L.M. Montgomery’s fifteen-year sojourn in Leaskdale is framed by two novels – Anne of the Island (1915) and The Blue Castle (1926) – that showcase a houseful of women. In Anne of the Island, Anne rents a house with three other young women and a female housekeeper. Patty’s Place becomes emblematic of what Eve Kornfeld and Susan Jackson call a “feminine utopia.”1 The house belongs to a woman, Miss Patty, highlighting the female ownership and empowerment that is the focus of the novel. The girls are mutually supportive, caring, and playful with one another, thus enabling each other’s success in their university education. However, in the eleven years between the publication of Anne of the Island and The Blue Castle, enough had changed in Montgomery’s life and in Canadian society to alter her representation of girls’ and women’s relationships with one another. Rather than offering playfulness and support, the women with whom The Blue Castle’s Valancy Stirling lives, her mother and Cousin Stickles, are demeaning, emotionally cold, and judgmental. In part because of Canadian society’s shifting attitudes after the First World War, Montgomery’s 1926 novel depicts women’s same-sex relationships as problematic and troublesome. For Valancy, salvation is found only through marriage; she laments her social isolation – “I haven’t even a gift for friendship” – and the narrator points out that Valancy “has never so much as had a girlfriend.”2 Ultimately, the troublesome relationships between women not only reveal the negative impact of these societal changes but also expose the complicity of the reader in desiring the conventional romantic ending. Montgomery shows her readers that they themselves impose unrealistic expectations on the young heroines.
Critics exploring Montgomery’s representation of same-sex friendships and women’s communities have often read them as idealized. Notably, in referring to the world of Anne of Green Gables as a “feminine utopia,” Kornfeld and Jackson write, “Men appear only when they can perform a useful function, and only after it is clear that the women can manage perfectly well on their own.”3 Temma Berg suggests that Montgomery herself was conflicted about female friendships, but in Anne of Green Gables, she “successfully repressed” her misgivings to depict the enduring love between Anne and Diana.4 Marah Gubar persuasively argues that Montgomery’s Anne series postpones the inevitable heterosexual marriage in order to “make room for passionate relationships between women that prove far more romantic than traditional marriages.”5 While I agree wholeheartedly with Gubar, she reads the novels in the order of Anne’s life rather than in the order in which they were written. As I will argue, Montgomery’s attitudes towards women’s friendships changed over the course of her life. Early on, she depicts friendship “as more satisfying to her than love,” in Denyse Yeast’s words; however, her later works construct much more troubled connections between women. Yeast touches on this shift when she contends that “with [her best friend] Frede’s death [in 1919] Montgomery’s writing changed significantly.” Arguing that Montgomery’s writing becomes more subversive, Yeast demonstrates that Montgomery’s works become “more openly rebellious” because she expresses her growing anger at the losses and challenges she faced in her life.6 In the next chapter, Caroline Jones discusses a similar subversive change in Montgomery’s depiction of motherhood as her boys grew and developed.
In order to understand why Montgomery’s representation of female same-sex bonds might have shifted between 1915 and 1926, it is important to ground her novels in their historical context. I have discussed elsewhere how Montgomery’s attitudes towards female friendship and sexuality changed alongside shifting gender roles in postwar Canada.7 Exploring Montgomery’s journal entries that recount her experiences with a female schoolteacher, Isabel Anderson, who obsessively sought her attention in the late 1920s and 1930s, I argue that Montgomery deploys the figure of Isabel in order to heterosexualize herself in the face of a society newly fearful of lesbianism; yet, she does so in such a way as to maintain the centrality of her love for women. Montgomery labelled Isabel a lesbian and expressed a marked horror over Isabel’s desire for her. I argue that Isabel’s gushing attentions are a product of an earlier age – the romantic friendships of the Victoria era – that are no longer acceptable in the Canada of the 1930s. While I focus here primarily on the depictions of friendship and lesbianism in Montgomery’s journals, my hope is that the argument lays the groundwork to explore the changing representation of female friendship in Montgomery’s fiction. From her arrival in Leaskdale in 1911 to her departure in 1926, Montgomery’s time there shows dramatically the pre-war and postwar possibilities for women’s relationships with one another, as Jones also highlights in the next chapter through her examination of changing mother-daughter relationships.
Many historians and literary scholars have explored representations of women’s relationships in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Most well known, Lillian Faderman traces the history of female friendship in Surpassing the Love of Men, pointing out that a fashion for romantic friendship emerged in the eighteenth century and, unlike the early twenty-first century, was rarely regarded as erotic: women friends “embraced and kissed and walked hand in hand, and some even held each other all night in sleep. But unless they were transvestites or considered ‘unwomanly’ in some male’s conception, there was little chance that their relationship would be considered lesbian.”8 This pattern of intense hyperbolic love between women reached its zenith during the nineteenth century when, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues about Victorian America, families encouraged friendships between women in order to discourage “heterosexual leanings” in younger women unready for marriage.9 Women in romantic friendships declared passionate love for each other, as Montgomery demonstrates in Anne of the Island by explaining how Philippa “adores” Anne: “I love you madly, and I’m miserable if I don’t see you every day. You’re different from any girl I ever knew before.”10 Faderman writes, “What the nineteenth century saw as normal . . . [the twentieth] century saw as perverse.”11
Importantly, Faderman links the increasing suspicion of women’s same-sex love with the agitation for women’s rights in the first three decades of the twentieth century, explaining that those “who had vested interests in the old order were happy to believe the medical views of lesbians as neurotic and confused and to believe that women who wanted independence usually were lesbians.”12 Faderman suggests that the spectre of the lesbian operated to frighten women back into traditional marriages and roles and ultimately affected women’s attitudes towards friendship. She points to the widespread theories of the sexologists as playing a large role in shifting the discourse. These medical professionals, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, first determined that women who would not fulfil traditional gender roles were “inverts” and thus ill. This belief placed women’s passionate love for each other under the microscope, determining that such love indicated so-called abnormal desires. Ellis writes: “Among female inverts, there is usually some approximation to the masculine attitude and temperament.”13
A lesser-known sexologist, André Tridon, also expresses the connection between sexologists’ understanding of homosexuality and gender roles: “Homosexualism cannot be understood unless we associate it with a denial of life and all its duties.” He offers a description of a lesbian that can be read as an inverse prescription for what a girl ought to be: “The homosexual girl prefers boys’ games, does not care for sewing or other feminine occupations, is boyish in her disposition, her motions, often in her appearance . . . She shows embarrassment in the presence of other girls. She often falls madly in love with a female teacher or some older woman.”14 In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Faderman argues that the theories of the sexologists “finally came to be to discourage feminism and maintain traditional sex roles by connecting the women’s movement to sexual abnormality.” The cost of attempting to frighten women back into traditional roles was female romantic friendship: “These factors taken together – the concern over the ramifications of women’s increasing independence; the sexologists’ theories which came along at a most convenient time to bolster arguments that a women’s desire for independence meant that she was not really a woman; and the poetry and fiction of the French aesthetes which provided anxiety-provoking images of the sexual possibilities of the love between women – guaranteed that romantic friendship, which had been encouraged by society in the past, would now be seen in a different, and most antisocial, light.”15
Importantly, Montgomery not only had an awareness of the sexologists but also indicates in her journals of 1 March 1930, when she recounts her early communications with Isabel, that she has read their work: “The subject of ‘sex perverts’ has been aired sufficiently of late in certain malodorous works of fiction. I had learned of it in the cleaner medium of medical volumes. There was something in it that nauseated me to my very soul center but I did not think of it as anything that would ever touch my life in any way.” On 2 July 1932, she writes that she has been reading the work of Tridon, whom she mistakenly identifies as “Thedon.”16 While we cannot know for certain if she was aware of these theories in the mid-1920s, the ideas of the sexologists and the discourse of perversion were obviously not new to her in early 1930.
As Faderman provocatively suggests, in the nineteenth century, people tended to overlook the “revolutionary potential of romantic friendship.”17 Similarly highlighting the rebellious possibilities in female friendships, Sharon Marcus writes about twentieth-century England: “Same-sex friendships would come to be defined as antithetical to the family and the married couple.”18 Cameron Duder sees the same pattern occurring in Canada after the turn of the century: “Perhaps not as rapidly colonized by the ideas of the sexologists and Sigmund Freud, Canada was nevertheless party to an increasing obsession with studying, classifying, and controlling sexuality in its many ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ forms. Heterosexual as well as lesbian and bisexual women were subject to the trends that Faderman describes. Expressions of romantic love between women, which previously could have been uttered without condemnation, were, by the 1920s, being viewed with suspicion.”19 As Faderman does, Duder connects the fear of women’s same-sex friendships in Canada with the increase of education for women, of single women, and of women with viable jobs. As well, after years of protests and organized campaigns by suffragettes, Canada extended the vote to all women in 1918, before the United States (1920) and United Kingdom (1928).
Historian Veronica Strong-Boag suggests that the face of Canada rapidly and radically altered for its populace: “Whether it was because of the war, the flapper, or the Great Depression, Canadians only knew that domestic relationships had changed, and too often seemingly for the worse.”20 By the 1920s and 1930s, Strong-Boag reveals, Canadian women faced more overt pressure to marry and marry younger. Sheila L. Cavanagh’s article, “The Heterosexualization of the Ontario Woman Teacher in the Postwar Period,” demonstrates that the marriage bar prohibiting married women from teaching was quickly overturned as society became increasingly concerned with female homosexuality. She explains that “prior to the postwar period, it was possible for economically independent women to opt out of heterosexual and marital relationships with men.”21 Both these historians underscore the degree to which the threat of women’s independence became linked to a fear of homosexuality.
Here it is worth noting that the geographical setting of each novel also reflects a difference in attitude towards women. According to Strong-Boag, PEI and Nova Scotia, the settings of Anne of the Island, maintained more opportunity for women to become economically independent, whereas in Ontario, where The Blue Castle takes place, women married earlier and did not go out to work in the same numbers. Montgomery no doubt encountered a more conservative attitude towards women’s roles when she moved from PEI to Leaskdale, a conservatism bred not only of the historical moment but the geographical locale.
In 1915, then, Anne of the Island’s focus on passionate same-sex friendships, women’s pursuit of higher education, and the postponement of marriage would not necessarily be problematic or threatening. However, by the time The Blue Castle was published in 1926, the world had changed dramatically. For example, unlike Anne and Diana in Anne of Green Gables (1908) losing track of time together in Lover’s Lane, Valancy in The Blue Castle meanders down Lover’s Lane by herself: “It was hard to go there at any time and not find some canoodling couple – or young girls in pairs, arms intertwined, earnestly talking over their secrets. Valancy didn’t know which made her feel more self-conscious and uncomfortable.”22 The kind of friendship that Anne and Diana shared is now discomfiting.
Moreover, in her personal life, Montgomery experienced similar discouraging changes, a theme that recurs throughout the chapters of this book. First, and perhaps most importantly, she had moved to Ontario in 1911 to be a minister’s wife; maintaining a high level of propriety in her life, and her fiction, was of paramount importance. As passionate female friendship gradually becomes suspect in the 1920s, her fiction alters its depiction of it accordingly. On 1 February 1925, she comments on Dr McMechan’s Headwaters of Canadian Literature, in which he writes that her fiction shows the influence of her marrying a minister. She finds this laughable: “My ‘marrying a minister’ had absolutely no influence in any way upon my writings.”23 Despite her protestations, that a contemporary of hers identifies this influence suggests that it is quite likely, as Margaret Steffler similarly suggests in the previous chapter.
Highlighting Montgomery’s difficulties in Magic Island, Elizabeth Waterston explains Montgomery’s “litany of troubles” when she sat down to write The Blue Castle in 1924.24 As other chapters discuss in different contexts, Montgomery had lost her best friend, Frede Campbell, in 1919 in the influenza epidemic; she mourned this death deeply for the rest of her life. In 1924, her husband was mentally ill, the duties of a minister’s wife were overwhelming her, she had an ongoing lawsuit against her former publisher, she had money worries, and her son Chester was proving unmanageable, to name just a few problems. (The next chapter explores more completely the roller coaster of emotion surrounding Montgomery’s experience of motherhood.)
By 1926, then, there was a societal backlash against women which, in addition to her own mounting troubles, clearly affected the content of Montgomery’s fiction. In writing about The Blue Castle, Elizabeth Epperly notes a reversal in the courtship plot from the early Anne books: “Valancy recognizes the chivalry-in-disguise in a moment[,] unlike Anne Shirley, who cannot see Gilbert as anything but a school friend.”25 Indeed, The Blue Castle can be read as a mirror opposite of Anne of the Island. In Anne of the Island, Anne leaves home for university where she lives with three other co-eds and a widow housekeeper in a supportive and lively environment. In The Blue Castle, Valancy is stuck at home with her impossible mother and Cousin Stickles. While both novels centre on courtship and marriage, Anne, declaring that she wants to be a “nice, old maid,”26 rejects five marriage proposals, whereas Valancy, thinking she is going to die of heart disease, proposes to Barney Snaith. While Anne of the Island highlights Anne and her roommates’ hard work and ambition alongside their full daily lives, The Blue Castle demonstrates the utter emptiness of a spinster’s life. The narrator writes about “lonely, undesired, ill-favoured” Valancy: “The moment when a woman realizes that she has nothing to live for – neither love, duty, purpose nor hope – holds for her the bitterness of death.”27 On the surface, then, the backlash against women plays out in Montgomery’s novel about a lonely spinster who needs to find a man in order to have any happiness.
While marriage seems to be the only ambition for women in The Blue Castle, Montgomery’s earlier novel instead highlights women’s educational and literary ambitions. The novel does not sugar-coat the difficulties the girls face in pursuing their dreams, however. Anne tells Gilbert of six women’s responses to her going away to university: “They let me see they thought I was crazy going to Redmond and trying to take a BA, and ever since I’ve been wondering if I am. Mrs Peter Sloane sighed and said she hoped my strength would hold out till I got through . . . Mrs Eben Wright said it must cost an awful lot to put in four years at Redmond . . . Mrs Jasper Bell said she hoped I wouldn’t let college spoil me, as it did some people . . . Mrs Elisha Wright said she understood that Redmond girls . . . were ‘dreadful dressy and stuck-up.’” Gilbert protests, “You are the first Avonlea girl who has ever gone to college; and you know that all pioneers are considered to be afflicted with moonstruck madness.” Philippa’s math professor “detested coeds, and had bitterly opposed their admission to Redmond.” Aunt Jamesina, the girls’ housekeeper, reveals how Canadian society’s attitudes have altered from one generation to the next: “When I was a girl it wasn’t considered lady-like to know anything about Mathematics,” she muses, wondering if times have changed for the better. She adds, “I am not decrying the higher education of women. My daughter is an MA. She can cook, too. But I taught her to cook before I let a college professor teach her Mathematics.”28 Montgomery’s novel first exposes and then overturns the assumption that university education ruins women.
Moreover, Anne’s ambitions are not restricted to education. She wants to be a writer. First, she encounters troubled success with her short story “Averil’s Atonement,” which won the Rollings Reliable Baking Powder contest after Diana revised it slightly. While Anne is dismayed by the product placement in her story and with the filthy lucre attached to the prize, the novel continues to focus on her literary ambitions. When she later publishes a short story in a legitimate magazine and the editor requests more work from her, “literary ambitions budded and sprouted in her brain.”29 In her four years at Redmond, she completes a BA and becomes a successful writer with promise. Not so for Valancy. The only ambition she has is tied up in her Blue Castle in Spain, a reference to her constant daydreams of riches and lovers which enable her to tolerate desperate daily conditions in her ugly home with her ugly room and her unloving relatives. The novel is silent, at best, on higher education for women. The only writer in it is John Foster, the nature writer whom Valancy reads and quotes obsessively. In the world of The Blue Castle, women are no longer capable of studying or writing. While Valancy is still reading, and rebelliously reading against her mother’s will, she does not express larger ambitions. The heroine of Rilla of Ingleside similarly does not share in her mother’s former ambitions: Rilla simply wants to have fun and attract a particular young man. Even Montgomery’s most biographical and ambitious heroine, Emily of the New Moon trilogy, refuses an opportunity to go to New York with a woman as mentor to develop her writing further. Instead, she remains alone in Prince Edward Island until Teddy returns to her. Montgomery’s fiction begins to shut down the possibilities for her young female protagonists.
Through the preponderance of happily unmarried women in one novel and the near absence of them in the other, Montgomery’s two novels demonstrate a shift in the representation of women’s same-sex relationships and underscore how these friendships can lead to women’s potential independence. In Anne of the Island, women help other women, economically as well as emotionally. Not only do the Redmond co-eds rent a house together as a means of cutting expenses, but back in Avonlea, Anne’s adoptive mother, Marilla, is living with widowed Rachel Lynde, also as a practical way to make ends meet. Anne’s first boarding house in Kingsport is run by spinster twins. The house that she and her roommates rent belongs to an old spinster, Patty Spofford, who lives with her unmarried elderly niece, Maria. Tellingly, Miss Patty lowers the rent of the house for the students because she wants them to have it, demonstrating a woman’s economic support for other women. When Anne explains that the girls cannot afford the listed price, the older woman asks her what they can afford. In response to Anne’s figure, Miss Patty nods, “That will do. As I told you it is not strictly necessary that we should let it at all.” Most notably, Anne comes into money when the wealthy and unwed Josephine Barry dies and leaves her $1,000. According to the Bank of Canada inflation calculator, that would be the equivalent of approximately $20,000 CAD in 2015. Anne’s inheritance is strangely never referred to again, but Marilla’s adoptive son, Davy, asks whether Anne needs to marry now that she has money, clearly exposing one of the primary reasons women did so. He explains his question: “When Dorcas Sloane got married last summer she said if she’d had enough money to live on she’d never have been bothered with a man, but even a widower with eight children was better’n living with a sister-in-law.”30 While Anne and her roommates are not in similar desperate straits, Montgomery’s novel still draws attention to the fact that not all women are so lucky.
The Blue Castle no longer depicts unmarried life as a joyous, supportive condition. Valancy is single, as Anne is, but this state is regarded by her clan, and herself, as certain failure. The novel begins with Valancy’s waking up on her birthday morning to the realization that she is “twenty-nine and unsought by any man.” The narrator writes, “Deerwood and the Stirlings had long since relegated Valancy to hopeless old maidenhood.” Unlike the books in the Anne series, The Blue Castle is not populated with unmarried women; Valancy is one of the few and feels the stigma. Widows abound, but they are regarded as superior to unwed women. The narrator explains Valancy’s feeling about Cousin Stickles, who, simply because she “had once been desirable in some man’s eyes” and been married, has the “right to look down on” Valancy.31 Olive, Valancy’s younger and more attractive cousin, is single but obviously marriage material in the clan’s eyes because of her conventional good looks. The only other unmarried women are associated with illness. One is the Miss Sterling, spelled with an “e,” who is the aged spinster dying of heart disease. Valancy, the Miss Stirling, spelled with an “i,” gets the diagnosis letter intended for the other woman. Cissy Gay is another single female; however, Cissy became pregnant out of wedlock and refused to marry her lover when she realized he no longer loved her. The baby died at a year old. She is now shunned by the community of Deerwood and slowly dying. The narrative seemingly punishes Cissy for her refusal to marry.
On the surface, at least, The Blue Castle appears to reinforce the backlash against women’s economic and social independence. The only way out of oppressive circumstances is to marry or face the scorn of the community. Female friendship seems to be out of the question. Valancy’s relationship with her mother and Cousin Stickles is troubled. Both older women attempt to control every aspect of the younger woman’s life, as Gabriella Åhmansson points out: “One of Montgomery’s major aims in The Blue Castle is to expose, mainly through satire, the repressive society in which she herself had grown up . . . in particular the double standards and the ‘stigmatizing and controlling’ of female sexuality that goes with it.”32 Valancy feels that her mother does not love her and is disappointed that she was not a boy.33 Moreover, unlike Anne, Valancy is lamentably friendless.
However, Montgomery’s narrative counters the backlash by its very exposure of Valancy’s utter lack of choice. Her life changes only through random mistakes, such as her receiving the misdiagnosis that she will die shortly. Moreover, Montgomery’s novel shows that Valancy’s life changes because of other single women. Her misdiagnosis is passed to her instead of another spinster, Miss Sterling; the shared single-woman stigma is what causes Valancy to rise up against her controlling family. And, remarkably, her rebellion entails her leaving home to live with the ailing Cissy. When Valancy enters Cissy’s house to look after her, the scene between the two women is touching. Cissy is thrilled to have a friend: “It – would just be like – heaven – to have some one here – like you.” The narrator writes, “Valancy held Cissy close. She was suddenly happy. Here was some one who needed her – some one she could help. She was no longer a superfluity.”34
Not only does Valancy find emotional satisfaction in caring for Cissy but she also finds economic freedom. With her pay, she can purchase whatever clothes she likes, for example, rather than those chosen by her family. In some ways, similar to Anne at Redmond, Valancy manages to look after herself perfectly well before she proposes to Barney. However, she asks Barney to marry her because Cissy has died, and she has no other option but to return to the bosom of the clan. Since she believes she will die shortly, she explains her predicament to him, and he consents to marriage. Once again, however, this scenario highlights Valancy’s utter helplessness. “I can’t go back to Deerwood,” she explains to Barney, “you know what my life was like there.”35 While she admits to loving him, she also confesses that living on his island is part of the reason she wants to marry him. She needs to escape her family. Montgomery’s novel points out how few options uneducated women have in this kind of society. In doing so, her fiction offers up a muted protest against the shift in attitude towards women’s increasing independence that she observed in both small villages such as Leaskdale and larger urban centres such as Toronto.
Montgomery’s The Blue Castle presents a greater challenge to its readers than is first readily apparent, however. While Anne of the Island shows an Anne hesitant to succumb to marriage in the face of finishing her degree and her intense female friendships, The Blue Castle creates a Valancy desperate for marriage because of her economic dependence and loneliness. This may be the acceptable narrative trajectory in 1926, yet Montgomery’s novel disturbs its own ending by making it completely unbelievable. Valancy discovers, of course, that her own husband, Barney Snaith, is not only Bernard Redfern, the son of a wealthy tonic and pill manufacturer, but also John Foster, the nature writer. Valancy’s hopeless world is overturned by random good fortune. When she tries nobly to disengage from the marriage into which she feels she has entered unfairly – after all, she has never been on the brink of death, it turns out – she discovers that Barney loves her, is her favourite writer, and is wealthy. Because of Barney’s wealth, her family finally embraces the couple with pride. Valancy gets it all: love, wealth, intellectual stimulation, familial approbation.
It is worth noting here, as Holly Pike also argues later in this volume, that this novel challenges the received wisdom of the medical profession, the very institution that introduced and promulgated the theories about perversion, sexology, and suspicious female friendships. The rector with a doctorate in divinity, the aptly named Dr Stalling, mistakes Valancy for a boy in her childhood; while Dr Stalling is not a medical doctor, the novel still calls this learned man into question. Valancy does not want to go to the family doctor, Dr Marsh, when she worries about her health later on. Indeed, she imagines that, if Dr Marsh were eventually consulted, she would be sent to specialists who would ultimately be powerless to help her. Instead, she departs from family tradition by visiting Dr Trent, whose massive mistake in diagnosing her is the impetus for the action of the novel. When she explains all that has happened to her clan at the end of the novel, they rejoin, “That’s what comes of going to strange doctors.”36 Add to this mixture of mistaken medics Dr Redfern and his embarrassing yet highly popular tonics, and this novel ridicules not just doctors but the people who desperately want to believe what doctors tell them.
Similarly, readers want to believe the fairy-tale ending of The Blue Castle, and yet this climax calls itself into question. Valancy is about to set off on a European vacation: “She knew perfectly well that no spot or palace or home in the world could ever possess the sorcery of her Blue Castle,” ostensibly referring to Barney’s, and now her, island home. However, from the opening pages onwards, the Blue Castle has had another, more dominant meaning: Valancy’s elaborate fantasies. Surely, the reprobate Barney Snaith is a surprising candidate for Prince Charming. When he appears early on in the novel, “It was very evident that he hadn’t shaved for days, and his hands and arms, bare to the shoulders, were black with grease.” The clan thinks he is “a jailbird” and, exposing their racism, “half Indian.” Barney himself says to Valancy when she proposes, “You don’t know anything about me. I may be a – murderer,” and she later jokes that he has dead wives in his locked room, which she calls Bluebeard’s Chamber. Valancy’s family believes that he is the deadbeat father of Cissy’s baby, but Valancy knows this to be untrue. The words to justify her faith again call attention to Barney’s potential for violence: “A man with such a smile and lips might have murdered or stolen but he could not have betrayed.” The figure of Barney Snaith/John Foster/Bernard Redfern resonates with the possibility of evil-doing and deception. That this novel transforms the reprobate into a prince indicates that the book itself is a Blue Castle fantasy, hence the title. Most old maids would more likely wind up like the other Miss Sterling, a “lonely old soul,” who dies alone in her sleep.37 Montgomery’s novel places the reader in the position of the Stirling clan who might judge spinsterhood harshly and who greedily embrace the turn of events that transforms the unlikely Barney into a prince. The ironic excess of the ending keeps it clearly in the realm of an impossible Blue Castle fantasy.
Moreover, the end of the novel silences Valancy’s voice and restores traditional marriage and family ties, showing what must be given up for the happiest of happy endings. Montgomery’s later novel thus points a finger at readers who crave the heterosexual romance. In the final pages of Anne of the Island, Anne accepts Gilbert after spending three novels evading him. While the narrator explains that, after Gilbert proposes, “Still Anne could not speak,” the last words of the novel are hers.38 This novel maintains a clear focus on Anne’s voice and empowerment. On the other hand, in The Blue Castle after Valancy’s last words, when she asks Barney never to remind her that she proposed to him, two more chapters follow in which she is mute. The penultimate chapter is, intriguingly, an extract from a letter written by a single woman, Valancy’s cousin Olive, who is furious with Valancy’s good fortune. Again, the novel highlights the unbelievable nature of this tale and indicts the readers (and Valancy’s family members) who want to believe that Valancy’s misery can be overturned so easily. Olive writes bitterly about Valancy’s newfound status as the golden child in the family: “And they can’t see that Valancy is just laughing at them all in her sleeve.”39 The Blue Castle certainly seems to be poking fun at the reader who is well satisfied that Valancy has found her prince. Montgomery’s later novel can offer only a quiet protest to the conditions that have altered women’s lives from 1915 to 1926, but her message’s ironic twists suggest it is up to readers to rebel.