Commentary on Chapter 29 of The Blue Castle
“Before them lay Mistawis, like a scene out of some fairy tale of old time.”
Valancy was forbidden to read novels, but evidently she was not forbidden to read fairy tales or Shakespeare. Which might have been a weird sort of blessing in disguise - her imagination did not get prosaic as she aged.
“Supper was the meal Valancy liked best. The faint laughter of winds was always about them and the colours of Mistawis, imperial and spiritual, under the changing clouds were something that cannot be expressed in mere words. Shadows, too. Clustering in the pines until a wind shook them out and pursued them over Mistawis. They lay all day along the shores, threaded by ferns and wild blossoms. They stole around the headlands in the glow of the sunset, until twilight wove them all into one great web of dusk.”
I like this summer holiday vibe.
“How sweet it was to sit there and do nothing in the beautiful silence, with Barney at the other side of the table, smoking!”
This book almost makes you want to be in a romantic relationship with a man!!
“Music would drift to them alluringly from boats here and there, or from the verandahs on the big house of the millionaire on the biggest island.
“Would you like a house like that, Moonlight?” Barney asked once, waving his hand at it.”
Montgomery is finally starting to lay down some clues about Barney’s second secret identity.
“He had taken to calling her Moonlight, and Valancy loved it.”
This Moonlight nickname thing was also sneered at by the literary critics for being too cheesy and sentimental. I mean, it is cheesy I guess, but I don’t find it particularly unrealistic. People get goofy when they are in love, especially in the first months of a relationship. And I like it, I don’t care.
“Away down at the far end of the lake they got every night a glimpse of a big, continental train rushing through a clearing.”
The pieces are being laid for the climax of the novel…
Also this will be the railway Valancy’s father worked on in his youth in my fanfic Wu’s.
“So many hours a day Barney shut himself up in Bluebeard’s Chamber. Valancy never saw the inside of it. From the smells that filtered through at times she concluded he must be conducting chemical experiments—or counterfeiting money.”
What are those smells though? Ink?
“There is no such thing as freedom on earth,” he said. “Only different kinds of bondages. And comparative bondages. You think you are free now because you’ve escaped from a peculiarly unbearable kind of bondage. But are you? You love me—that’s a bondage.”
I also must say that I observed a tendency in everyone to view Barney simply as a Prince Charming/Giant Teddy Bear/Reward For Valancy. He indeed is quite a decent guy, but I think he is more cynical and “convincing as a man” than we sometimes give him credit for.
“Who said or wrote that ‘the prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is’?” asked Valancy dreamily, clinging to his arm as they climbed up the rock steps.”
It is apparently from a poem of Wordsworth.
“Ah, now you have it,” said Barney. “That’s all the freedom we can hope for—the freedom to choose our prison.”
The central thesis of all romance novels voiced out. And I love it. This book is intelligent.
“But, Moonlight,”—he stopped at the door of the Blue Castle and looked about him—at the glorious lake, the great, shadowy woods, the bonfires, the twinkling lights—“Moonlight, I’m glad to be home again. When I came down through the woods and saw my home lights—mine—gleaming out under the old pines—something I’d never seen before—oh, girl, I was glad—glad!”
I think Montgomery did a good enough job with Barney’s speech. The emphasis on his home being “his”, him calling Valancy simply “girl” - he talks in a masculine manner while still sounding romantic and being dreamy. That’s not always easy to pull off.
