Commentary on Chapter 5 of The Blue Castle
“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.”
“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!”
“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.”
I do agree that fear is at the root of most of the bad things people do. I also enjoy the Christian language here, though I am not a Christian.
turnnoffyourmind
yousharknotpass
dededos
andulkaphoto
origamiaround
