Whether we travel to foreign lands or just across the room, we all journey and from our journeying define ourselves.
~ Susan L. Roberson, introduction to Defining Travel
In July 1922, L.M. Montgomery travelled north 130 kilometres from her home in Leaskdale, Ontario, with her husband and two sons, to vacation in Bala, a small community in the Muskoka Lakes region that she initially describes in her journal as “a dear spot.” For her, it has “the flavor of home”; she compares the “roar of its falls” to “the old surge roar of the Atlantic on some windy, dark-gray night on the old north shore.” In Bala, she dreams of building a summer cottage on an island; she sits on a veranda and spends the afternoon “liv[ing] it all out in every detail.” Indeed, in the thirteen days she spends in the Bala area, she finds locations as “lovely as [her] dream-built castle”1 that inspire her to write The Blue Castle, a novel through which, Mary Rubio argues, she “was able to reinforce all the prevailing ideologies [of the domestic romance] which her conventional readers expected while at the same time embedding a counter-text of rebellion for those who were clever enough to read between the lines.” The Blue Castle reflects Montgomery’s experience in the Muskokas and represents, according to Rubio, a “room of Montgomery’s own” in which an ordinary woman – Valancy Stirling – becomes extraordinary as a result of her ability to assert control over her own location.2
The Blue Castle, then, is Montgomery’s adult novel of female empowerment, one that grows out of her exposure to and experiences in a new environment. What was it about this act of travelling, and this particular vacation-spot, that enabled Montgomery to write such a novel? Can contemporary literary tourists visiting Bala today, specifically its museum set up to honour Montgomery and her work, make productive and nuanced connections to this particular story and to Montgomery as an author? I draw on Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinctions between place and space, John Urry’s formulation of the “tourist gaze,” and the theoretical works on tourism of Erik Cohen and Dean MacCannell to argue that Bala offers the possibility for a tourist experience today that links back to Montgomery’s journey to the Muskoka region, relates to the novel this travel inspired, and encompasses contemporary Montgomery-related tourist sites. Critical readings of Montgomery’s experiences and those of her main character, Valancy Stirling, as tourists lead to alternative conceptualizations of the tourist that can – like The Blue Castle itself – both reinforce dominant expectations and undermine them. If visitors to Bala read these entries from Montgomery’s journal and this novel in critical relation to the contemporary “text” of the Bala Museum, their visit to Bala has the potential to enable an integrated reading experience that allows not only access to a recreational experience but also participation in Montgomery’s questioning nature and Valancy’s “Spirit of Muskoka.”3
Montgomery’s love for the Muskoka region is clear from her journal entries for the July 1922 trip. She recognizes a spirit in this region that appeals to her for two reasons: it reminds her of her original home in Prince Edward Island, and it speaks to her as a writer strongly affected by place. Six days after her arrival in the region, Montgomery begins writing in her journal. Rooming at Roselawn, a boarding house in Bala situated on the Muskosh River and run by Miss Toms, while taking meals close by in the home of Mrs Pykes, “a lady cumbered with much serving,” Montgomery describes the area in detail. The “lawn runs down to the river where the bank is fringed by trees. It is beautiful at all times but especially at night when the river silvers under the moon, the lights of the cottages twinkle out in the woods along the opposite bank, bonfires blaze with all the old allure of the camp fire, and music and laughter drift across from the innumerable canoes and launches on the river.”4 In this passage, Montgomery draws on what she knows to re-create and negotiate this location, constructing it in a way that enables her own agency. This agency is exhibited in her ability to determine what is beautiful about the Muskoka region, as she writes about this location on her own terms.
11.1 Montgomery on veranda of Roselawn, Bala
Montgomery’s ability to take control of this location through writing reflects the negotiation of what Tuan would call an unknown “space” to create a “place.” In Space and Time, Tuan posits that “‘space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better.”5 When Montgomery likens the Muskoka bonfires to her own previous knowledge of “the camp fire” and interprets the sights and sounds of the evening on her own terms, she makes it explicit that she feels validated and empowered even by the name “Muskoka! Music – charm – wonder – it suggests them all.” Bala “is a dear spot – somehow I love it,” she states unequivocally. Her only complaint seems to be the “terrible beds.”6 For her, this unknown space quickly becomes a place: she is able to know it, have power and control within it, “endow it with value,”7 and even love it on her own terms because of her ability, in part, to write about her experience in her journal.
In chapter 8, Emily Woster discusses Montgomery’s self-construction in her journals, particularly as these relate to textual annotations in her books. Montgomery’s ability to link Bala to Prince Edward Island, bringing together her stories of the two through her journaling, demonstrates her penchant for a particular type of self-fashioning, which Woster argues is highlighted in this period in Montgomery’s life. Woster observes that Montgomery’s “nostalgia eventually gives way to more direct self-confrontation and self-construction” between 1919 and 1930 as “she more consciously documents her present rather than past through the textual occupations of the moment.” This documentation of the present, however, necessarily involves negotiations of spaces and re-creations of places through her writing, as she brings what she knows together with what she reads to assert power over her locations through further acts of writing. In this period, as Woster observes, Montgomery “reveal[s] a new ‘identity pattern’ in the journal that is informed as much by literature and text as it is by [Montgomery’s] own past.”8
To create this identity pattern, Montgomery maintains control over the value systems in this particular location, as is evident in the ways in which she writes about both the Muskoka region as a place and her relationships within it. For example, in her journal she discusses her continuing relationship with John Mustard, her former high-school teacher, who was vacationing in Muskoka at the same time as Montgomery and her family. Mary Beth Cavert describes Mustard as one who “bored [Montgomery] as a suitor in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan almost 30 years earlier.”9 When Mustard insists on remaining behind with her when the others go fishing, Montgomery admits to feeling “rather disagreeably conscious of the last time [they] were alone together – that evening in the twilight in Eglinton Villa, Prince Albert, when he asked [her] to marry him.” However, neither refers to the past in their present location, and Montgomery retains the control of interpretation when she states that “the world has changed so much since that last time we were alone together that it is rather hard to think it ever happened.” She further asserts her control over the social situation – and their relationship in this new location – by refusing the fleeting urge to discuss the circumstances of the “affair” and also by determining that the reason she “never refer[s] to them – he never refers to them . . . is the same in both cases.” She is adamant that she understands his reasoning and the nature of their ongoing relationship and this enables her to define it, even though Mustard does not utter a word.10
This control of the relationships central to her place in the Muskokas enables Montgomery to dream in ways that were not common in her everyday life. Seemingly spending much of her time alone while on this vacation, she writes that some of her old dreams, which regularly seem “lost” to her in her everyday environment, re-emerge in Bala as “immortal.” She states explicitly, “I find that I can dream even yet in Muskoka.”11 Cavert summarizes Montgomery’s daydream: “On an evening of magic where the river reflected the light from the moon, cottages and flickering bonfires, she imagined a summer cottage and boat dock on a beautiful island. She peopled it with her dearest kindred spirits.” Most importantly, as Cavert points out, “The centerpiece of this dream was talk – the frequent ‘soul-satisfying talk of congenial souls.’ This was a restorative and crucial element to any daydream for Maud Montgomery, for it was the thing she craved the most.”12 Conversation and positive, trusting relationships – and here her imagining of them – emerge as central to Montgomery’s construction of place.
Montgomery revels in asserting what Urry theorizes as the “tourist gaze,” the ability to look at the world in a new light due to “a basic binary division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary.”13 Far from being overwhelmed by her experience of this new location as a tourist, Montgomery draws strength from her time in recollection, stating, the “continuous panorama of lake and river and island made me think of Robert Louis Stevenson’s lines, ‘Where all the ways on every hand / Lead onward into fairyland.’”14 Her ability to dream in this place is, by her own admission, extraordinary. It enables her not only to write about Bala but, ultimately, to imagine it in ways linked to the worlds imagined and created by other writers. In her journals, she demonstrates that she can find the way to her own version of this extraordinary fairyland while daydreaming alone on the porch at Roselawn. She envisions an ideal location, complete with her own island-based cottage. Here, she creates a story and a location filled with furnishings “de luxe” and with detailed relationships between people; in this location, she clearly has a prominent voice. She imagines herself within the place “talk[ing] – the soul-satisfying talk of kindred spirits, asking all the old, unanswered questions, caring not though there were no answers as long as we were all ignorant together.”15 The lack of answers does not denote a lack of control for Montgomery; her voice is clearly empowered here, and her journal writing enables her to control and construct the place of the Muskokas envisioned through her tourist gaze.
There are many kinds of tourists, however, and Cohen’s “Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences” reminds us that people see locations in various ways. Cohen delineates five modes that “span the spectrum between the experience of the tourist as the traveler in pursuit of ‘mere’ pleasure in the strange and novel, to that of the modern pilgrim in quest of meaning at somebody else’s centre.” In this segment of Montgomery’s journal, we see her reaching out to establish what Cohen describes as the “existential mode,” which involves commitment to “an ‘elective’ spiritual centre” and “comes phenomenologically closest to a religious conversion, to ‘switching worlds.’”16 Bala becomes another world for Montgomery, a fairyland where she can write new stories apart from her own realities at the Leaskdale manse. In the Muskokas, she becomes a different kind of tourist than Ewan, the boys, and Mrs Mustard, who – while she is daydreaming on the veranda – have gone fishing. Fishing fits into what Cohen refers to as the “recreational mode,” which occurs when the tourist seeks and attains “the pleasure of entertainment,” or perhaps even the “diversionary mode,” a kind of escape from daily routine “into the forgetfulness of a vacation.”17 Montgomery’s experience involves a more substantial relationship to her location. However, existential tourists can never have full access to worlds other than their own, as even these tourists must return home. They cannot subvert the binary and move to the alternative centre but will live in two worlds: the world of their everyday life, where they follow their practical pursuits, but which for them may often be devoid of deeper meaning; and the world associated with this new centre, to which they will depart on periodical pilgrimages to derive spiritual sustenance.18
Montgomery’s recognition that she cannot live in the worlds she imagines brings her pain. A few days after creating her imagined place filled with kindred spirits, she takes a tour of the area and finds the locations she visits as “lovely as her dream-built castle of last Monday . . . so lovely that it hurts [her].” She knows that she must return home. Back at the manse in Leaskdale, she writes, “The vacation has been – as most vacations are – a compound of pleasures and discomforts. But the pleasures far outweighed the discomforts and we were sorry to come away – then when we got home we were glad to get home. It was so nice to see my own green lawn and maple trees again – my garden, my flowers, my house.” Montgomery takes ownership of her home as a place and prepares to switch back into her role in that world. However, even six years later, when passing through Bala, she expresses her fondness for it: it is “full of pleasant memories . . . I’ve always wanted to go back.”19
At the manse, Montgomery returns to her normal life, but it is the world of the Muskoka region – the dream, the fairyland – that enables her to write The Blue Castle. Rubio posits that when Montgomery returned home, her attempts to finish the novel were initially stymied by Ewan’s unstable mental health and additional upheaval in her domestic routine, but ultimately her “spirits soared and her pen started flying again.” Writing about Valancy’s life in the Muskokas was a “release from her cares and worries,”20 as Montgomery continued to enact Cohen’s “existential mode,” switching between worlds to finish writing The Blue Castle in under a month. In the process, she created a character in Valancy who finds the inner strength to switch worlds, moving beyond her own initial experience as a tourist to re-create and live in a place that Montgomery is only able to visit. When Montgomery finished her revisions of the novel in March 1925, she regretted that the existential vacation it inspired had to come to an end: “I am sorry it is done. It has been for several months a daily escape from a world of intolerable realities.”21 In its completion, The Blue Castle represents the ultimate expression of Urry’s “tourist gaze”: Montgomery’s ordinary life exists in a binary relationship with the extraordinary life of Valancy Stirling. Whereas Valancy elects to put herself and her own dreams at the centre of her chosen home to establish a new place in her “blue castle,” her creator, according to Rubio, “closed off this book [and] resolutely returned, with dignity, to her own personal prison.”22
The Blue Castle was published in 1926, between the second and third books of the semi-autobiographical Emily series, and four years after Montgomery’s visit to the Muskoka region. The story is set in Deerwood, a small, lakeside town that clearly mirrors Bala: Deerwood has many geographical similarities, such as Elm Street, site of the fictional Stirling family home, which remains in Bala today, as well as conservative values akin to those of Bala of the early 1920s. Considered one of Montgomery’s only adult novels, The Blue Castle is also her only work to be set exclusively outside of Prince Edward Island. The story centres on Valancy, a twenty-nine-year-old woman “relegated . . . to hopeless old maidenhood” by her family, the Stirling clan. Valancy feels disempowered because she “had never had a chance to be anything but an old maid. No man had ever desired her.”23 She knows her position within her family – she is well aware of the systems that devalue her, reminded of them daily through her family’s refusal to call her by her name. Instead, they call her “Doss” and relegate her to a secondary position within the family.
Like Montgomery, Valancy seems to find some freedom and sense of empowerment in being alone. However, her family does not permit her to stay alone in her room: “People who wanted to be alone, so Mrs Frederick Stirling and Cousin Stickles believed, could only want to be alone for some sinister purpose.” Her family’s vigilance allows Valancy little reflective time on her own, and she is initially unable to create an empowering “place,” in Tuan’s sense, on her own terms. In fact, “the only thing she liked about her room was that she could be alone there at night to cry if she wanted to.” Within her home, she is “cowed and subdued and overridden and snubbed in real life”; however, she does manage to create an imaginary place that contrasts with her limiting home life. As a result, “Valancy had two homes – the ugly red brick box of a home on Elm Street, and the Blue Castle in Spain. Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies of the fair and unknown land.”24 Valancy is at home in this land as a regular visitor, and her imaginary travels to it clearly reflect Cohen’s “existential mode.” Montgomery writes of Valancy’s ability to make strong connections with “kindred spirits,” mirroring the author’s own experiences; as a result of her relationships with others in this fertile place, Valancy is able to question the norms of the Stirling clan.
Through her writing of Valancy’s constructed dreamland, Montgomery enables Valancy to escape the Stirling home to a diversionary place in which she feels empowered and has control over the value systems. Indeed, Valancy knows the “Stirlings would have died of horror if they had known half the things that Valancy did in her Blue Castle. For one thing, she had quite a few lovers in it.”25 Each night, she travels to Spain, where her negotiation of the binary division between her limiting experiences in her daily life and the extraordinary experiences available in the exotic locale of her imagined Blue Castle reflects Urry’s “tourist gaze.”26 However, the established norms are clearly still present in Valancy’s imagined place: while she has numerous lovers, there is “only ever one at a time,” and she does not “deliberately murder these loves as she out[grows] them. One simply fade[s] away as another [comes].”27
Valancy finds validation for her dreams through reading the books of John Foster, which seem to her to contain “some tantalizing lure of a mystery never revealed – some hint of a great secret just a little further on.”28 Like her Blue Castle, however, the worlds of these books initially enable diversionary tourism at best; on the eve of her thirtieth birthday, they represent only temporary escape. In order to subvert the traditions of the domestic romance, it is not enough for Valancy to imagine or read about new places; indeed, as Rubio argues, for Valancy to create a place that can represent a “room of Montgomery’s own,” she must move from her position as an ordinary woman to an extraordinary one. This transition involves both a challenge to the norms of her home life and a journey to explore the freedom – and face the fear – associated with Tuan’s unknown and unexplored “spaces.”29
As Tuan notes, interactions with locations are complex, and new locations can enable personal growth, provided one takes the time to negotiate them on one’s own terms.30 Valancy takes the opportunity to negotiate her newfound freedom once she has left the Stirling clan behind. Caroline Jones argues in chapter 5 that “freedom leads Valancy into traditional romantic love . . . but the stronger discovery may be Valancy’s own inner mother, willing and able to love, nurture, and accept herself unconditionally.”31 This self-love enables Valancy to move beyond the position offered her within her family home to establish a new role for herself as an empowered woman who can negotiate her location on her own terms. Perhaps this is the ultimate difference between Valancy and Montgomery: in Valancy, Montgomery writes a character who is able to do more than she herself can do in actuality. Valancy creates her own location of empowerment within her marital relationship, collapsing both elements of the tourist gaze to ensure that the once-extraordinary becomes central to her ongoing, ordinary existence as Barney’s wife.
Valancy’s original, traditional family life initially prevents this collapse from occurring. Familial relationships are central to the construction of her place; they limit her behaviour – she should be “decorous and proper and Stirlingish” as a member of the family because, as Abel Gay points out, “They don’t like being sassed back.”32 Indeed, as both Laura Robinson and Holly Pike suggest in their chapters, Valancy’s challenges to the value systems of the conservative Stirlings and accepted gender roles are linked by her family to mental illness and disease.33 At the outset, these challenges represent a limited escape from her family’s control over her. For example, when she defies her family at dinner – “she had merely said the things she had always thought” – she returns to her own room not to cry but to laugh and acknowledge that “dinner had been fun.”34 Although she does not travel far in this instance, she does defy her family’s expectations in a way that reflects Cohen’s most limited mode of tourist experiences: she is in “pursuit of ‘mere’ pleasure in the strange and novel.”35 She is finally able to “laugh at her clan as she has always wanted to laugh” before returning to enjoy time alone in her room on her own terms. It is telling that, at this moment, Valancy begins to look out the window and feel connected to the world beyond her family home, the natural world central to Foster’s books. She feels the “moist, beautiful wind blowing across groves of young-leafed wild trees [as it] touched her face with the caress of a wise, tender, old friend” and acknowledges a connection to “the shadowy, purple-hooded woods around Lake Mistawis.” She continues to find the strength to defy her family, shortly thereafter leaving to “keep house” for Roaring Abel and care for Cissy Gay, asserting to her horrified mother, “I am going to look for my Blue Castle.”36
Much of what occurs in The Blue Castle reflects the tradition of the domestic romance, as Valancy is a relatively young woman – although cast as an “old maid” – who is initially denied agency and the ability to define herself. Her story demonstrates what Nina Baym discusses as central to this genre: “the failure of the world to satisfy either reasonable or unreasonable expectations [which] awakens the heroine to inner possibilities.” As the novel unfolds, Valancy develops as other heroines of domestic romance whom Baym describes, with “a strong conviction of her own worth as a result of which she does ask much from herself. She can meet her own demands and, inevitably, the change in herself has changed the world’s attitude toward her.”37 What occurs, however, is more than a change in attitude; Valancy does not return home to her established life but instead re-creates a new place for herself that moves beyond established norms. In leaving her established place to care for another, she moves beyond Cohen’s “recreational” and “diversionary” modes of tourism toward the “existential”: she commits to an “elective spiritual centre” in her friendships with the socially unacceptable characters of Cissy and Abel and, eventually, in her relationship with the outcast Barney Snaith. In choosing to live with Barney as his wife – even prior to discovering that he is, in fact, the writer John Foster and the creator of the worlds she so admires – she rejects her family’s value systems to create a place of her own in the woods she previously could only glimpse from her bedroom window. Thus, as Rubio argues, Montgomery, through Valancy’s experience, “has validated female experience, given voice to female emotion, and helped remove women from imprisonment within silence and pain.” In enabling Valancy in this way, “Montgomery both works within the traditional literary genre of domestic romance and yet circumvents its restrictive conventions when she critiques her society”; a reader who can read “between the lines” will know that Montgomery is creating room for acknowledging women’s stories that were often unwritten, and unheard, in her time.38 Here is Rubio’s “counter-text of rebellion”: Valancy is able to change society’s attitude towards her and to do so without returning home.
Montgomery creates a new life for Valancy in The Blue Castle, moving beyond her own “existential” tourist experience in the Muskokas to imbed her character in a new world in which Valancy controls her relationships and is able to re-create a sense of Tuan’s “place” that enables her continued agency. Thus, she is able to find her “Blue Castle” and unpack the “mystery” of John Foster’s books and identity. Unlike Montgomery, who must return home to Leaskdale, Valancy is able to build a life on Lake Mistawis. In fact, when she leaves her new home to become a more traditional tourist with Barney, on her “real honeymoon,” she demonstrates best her ongoing ability to negotiate spaces to create places: “Despite the delights before her – ‘the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome’ – the lure of the ageless Nile – glamour of the Riviera – mosque and palace and minaret – she knew perfectly well that no spot or palace or home in the world could ever possess the sorcery of her Blue Castle.”39
Valancy’s actualized Blue Castle is appropriately located in the Muskoka woods, and the pine trees link her imaginary Blue Castle directly to Montgomery’s own Muskoka-based “dream-built castle”: Montgomery’s love of Bala is instinctual because of its similarity to Prince Edward Island and the shared, recognizable “flavor of home – perhaps because of its pines which are plentiful hereabout.”40 This natural location, then, is notable for both its effect on the author and the story she creates in The Blue Castle. In the previous chapter, Pike describes not only the significance of this natural location but also the history and importance of its commodification as a site for personal rejuvenation and empowerment, arguing that “the woods have both a significance of their own and also one that is created by the person who describes them.”41 As I discuss earlier, Montgomery codes her environment and her experience and demonstrates her control over her relationships, transforming unknown spaces into known places into which she can insert her own story as well as that of Valancy as female heroine. In the process, she asserts control over, while participating in, the commodification of the location of Bala through the creation of a novel for her readers’ consumption. Montgomery is clearly aware of the power of storytelling and how stories might enable readers to assert control over places of their own. As Pike discusses, the stories of John Foster enable Valancy to connect with the natural world on the terms of a consumer, and – as such – they become a “remedy that works if the consumer believes in” the stories themselves.42 Thus, the commodification of place through stories directly relates to Valancy’s ability to assert control over her experience, which can be linked to Montgomery’s ability to write about this empowered woman’s experience in the Muskokas in her own time.
How, then, does the story of The Blue Castle function in relation to the world of Bala today? Do the stories of Montgomery, through her journal entries here discussed and The Blue Castle, mediate the continued commodification of the “story” of Montgomery in Bala? Indeed, like the story of the pine-filled woods, the story of Montgomery’s visit to Bala has no significance on its own but is created by those who experience it and seek to make sense of it on their own terms, adapting their own versions of the tourist gaze to negotiate spaces and create their own places on their own terms in the contemporary moment. This experience entails the negotiation of what Lorraine York discusses generally as Montgomery’s “literary celebrity” in relation to Bala. According to York, what Montgomery “has created has become so famous that it has attained celebrity status in its own right and has circulated through various popular cultural channels while keeping Montgomery’s own reflected celebrity alive and thriving.”43 This reflection invites examination of how Montgomery and her stories continue to inform Bala today. A visitor to the small Ontario community will find that “Bala’s Museum” – subtitled “with Memories of Lucy Maud Montgomery” – fits well with York’s discussion of sites centred on this Canadian literary icon and her works, as it conflates the celebrity of the character of Anne with the larger story of Montgomery, Bala, and The Blue Castle. The site is described on a plaque erected in 1993 during Bala’s 125th “founding anniversary”: “Bala midwife Fanny Pike and her husband, Charles, a CPR track walker, built this home in 1909. Originally one room, later additions allowed the house to be run as a tourist home. Its most famous guest was Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, who had meals here with her family. That two week Bala holiday in 1922 was the inspiration for LMM’s book, The Blue Castle, published in 1926.” The museum, privately owned and operated by Jack and Linda Hutton since 1992, was designated an historic site by the Township of Muskoka Lakes Council in April 2013; its website indicates that it “has become known as one of the best LMM museums in all Canada, attracting LMM fans and scholars from all around the world (41 countries so far).”
The Huttons have accumulated a wide collection of Montgomery memorabilia, ranging from photos and written material to a large number of Montgomery’s books, to a vast array of mostly Anne of Green Gables–related souvenirs including dolls, tea sets, and even an ashtray.44 Thus, the museum participates in what Poushali Bhadury calls the “storm of commodification ventures (that are the) generator of a virtual Canadian subindustry” in literary tourism related to Montgomery.45 Like the stories represented in sites highlighting Montgomery – particularly in relation to Anne of Green Gables – which Bhadury discusses, the story of Montgomery in Muskoka is a commodified one in multiple ways. At the site, for $4.99 per person or $16.99 per family, tourists can view this wide assortment of “artifacts,” including the “silver tea set given to LMM as a wedding present in 1911 . . . The basket in which Maud kept her personal correspondence . . . One of the best collection [sic] of her books, including rare and first editions . . . Handwritten excerpts and photos from LMM’s Bala diary . . . The boat that sank under actress Megan Follows in the TV movie ‘Anne of Green Gables’ . . . [and the] Avonlea schoolhouse in miniature.”46
Like the exhibits at the L.M. Montgomery Institute in Prince Edward Island discussed by York, where “bedspreads and lacework share cultural space with the author’s writings, as objects of celebrity devotion,” this disjointed assortment of artifacts provokes the question of what kind of experience is available to a tourist visiting a literary site of this nature.47 How can such sites negotiate the relationship between Montgomery-as-author, Montgomery-as-product, and the books themselves? Certainly, the museum navigates between the “real” and “fictional” in similar ways to those outlined in both Jeanette Lynes’s discussion of “Consumable Avonlea” and Bhadury’s argument that the Green Gables site in Prince Edward Island is a “simulacral space,” a “product of the imagination striving from legitimacy and entrance into the ‘real’ world to satisfy consumer desires.”48 The Bala Museum is perhaps an even more complex simulacrum: it draws on Montgomery’s tourist experience to highlight the legitimacy of the relationship between the author and the Muskokas, yet it offers a tourist experience that links more explicitly to the fictional character of Anne. What is missing from the Bala Museum is not only the older Anne that channels elements of Montgomery herself – and Montgomery in Ontario – but also the less marketable, or at least less marketed, character of Valancy, along with significant reference to The Blue Castle.
The Huttons’ book, Lucy Maud Montgomery and Bala: A Love Story of the North Woods, closes with the following apostrophic address: “In a way, Maud, you have never left Muskoka. As long as people continue to read The Blue Castle, a part of you will always remain here with us in Bala. Thank you for writing such a beautiful book. It continues to speak to us on so many different levels after more than 70 years.”49 The Huttons have travelled across Canada and beyond to bring together items which, for them, represent the “experiential mode” of travel, in which “a tourist seeks meaning from the aesthetic experience of the authenticity of the life of others,”50 namely, Montgomery as author, primarily of the Anne series. As a result, like the fishing trip enjoyed by Ewan, the boys, and Mrs Mustard in 1922, a visit to the Bala Museum encourages an experience that can be classified in Cohen’s “diversionary or recreational modes,” as there are many items present in this house that a Montgomery enthusiast might find of interest. The authenticity of the resulting experience as somehow related to Montgomery in Muskoka, however, is undermined in some ways by the disjointed nature of the narrative here, as Montgomery’s personal belongings sit side-by-side with photocopies of her journals, editions of her books, and countless representations of her characters from books, movies, plays, and other media.
Can Bala’s Museum offer tourism in the “existential mode,” connecting visitors today with the “Spirit of Muskoka” that caused Montgomery to ask questions and to challenge social norms through the story of Valancy Stirling? I would argue that these interrelated stories – of Montgomery, Valancy, and the contemporary tourist – rely, like the stories of John Foster, in their efficacy on the consumer’s belief in them. The Huttons certainly believe, but whether their museum enables tourists to access a meaningful connection to Montgomery and her stories that moves beyond simple entertainment depends, I would suggest, on the nature of the tourist. Despite the passion and commitment with which this museum has been built, the product – the museum – sets up the possibility for Urry’s “tourist gaze” to be enacted: there is a binary relationship between the ordinary world of Bala today and the extraordinary world represented in Bala’s Museum that becomes obvious immediately when the visitor enters the museum and has the opportunity to don costumes like those worn by characters in the Anne of Green Gables television movie (1985), complete with hats with attached “Anne braids.” An “alternative world” is on offer here, and the possibility for entertainment is present; however, the authenticity of links between a tourist’s performance of a Prince Edward Island-based “Anne” in 2015 and Montgomery’s experience of Muskoka in 1922, reflected in The Blue Castle, is questionable.
That said, the contemporary theorist Dean MacCannell links the “authenticity” of tourist sites specifically to their ability to facilitate pedagogy, textualizing a story that educates the nation about its historical past. What validates a site is not the strength of its markers but the possibility of “fixing” them with replication – a site “becomes ‘authentic’ only after the first copy of it is produced.”51 As Bhadury, York, and others discuss in detail, there is no doubt about the fixity and replication of Anne-related memorabilia, and such items are juxtaposed with Muskoka and The Blue Castle through both the Bala Museum website and the Huttons’ book. Thus, one could argue that the emerging story of Montgomery in Muskoka succeeds in its own way despite the disjointed nature of its component parts. MacCannell further argues that contemporary touristic places are produced through a process validated by this commodification. The Bala Museum effectively follows the model that he outlines through the production of postcards and a book, not to mention the large assortment of products available for purchase in the museum gift shop. This process begins “when the site is marked off from similar objects worthy of preservation,” which happened when the site was designated as a local historic site in 2013.52 The second and third phases, “framing and elevation” and “enshrinement,” are highlighted through the ongoing perpetuation of the site as a tourist destination – through signage, tourist brochures, and stories. One could argue that this essay actually participates in the legitimation of this site by not only putting it into a larger academic frame of reference but also reading it alongside other literary tourist destinations. The fourth phase is the mechanical reproduction of the site through further markers, including the postcards already mentioned and the doll house replicas housed within the museum. People can participate in the mechanics of reproduction through re-enactments encouraged on-site, including taking part in a raspberry cordial tea party like that of Anne and Diana in multiple renditions of Anne of Green Gables.53 Such acts of reproduction are followed by MacCannell’s fifth phase: social reproduction, in which “groups, cities, and regions begin to name themselves after famous attractions.”54 This volume’s appendix identifies such reproduction in Ontario; in PEI, the reproduction is even more extensive.
It would appear that this process validates Bala’s Museum precisely as a site labelled “Memories of Lucy Maud Montgomery,” as a disjointed place celebrating a simulacral relationship between and among Bala, Montgomery, and her books. However, as the philosopher Henri Lefebvre argues, disjuncture most accurately reflects the nature of “everyday life”; therefore, Lefebvre searches for a different set of spatial codes from the dominant one that forces things to be encoded separately and systematically. He posits that the “first thing that [an alternative] code would do is recapture the unity of dissociated elements.”55 This code can be established through reading the journals of Montgomery in relation to The Blue Castle and the site of Bala’s Museum. For those whom Rubio might call “clever enough to read between the lines,” this code also enables the creation of an interrelated counter-text reflecting Valancy’s imaginative and empowered “Spirit of Muskoka” and Montgomery’s “soul-satisfying,” questioning nature.56
Visitors to the Bala Museum must actively enact a tourist gaze and participate in creating a place from the dissociated artifacts at this site. This process requires tourists to adopt a critical perspective antithetical to that of the passive museum-goer or recreational tourist; they must decide what they will include or interrogate from the myriad representations of “Maud,” Anne, Montgomery’s novels, and their various manifestations to recreate actively the story of Montgomery in Muskoka. “The Spirit of Muskoka” involves the tourists’ acknowledgment of the power of the imagination and the importance of “fairyland”; there is ample opportunity to question “authenticity” and to place, instead, critical imaginings at the centre of the tourist’s own integrated counter-text, created at the intersection of the stories in Montgomery’s journals, The Blue Castle, and “Bala’s Museum: With Memories of Lucy Maud Montgomery.” Like Valancy, today’s tourist should listen to the voice of “the imp” that questions the nature of place in order to discover the ever-changing, empowering “Spirit of Muskoka” that Montgomery so loved.57