant.

“And her dust-pile!

One day Valancy had heaped up the sand in the little island cove in a tremendous cone and stuck a gay little Union Jack on top of it.

“What are you celebrating?” Barney wanted to know.

“I’m just exorcising an old demon,” Valancy told him.”

Would you like to read sth together

-after Blue Castle

-a bit later this year?

Some time ago I saw post on Facebook with another illustrated version of The Blue Castle after the one, I showed you at the beginning of the blog. It's from Latvian edition* from 1998, illustrator was David Bathrurs. Right now I will post only the first one shared in the post, to not spoil anything for first time riders of our book club 👀

[source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/253587391363122/?multi_permalinks=9507376225984146&hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen]

I believe it's from chapter one. The crack on the mirror is on point. And Valancy looks so beautiful with her hair down <3

[edit: it's from chapter 2! I was able to put my hands on ebook haha]

“M-i-r-a-g-e is pronounced mirazh,” said Valancy shortly, picking up her tea and her beans. For the moment she did not care whether Uncle Benjamin cut her out of his will or not. She walked out of the store while Uncle Benjamin stared after her with his mouth open. Then he shook his head.

“Poor Doss is taking it hard,” he said.

Valancy was sorry by the time she reached the next crossing. Why had she lost her patience like that? Uncle Benjamin would be annoyed and would likely tell her mother that Doss had been impertinent—“to me!”—and her mother would lecture her for a week.”

She literally just corrected his pronunciation.

“I’ve held my tongue for twenty years,” thought Valancy. “Why couldn’t I have held it once more?”

Yes, it was just twenty, Valancy reflected, since she had first been twitted with her loverless condition. She remembered the bitter moment perfectly. She was just nine years old and she was standing alone on the school playground while the other little girls of her class were playing a game in which you must be chosen by a boy as his partner before you could play.”

As someone who deep down still feels the wound of my crush at 6 years old “loving” my best friend instead, I feel this.

“Nobody had chosen Valancy—little, pale, black-haired Valancy, with her prim, long-sleeved apron and odd, slanted eyes.”

Again, Valancy is “black-haired” and has “odd, slanted eyes”.

“Oh,” said a pretty little girl to her, “I’m so sorry for you. You haven’t got a beau.”

Valancy had said defiantly, as she continued to say for twenty years, “I don’t want a beau.” But this afternoon Valancy once and for all stopped saying that.

“I’m going to be honest with myself anyhow,” she thought savagely. “Uncle Benjamin’s riddles hurt me because they are true. I do want to be married.”

I just admire the honesty and vulnerability here. Modern fiction, in trying to have strong and admirable heroines, can sometimes neglect this type of honesty.

“I want a house of my own—I want a husband of my own—I want sweet, little fat babies of my own—” Valancy stopped suddenly aghast at her own recklessness. She felt sure that Rev. Dr. Stalling, who passed her at this moment, read her thoughts and disapproved of them thoroughly.”

“Wanting babies” here mostly functions as Valancy daring to admit to herself that she desires to have an active sexual life. That’s why she is ashamed of having thought this in front of the Reverend.

But I wonder how much she actually wants to be a mother too. Should we want her to be a mother? Is she a mother in her Blue Castle?

“Valancy was afraid of Dr. Stalling—had been afraid of him ever since the Sunday, twenty-three years before, when he had first come to St. Albans’.”

How much of her fear is about religious authority in general and how much is it about the man Dr. Stalling himself?

“Valancy had been too late for Sunday School that day and she had gone into the church timidly and sat in their pew. No one else was in the church—nobody except the new rector, Dr. Stalling. Dr. Stalling stood up in front of the choir door, beckoned to her, and said sternly, “Little boy, come up here.”

Valancy had stared around her. There was no little boy—there was no one in all the huge church but herself. This strange man with the blue glasses couldn’t mean her. She was not a boy.

“Little boy,” repeated Dr. Stalling, more sternly still, shaking his forefinger fiercely at her, “come up here at once!”

Valancy arose as if hypnotised and walked up the aisle. She was too terrified to do anything else. What dreadful thing was going to happen to her? What had happened to her? Had she actually turned into a boy?”

Another trauma of Valancy where she is denied “proper” female identity and “feminine beauty”.

The Blue Castle’s beginning is actually one of the most raw depictions of what it feels to be an overlooked woman.

“Valancy sat through the whole service in an agony of dread and was sick for a week afterwards. Nobody knew why—Mrs. Frederick again bemoaned herself of her delicate child.”

A hint that Valancy’s sicknesses might have a psychological root instead of a physiological one.

“Dr. Stalling found out his mistake and laughed over it to Valancy—who did not laugh.”

Raw.

“Valancy tried to read a story, but it made her furious. On every page was a picture of the heroine surrounded by adoring men. And here was she, Valancy Stirling, who could not get a solitary beau!”

Relatable.

“Valancy slammed the magazine shut; she opened Magic of Wings. Her eyes fell on the paragraph that changed her life.

“Fear is the original sin,” wrote John Foster. “Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something. It is a cold, slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading.”

Valancy shut Magic of Wings and stood up. She would go and see Dr. Trent.”

(* And I'm very thankful if you haven't)

Some time ago I saw post on Facebook with another illustrated version of The Blue Castle after the one, I showed you at the beginning of the blog. It's from Latvian edition* from 1998, illustrator was David Bathrurs. Right now I will post only the first one shared in the post, to not spoil anything for first time riders of our book club 👀

[source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/253587391363122/?multi_permalinks=9507376225984146&hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen]

I believe it's from chapter one. The crack on the mirror is on point. And Valancy looks so beautiful with her hair down <3

[edit: it's from chapter 2! I was able to put my hands on ebook haha]

“Valancy could hardly be a changeling at twenty-nine,” said Aunt Wellington satirically.

“She was the oddest-looking baby I ever saw, anyway,” averred Uncle Benjamin. “I said so at the time—you remember, Amelia? I said I had never seen such eyes in a human head.”

“I’m glad I never had any children,” said Cousin Sarah. “If they don’t break your heart in one way they do it in another.”

“Isn’t it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up?” queried Valancy. “Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain. (…)

The universe did not answer but Uncle James did.

“Isn’t there something coming up of late about secondary personalities cropping out? I don’t hold with many of those new-fangled notions, but there may be something in this one. It would account for her incomprehensible conduct.”

“Valancy is so fond of mushrooms,” sighed Cousin Georgiana. “I’m afraid she’ll get poisoned eating toadstools by mistake living up back in the woods.”

(Chapter 27)

I don't think I did the book trope thing right because I don't think any of these are tropes (except for the tuberculosis), but they are all in L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle and they are all amazing (except for the tuberculosis).

And if you want to read it along with some cool people, then join us with the tag #blue castle book club starting May 18th, run by @dustpileofherown.

...mother stepped so lightly and gaily yet that you thought her feet had wings.

...mother had said piteously, fluttering her hands in a way she had which always made Jane think of two little white butterflies

...her face like a rose in the light of the rose-shaded lamp.

Mother's mouth was like a rosebud, small and red

Mother's were just the colour of the sky on a summer morning between the great masses of white clouds.

...touching mother's cheek as mother bent down and kissed her. It was like touching a rose-leaf. And mother's lashes lay on her cheeks like silken fans.

This, combined with her repeatedly trying to keep the peace with the grandmother, shows a woman who is just as much a prisoner as Jane. In fact, the only time we see the mother sticking up to the grandmother in any small measure is for Jane. And often, it's something on this level:

Grandmother's voice implied that Victoria had low tastes and that kitchens were barely respectable. Jane wondered why mother's face flushed so suddenly and why a strange, rebellious look gleamed for a moment in her eyes.

But I respect the hell out of her because no matter how much Jane’s grandmother TRIES to turn her against her own daughter, she never does. She loves Jane dearly, and yes we do see her protective instincts flair up when her mother tries to degrade Jane.

Could she be a better mother if she had just tried harder, stuck up to her own mother a bit more? Try to find some real independence rather than just being a socialite as her mother wants? Yeah, sure. But she seems to suffer an arrested development as much as Jane is, in fact Jane kind of takes after her in that respect I would say and is only able to branch out more once she’s away from that toxic household, become more confident in herself and towards others, more talkative, more assertive, it’s wonderful to see, and it makes sense that her mother only managed to find that bravery once when she was far from home as well.

You are hereby cordially invited to the second Blue Castle Book Club kicking off Monday, May 18th.

We will be continuing to use the tag #Blue Castle Book Club for all posts so feel free to jump in the conversation there!

Here is the official schedule, one chapter per day with weekend breaks to catch up:

May 18-22: Chapters 1-5

May 25-29: Chapters 6-10

June 1-5: Chapters 11-15

June 8-12: Chapters 16-20

June 15-19: Chapters 21-25

June 22-26: Chapters 26-30

June 29-July 3: Chapters 31-35

July 6-10: Chapters 36-40

July 13-17: Chapters 41-45

You can find the full text of the book here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67979/pg67979-images.html