The first time I read The Blue Castle, I didn’t really connect with it, and these chapters were the main thing I remembered from it. It’s still amazing to me that the descriptions of Valancy and Barney’s life on the island make up such a small fraction of the book (7 chapters out of 45).

These chapters still don’t quite work for me. To me, Lucy Maud Montgomery excels at the intersection of the romantic and the ridiculous. This is what makes Anne of Green Gables (and Emily of New Moon, and Emily Climbs) her masterworks. When a moment of exhaltation breaks though petty cares and conflicts (as with Emily’s reconciliation with Ilse in Emily Climbs); when romantic imaginings collide with the mundanity of the real world (so many times for Anne); the transitions amd conflicts between the transcendent and the everyday. One of my favourites is in Emily Climbs, with several trasitions of this kind in sequence: Emily performs in a drama, does excellently, and is in an uplifted mood; she returns home to find her Aunt Ruth has locked her out, and is outraged; she walks back to New Moon, furious amd then uplifted under a beautiful night sky; she has a convsation with Cousin Jimmy, marked by wonderful lines like:

Now, you can't eat doughnuts and remain dramatic. Try it.

Emily slipped from her peak of tragedy to the valley of petulance.

And then she goes back and turns the tables on her Aunt Ruth.

That line – “from the peak of tragedy to the valley of petulance” – encapsulates for me the kind of juxtaposition that LM Montgomery does so well.

The middle chapters of The Blue Castle don’t have that and so, in comparison, they feel like a diet of sugar cubes. And they don’t feel real.

Valancy can have a wonderful life where she can do as she pleases with her time, love nature, enjoy Barney’s companionship – I have no issue with that. But not every day is perfect, even when we are happy. If you sleep out under the stars in Muskoka summers, you will wake up with mosquito bites. Some November and February days will be dreary. Even happy newlyweds occasionally get colds. The Blue Castle may be wish fulfillment, but it is set in the real world, and a few more touches of the real world – scenes where Valancy and Barney are happy together despite little disappointments and mishaps – would make it feel so much more true. Barney’s return in winter when Valancy fears for his life is a moment done right – a night of dramatic terror met by this anticlimax:

Barney hooted.

“After two years of the Klondike did you think a baby storm like this could get me? I spent the night in that old lumber shanty over by Muskoka. A bit cold but snug enough. Little goose! Your eyes look like burnt holes in a blanket. Did you sit up here all night worrying over an old woodsman like me?”

Without this kind of counterpoint, LM Montgomery’s nature descriptions unrelieved by personality and humour fall a little flat to me. It would also be stronger if the chapters were less an overview – if we were allowed to feel Valancy’s fear and actually be unsure if Barney was all right, if we had more individual moments and less a seasonal gloss.

The other thing I’ll say is that it was illuminating to learn that LM Montgomery wrote this book after having a book of nature writing rejected, and put her writings in The Blue Castle under John Foster’s name. Because here’s the thing, they merited rejection. The John Foster quotes are the weakest nature writing in the whole book; and they are too tame and flowery to feel like they authentically come from a lover of untamed wilderness.

It's funny that. Okay, I can laugh bc it's fiction (but I sooo want to give Valancy a hug, nothing worse than looking like a fool) but this story be like: conflict arises in the plot, a conflict which is due to the fact that our heroine is not dying. We will refer to Dr Trent's letter that contains the most devastating news a patient can hear as comforting.

Although, well, a complete hack's writing can be as 'black and steady' as a true expert's.

Valancy, who had spent so many happy wakeful hours of night lying by that window, now paid the price of them all in this one night of misery. 

Oh so that's the reason for those long paragraphs of wakeful hours during winter.

Towards morning Valancy fell into a fitful doze with ridiculous dreams. One of them was of Barney taunting her with having tricked him. In her dream she lost her temper and struck him violently on the head with her rolling-pin. He proved to be made of glass and shivered into splinters all over the floor. She woke with a cry of horror—a gasp of relief—a short laugh over the absurdity of her dream—a miserable sickening recollection of what had happened.

Has she been reading Jane Eyre? 'Tricked into a marriage'.

Valancy knew, as people sometimes know things—inescapably, without being told—that he was not in the house or in Bluebeard’s Chamber either. There was a curious silence in the living-room. 

This is so well written.

So Barney had betaken himself to the wilds. He would not return till night—perhaps not even then.

It's his way of dealing with things but it's not exactly helpful at this time. Face the reality, Barney!

Mechanically she put the Blue Castle in perfect order. Then she put on her hat and coat, locked the door and hid the key in the hollow of the old pine and crossed to the mainland in the motor boat. She was going into Deerwood to see Dr. Trent. She must know.

[amazon]

Sadly, this time there are no illustrations in free sample [*] So I can only judge lose, non-rendered arm of Valanccy, crocked bow tie, uneven buttions... And this Barney looking like twinkified version of a guy from Corpse Bride...

And if you're not fully convinced this is AI: fair. I also needed to just look at this for some time. And research ""illustrator"".

[post on IG]

Yeah. So AI-rtist. There is a recording of showing illustration from another book from this "classics series". Not very... looking like whatever.

As LMM's nature writing turns from summer to fall and winter, I find myself wondering more about the loo situation at the cottage.

Was this ever discussed in TBCBC 2023?

This article gives an approachable introduction to the subject. Some highlights:

As a child growing up in late 20th-century Ontario, I wasn’t aware that the modern bathroom was a fairly new thing. [...] In 1947, the town council of Barrie was still trying to convince some local folks to install indoor plumbing and let go of their outhouses. It was reported that some 205 households in the town depended on an outhouse [...] Another type of privy was the dry earth closet. These could be used outdoors or in, as they were claimed to be fairly free of offensive odours. The dry earth method involved a vault of sifted soil which had more soil added after each use. Again, the contents were periodically removed to the kitchen garden.

While the indoor dry earth closet sounds preferable to an outhouse, and I would love to think of the cottage as having one, in the reading I've done about Muskoka at the time, it seems that having an outhouse would have been the standard arrangement, e.g.:

When a guy is in cottage territory, he tends to treat the whole outdoors as his toilet (gross but true), so I imagine that Barney's outhouse might have been somewhat neglected before Valancy arrived. Once she did arrive and her tidying of the cottage extended to the outhouse, he would have done his part in patching the roof or re-hanging the door or whatever needed to be done. And then in winter he would have been out shoveling early in the mornings to make sure she had a clear path.

So that's all fine.

What gets me is the other standard part of the outhouse arrangement, i.e., the chamberpot for night-time, typically stored under the bed.

Maybe I'm just looking at this from too modern a lens, but sharing a bedroom chamberpot with someone I'm deeply in love with, who only married me out of pity, seems *way* more awkward than whatever sexual relationship Valarney worked out between themselves. And this is Valancy, who grew up in a household of women - no father or brothers.

So, a mini-poll:

I'm dying at this tag - I'll put the rest under a cut, though, so that you don't have to think any further about it.