asymphonyofstarlight - Tumblr blog

asymphonyofstarlight · 8 days ago

Note

just reread the curious case of walter blythe................ i trust you with my blorboy. any other thoughts on him?

(referring to this post - highly recommend digging into the reblogs as well because there was a lot of interesting discussion!)

Thoughts on Walter Blythe? Do I have thoughts on Walter Blythe? My home-boy, my rotten soldier, my sweet cheese, my good-time boy? He's hard to analyze because the tears make it difficult to see the screen to type, but I will assuredly try my best.

Gah, it's hard to know even where to begin with Walter. Walter is difficult to poke at it in one sense, because (as I read somewhere once), he's more of an emblem than an actual character. He repeatedly represents WWI in the text, and WWI's impact on his generation. Like Emily, he seems to have a connection to a "second sight" of sorts, but unlike Emily, this isn't in your local neighborhood witch way - it's in a 'terminal and aware of it' way (to borrow the phrase from gogandmagog). Both Rainbow Valley and Ingleside mark him for death; a rather abrupt shift from the sunny childhood tone of the novels. What's more, this sometimes comes from Walter himself. In Rainbow Valley, he's the one to say they'll follow the Pied Piper, while also being the one to sense the horror flickering underneath the idea. In Ingleside, we have the shadow of his cross over his bed, breaking the placement of the story for a moment; it pops forward to a future Anne, looking back and wondering if that were an omen in her grief (a chilling vignette in an otherwise idyllic, literal 'tucking children into bed' scene). Then, of course, there's this poppy passage I'll never stop thinking about:

"Look at that wave of poppies breaking against the garden wall, Miss Cornelia. Susan and I are very proud of our poppies this year, though we hadn't a single thing to do with them. Walter spilt a packet of seed there by accident in the spring and this is the result. Every year we have some delightful surprise like that." "I'm partial to poppies," said Miss Cornelia, "though they don't last long." "They have only a day to live," admitted Anne, "but how imperially, how gorgeous they live it! Isn't that better than being a stiff horrible zinnia that lasts practically for ever?"

As posted before, it's a subtle foreshadowing of Walter's short life, while also referencing his fate - poppies are its enduring symbol of WWI.

So, in the midst of this repeated foreshadowings, we have actual child Walter. Extremely sensitive, bullied, a misfit, a misfit to the point that he doesn't even look like his family (a hop out of kin, as the book says), and someone who is ruled by fear yet has a iron moral backbone. He hates violence in all forms, and yet can savagely beat another child when called for. He's implied to have a gift for poetry that's exceptional, the same gift that leads to derision and confusion from everyone around him. He's asexual in the text, as the article I cite in the original post would say, never displaying an interest in women (besides one person suspecting he liked Faith) in a way unlike every other LM Montgomery hero. He's very earnest - see this passage from Ingleside, which is probably one of my favorites from LM Montgomery, just look at our helpful boy:

"Did you hear what happened to Big Jim MacAllister last Saturday night in Milt Cooper's store at the Harbour Head?" asked Mrs. Simon, thinking it time somebody introduced a more cheerful topic than ghosts and jiltings. "He had got into the habit of setting on the stove all summer. But Saturday night was cold and Milt had lit a fire. So when poor Big Jim sat down...well, he scorched his..." Mrs. Simon would not say what he had scorched but she patted a portion of her anatomy silently. "His bottom," said Walter gravely, poking his head through the creeper screen. He honestly thought that Mrs. Simon could not remember the right word. An appalled silence descended on the quilters. Had Walter Blythe been there all the time?

Then we have adult Walter, whose character focus has been tightened to the war entirely. Walter's arc as an adult is facing his fear of violence, but also, of himself - of not being good enough. Walter has been looked down his entire life for who he is, including by his loved ones (both Gilbert and Susan imply or explicitly state disapproval of Walter at different points, although Gilbert's is very understandable in context). Wrapped into this has to be the self-knowledge of what he was like fighting Dan Reese, and knowing that he'll be expected-encouraged-required to tap into that part of himself. It's a pressure cooker situation, with societal pressure, moral pressure, moral censure, and self-censure all thudding down on him at once.

And Walter goes, and Walter dies. His arc as the "other" is complete; his poem and letter to Rilla speak to a hope for the future; he even sees his death as a mercy, because he couldn't have lived after the things that he'd seen. Jem will come back to work as a surgeon and marry Nan; Nan will wed Jerry; Rilla be a mother and wife to Ken -- Walter will forever be "Somewhere in France."

A grim ending, but LM Montgomery is deliberate in highlighting its hope. Walter writes of the poets of the future, and his death is understood to be both a pointless tragedy and a necessary, noble sacrifice.

What interests me is how this changes in the TBAQ. This book...it's raw. It's just raw. There are notably moments when the importance of Walter's death is emphasized, and this importance is intertwined with a steady hope - see the following line from Gilbert...

...but repeatedly, it's raw grief. Walter's siblings rarely refer to him dying; instead, they describe it unsteadily as "when he went away." Anne especially - the main character of the series, a cultural cornerstone synonymous with optimism and joy - is a far cry from how we've seen her before. It's repeatedly mentioned that Anne has not been the same since Walter's death, and whenever we hear Anne speak after the war in this book, it's almost always--if not always--something downcast and hopeless. It's her children and her husband who are the ones trying to comfort and find meaning; Anne herself is broken. The book reflects the themes of Walter's arc in Rilla - his noble sacrifice, the violence of his passing, its inevitability as deemed by the text - but it is also a blunt, uncushioned statement that Walter's death left a wound that will never be healed. Unlike with other major character deaths in the Anne series - Matthew, Joyce, eventually Marilla - there is no acceptance here. Anne of Ingleside mentions how Anne still mourns Joyce, but that's one beat of many in her life filled with babies and laughter. Here, Anne's grief is the only one. Everything we learn about her in this book indicates that Anne is not okay, and will never be okay again. It's a picture of a woman so deeply sunken in her grief it becomes her primary characteristic. She finishes Walter's unfinished poems, she reads them aloud to her family, she is disconsolate in every paragraph, and the book ends with her finding a poem of Walter's he wrote on the front where he imagines viciously bayonetting a teen soldier to death, resulting in her saying she was happy Walter had never come back.

I'm getting offtrack from the subject of Walter here, but the point of these very rambling paragraphs is that Walter's inherent textual purpose is to illustrate the horrors of WWI. Normally, LM Montgomery's strength lies in the slice of life approach that deftly handles the reality of life's bittersweetness. With Walter's fate, it's just bitter. There's no uplifting message, or character growth--the characters are crushed (at least in TBAQ, vs in Rilla, where its tied to the defeat of evil and Rilla's arc as mentioned above).

This inherent purpose is impossible to separate from Walter, or at least very difficult [trust me, as someone who is writing a fanfic on a no wwi walter]. What would a Walter who survived WWI been like? Would he have been transformed into a darker version of Dean Priest? What about a Walter who never went to war at all? Would he have married Una? Would he have married at all? Was part of his tragedy realizing the reality of romance (ala Anne in Anne of Avonlea) too late, quite literally the night of his death? How would that play out if he had survived? If WWI had never happened at all? Would he have been a famous poet? Or was this only achievable through war and his Piper poem? WWI is the fabric of Walter's character, and so answering these questions - while definitely possible and reasonable - can turn into a bit of a guessing game. The implication in Walter's tragedy - in this sense, tragedy meaning what he himself lost with his death - is that he never achieved his dream of being a poet, and he never married Una/didn't see her until it was too late. This provides us with the implication of what his life would have been like if he had survived, but the war also serves as his mechanism for achieving them. Walter becomes a famous poet because of the war, and realizes his [??????] for Una only once he realizes his death is inevitable.

Then, as seen in the post you brought up, Walter's intended character arc inadvertently doubles as an unintended character arc of his sexuality. A lot of Walter's "terminal and aware of it" characteristics double as signals for the potential truth of his sexual identity. I think this is seen most sharply in the short story from TBAQ where Patrick, also unlike other boys, also censured by society, says he loves Walter with all his heart - meant to pair them due to their brushes with death, but the secondary reading here is inescapable.

This post has become a sprawling behemoth, but it visually demonstrates my overall point: I think Walter Blythe is one of the richest and most complex characters LM Montgomery wrote. It's fun to tease out the other characters' beliefs and habits and depth, but Walter is a universe of implication and tragedy. There are endless questions to be asked here: what did Gilbert think of Walter, as almost polar opposites? How did their relationship change as Walter grew into a man? What about Walter's nephew, who is said to also love poetry? What sort of relationship would they have had if Walter had survived? How do you grow up dealing with censure from all sides? How do you grow up dealing with censure from all sides, and with a popular and well-liked older brother who is everything you are not? The war serves as a christening of Walter's courage and therefore his masculinity - how would Walter's struggles with his perceived masculinity have played out had the war never happened? Would it have taken international success for him to gain respect? What if he never did? How would Walter's capacity for savage violence have played a role in his life, if it all? Why is Walter so capable of savage violence compared to his siblings? If Walter had survived, would this part of him become more prominent? On the flip side, Walter is extremely sensitive to ugliness and violence - how would this impact his life if the war had never happened, because life inevitably brings this everyone's way?

Most importantly of all, can Walter as an emblem be separated from the thing he is the emblem of? What do you do with a symbol that loses its meaning?

In the end, Walter's character has the unavoidable tension of a tragic figure for the reader. His story compels us because of its end, and yet wanting to change the end is what compels us. Separating Walter Blythe from his death in the text is nearly impossible- but also irresistible.

#rb to save #walter blythe #op your MIND #roi #feeling insane.#“what do you do with a symbol that loses its meaning?”

37 notes · View notes