The chapters where Valancy goes full IDGAF and snarks at her family are my favourite ones in The Blue Castle. It’s absolutely hilarious to see her go off on them. And it highlights an amazing irony – for 29 years Valancy’s been picked at over and over for a few tiny childhood incidents, precisely because she’s always so compliant and so little trouble. If she steps out of line even a little she gets pushed back into it. But when she steps out of line a lot – there’s so many things her family can’t pick just one. Any one of her comments by itself would be something her family would jump on her for and pick at endlessly, but all of them together make any individual one pale in comparison to the whole.
The ‘difficult’ people in the Stirling family get catered to; the compliant ones get browbeaten and sat on. As soon as Valancy becomes ‘difficult’ her family start taking her wishes and reactions into consideration, because there’s now a cost to not doing so.
Some of Valancy’s greatest hits:
“Won’t you try to remember you’re a lady?” she pleaded.
“Oh, if there were only any hope of being able to forget it!” said Valancy wearily.
Mrs. Frederick felt that she had not deserved this from Providence.
“Doss,” he chuckled, “what is the difference between a young girl and an old maid?”
“One is happy and careless and the other is cappy and hairless,” said Valancy. “You have asked that riddle at least fifty times in my recollection, Uncle Ben. Why don’t you hunt up some new riddles if riddle you must? It is such a fatal mistake to try to be funny if you don’t succeed.”
“Aunt Alberta, to save her dinner, plunged into an account of how a dog had bitten her recently. Uncle James, to back her up, asked where the dog had bitten her.
“Just a little below the Catholic church,” said Aunt Alberta.
At that point Valancy laughed. Nobody else laughed. What was there to laugh at?
“Is that a vital part?” asked Valancy.
“What do you mean?” said bewildered Aunt Alberta, and Mrs. Frederick was almost driven to believe that she had served God all her years for naught.”
Innuendo! She’s making innuendo! Pretty tame, but it’s such a change from all the previous chapters!
“Aunt Isabel concluded that it was up to her to suppress Valancy.
“Doss, you are horribly thin,” she said. “You are all corners. Do you ever try to fatten up a little?”
“No.” Valancy was not asking quarter or giving it. “But I can tell you where you’ll find a beauty parlor in Port Lawrence where they can reduce the number of your chins.”
She’s not being any ruder to them than they are to her!
“Oh, but you know we’re all dead,” said Valancy, “the whole Stirling clan. Some of us are buried and some aren’t—yet. That is the only difference.”
Basically laying out the reason behind her behaviour change, though they don’t know it!
“Don’t worry about my stomach, old dear,” said Valancy. “It is all right. I’m going to keep right on eating. It’s so seldom I get the chance of a satisfying meal.”
It was the first time any one had been called “old dear” in Deerwood. The Stirlings thought Valancy had invented the phrase and they were afraid of her from that moment. There was something so uncanny about such an expression. But in poor Mrs. Frederick’s opinion the reference to a satisfying meal was the worst thing Valancy had said yet.
It’s so mean, and her mother deserves it!
“If you mean,” said Valancy passionately, “that Barney Snaith is the father of Cecily Gay’s child, he isn’t. It’s a wicked lie.”
In spite of her indignation Valancy was hugely amused at the expression of the faces around that festal table. She had not seen anything like it since the day, seventeen years ago, when at Cousin Gladys’ thimble party, they discovered that she had got—SOMETHING—in her head at school. Lice in her head! Valancy was done with euphemisms.
Poor Mrs. Frederick was almost in a state of collapse. She had believed—or pretended to believe—that Valancy still supposed that children were found in parsley beds.
“Hush—hush!” implored Cousin Stickles.
“I don’t mean to hush,” said Valancy perversely. “I’ve hush—hushed all my life. I’ll scream if I want to. Don’t make me want to. And stop talking nonsense about Barney Snaith.”
This feels like a turning point – when Valancy’s rebellion turns from anger on her own behalf to anger on someone else’s, and sets up her going to care for Cecily. It starts with her being willing to be frank and unembarassed about the truth.
“When I was a young girl I never thought or spoke about such matters, Doss,” said Aunt Wellington, crushingly.
“But I’m not a young girl,” retorted Valancy, uncrushed. “Aren’t you always rubbing that into me? And you are all evil-minded, senseless gossips. Can’t you leave poor Cissy Gay alone? She’s dying. Whatever she did, God or the Devil has punished her enough for it. You needn’t take a hand, too. ”
The justaposition of “crushingly” and “uncrushed” is so great. Valancy’s realized her family are tedious and loveless and undeserving of her fear, but this is where it turns to a moral opposition and moral condemnation of their cruelty and judgement.
“Doss,” said Uncle James heavily, “the Ten Commandments are fairly up to date still—especially the fifth. Have you forgotten that?”
“No,” said Valancy, “but I thought you had—especially the ninth. Have you ever thought, Uncle James, how dull life would be without the Ten Commandments? It is only when things are forbidden that they become fascinating.”
It’s a great rebuttal, and the one of the core themes of the book – the difference between being polite and being good. Valancy is being impolite for the first time in her life, and she is liberated to be good for the first time, because for the first time she can take a stand. (The fifth commandment is honouring one’s parents; the ninth is a prohibition against slander, which is what Valancy’s family have been doing.)
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