Dichroic Reflections

Ladies of Missalonghi vs. The Blue Castle

I've finally gotten around to reading The Ladies of Missalonghi, by Colleen McCullough, which is widely reputed to be just an Australianized version of my favorite of L.M. Montgomery's books, The Blue Castle (henceforth Ladies and TBC) and I'd have to say that in large part I'd agree with that assessment.

It's true that many of the items the two stories have in common are standard plot devices, some straight out of those penny dreadful romances Missy in Ladies loved: the three maiden women living together, the character who doesn't fit in to a talented or prominent family, the marriage in which one or both people don't fall in love until after they're married (a feature in roughly every other Harlequin-type romance, I think, because it so conveniently legitimizes the sex). But there are so many little correspondances that I don't think they can all be coincidence. Three examples are the heroines of both books both being forced to eat the oatmeal they loathe every morning; the comment, in the exact same words, about how Alicia / Olive "keep all their goods in the shop window", and Barney's / John Smith's always having wanted to own an entire island / valley.

This bewilders me, because if I were reusing a plot so closely, those small details would be exactly the sort of things I would be sure to change. It's been pointed out to me that oatmeal every morning was a common thing in the Scots heritage widespread in both Canada and Australia, and that the "goods in the shop window" phrase wasn't uncommon in the period of both books (1920s-1930s). However, the "shop window" comment is used so much in the same context that I have a hard time believing that. Another possible explanation that has occurred to me is that possibly reusing some of those details may have given McCullough a chance to talk back to LMM, through the device of Una. ("And do you know what happens to goods when you keep them in the window, darling? They fade!") I've certainly had the experience of wanting to talk back to an author and can imagine McCullough might have had a lot of fun with this. It also let her give a strong opinion on the "Did they or didn't they?" perennial quation about Valancy and Barney Snaith. Missy and John Smith emphatically did. (Though I never could imagine why anyone would think Valancy and Barney didn't. She loved him, they were married, and they slept in the same bed. How not? Some LMM fans are a bit too determinedly pure sometimes.)

There are plenty of unique bits in Ladies; the number of other books on the shelf by McCullough shows she has no need to borrow ideas to fill out a book. (I didn't know she'd written about Caesar until I went looking for Ladies. Una is at least an interesting plot device, though she strikes me as a bit odd, and I absolutely fell in love with Missy's mother Drusilla, as her character unfolds through the book. Ladies has a much more explicit feminist message than TBC. In the latter the women in Valancy's family are as unpleasant as the men. In Ladies, the men are uniformly obnoxious, but only some of the women are. I enjoyed the BlueMountains setting (I've been there!) and the
irrepressible Australian bawdiness - everything from Una's comment that Uncle James would probably rather have someone else bite his bum, preferably someone masculine, to John Smith's question when Missy visits the lavatory: "Long visit or short?"

I don't think Ladies has the heart TBC does. TBC can really be viewed as the emergence of truth from a tissue of conventional lies. When I peeked ahead at the ending, it looked like the marriage in Ladies was based on a lie, which I thought it would really poison the book for me. It's not exactly, though; it's just begun on a lie. Still, the lie is never cleared up and John Smith makes it clear that a woman's untruthfulness is one of the unforgiveable sins to him, so that though the book isn't exactly ruined, it's certainly diminished. Missy is nice enough but not as enchanting as Valancy -- Valancy is really a lady, a term not too old-fashioned for Montgomery's characters. While she might try to get her own back at Cousin Olive, she doesn't ever do anything untrue to herself. When Valancy rebels, her first act after leaving a family party early with a few well-chosen words, is to perform an act of kindness, moving in to stay with dying Cissy Gay. When Missy rebels, after leaving a family party early with a few well-chosen words, her first act is to return a dress Alicia had handed down with disdain, after festooning it with cow and pig muck. Valancy falls in love with Barney after getting to know him well at Abel Gay's. Missy falls in love with her idea of John Smith after three brief meetings and a few words.

Ladies isn't quite cotton candy; it's too good for that. But it's not the nourishing comfort food TBC is, either.