27 Stoic Courage and Montgomery's Blue Castle | Philosophy and Literature - Female Empowerment - Bluestocking Society -Women's intellectual history. The Female Stoic Podcast.

Welcome to the Female Stoic podcast.My name is Stephanie Poppins and I am an advocate for literary empowerment.That means I believe the example set by the literary masters can broaden life perspective, create increased self-awareness, and empower us to overcome the obstacles we encounter here in the 21st century.

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By listening and referring what we hear to Stoic philosophy, we can foster a strong sense of self and navigate the world more effectively.This podcast takes the form of both discussions and meditations, and if you like what you hear, you might consider looking me up on my socials where I post empowering videos every day.

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Or you may like my classic audiobooks and original stories available on my website, newworldbooks.uk.Happy listening.

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Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Female Stoic Podcast.Today we are talking about Stoic courage and the Blue Castle, which of course refers to the novel The Blue Castle written by Ellen Montgomery.

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In this episode we will consider the utility of courage in our lives and how to adopt this in order to stay true to our Stoic virtue and so protect our inner peace.As we know, emotional regulation is essential for the protection of our inner peace, and having the courage to take action and face our fears rather than revert to reactivity to outside influences is what the Female Stoic Podcast is all about.

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This podcast's niche is literary empowerment and the pursuit of inner peace through literature and the Stoic philosophy.So welcome to this soothing safe space in which we discuss this.

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Without further ado, let us begin today.The literary master we'll be referring to is Lucy Maude Montgomery and the book The Blue Castle, which features Valancey Sterling, who as a 29 year old woman in the early 1900s, decides to break free from the oppressive constraints, expectations and obligations her ever judging family has laid on her since birth.

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To face the many fears she has in order to realise her dreams.And we must remember this character, as all characters created are to some degree a projection of parts of the author's life experience.

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Whether drawing from their personalities, world views, a complex amalgamation of traits, or even entirely imagined, the characters reflect the author's deeper understanding and exploration of humanity.

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And of course, here it would be remiss of me to neglect the mention of my audiobooks.Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island and The Blue Castle, as well as Montgomery's short stories are all available on Google Play, so take a listen when travelling, working or relaxing.

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OK, so Ellen Montgomery's life was significantly restricted by the social conventions of her era.We know that her personal circumstances her own private struggles with mental health.She had achieved professional success as a writer regardless, but her personal life was often challenging and constrained.

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Women in late Victorian and early 20th century Canada were expected to prioritise marriage, child rearing and home making over professional ambitions, and her family initially viewed writing as an unproductive career.They did not support her aspirations.

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Raised by strict maternal grandparents in a rigid Presbyterian community on Prince Edward Island, Montgomery was heavily influenced by conservative moral codes and social expectations.There was a fear of what people would say.

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She ended a marriage with Ewan MacDonald, an aspiring minister.She was largely unhappy with, but she entered it for security and the perceived necessity of marriage for a woman of her time.She described feeling rebellion and despair on her wedding night.

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She wanted to be free, and the main female protagonist in The Blue Castle reflects this somewhat.Her husband struggled with severe mental illness and depression for many years.

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She became his primary caregiver and worked hard to conceal his condition to protect his career and their family's reputation.This took a significant toll on her own mental health and she battled lifelong depression, mood swings and possibly seasonal affective disorder, which were of course highly stigmatised and poorly understood.

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Over time, she and her husband both developed addictions to the medications they used to manage their conditions, but despite this, she used her imagination and writing as a vital escape, and this is what we see in The Blue Castle.

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So in former children's novels, she was creating characters like Anne Shirley who could express that freedom and courage she often lacked in her own childhood.But The Blue Castle is a novel for adults.She wrote only two, but this one is the one specifically based outside Prince Edward Island.

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So let's have a look at Valency Sterling, the main protagonist.Her journey is one of growth and self discovery.In The Blue Castle, she transforms herself from a timid individual to a courageous and confident woman who defies societal norms.

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So let's have a look at the character of Valencey Sterling.Her stories about breaking free from repression and fear she develops in her somewhat restricted life a place called the Blue Castle in her imagination.

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And this place is where she escapes to when she finds external forces overwhelming her family, her large extended family who put this societal pressure upon her.And this move in the story from fantasy to reality means she takes this fantasy world that she's created and she seeks to reproduce it in reality as a result of a life changing piece of news.

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She's been given a call to action, as it were.And just to tap into the blue stocking element to keep this relevant, we know that Montgomery was aware of the blue stockings as they're mentioned in Anne of the Island.

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When the character in this story, Phil Blake, mentions the concepts of blue stocking shaming and Aunt Jamasina suggests in bygone days, a clever girl would try to hide her intelligence rather than flaunt it.So Montgomery is referring to and is also aware of the social advancements specifically for women in the years preceding the novel she wrote, which is of course reflected in her strong protagonists, not least of all Anne Shirley, who seeks academic advancement to empower herself.

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She very much has a mind of her own, and this is also the case with Valenci Sterling.Although unlike Anne, Shirley, Valencia is approaching her dilemmas from a place of adulthood, She's facing the inevitable.

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The doctor's given her bad news.She has a limited time to live.So this story is more one of personal courage, hence the theme.Today she is battling against the social constraints put upon her by her family, those external forces.

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And she is saying, I choose to take action.I choose to be courageous enough with the time I have left to take action and create a life that I want.And as noted at the beginning of the episode, this very much reflects Montgomery's state of mind.

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And she lives out to Valence's Blue Castle.But she does this by putting pen to paper.Such is the beauty of writing novels.She is displaying this courage to take action and in so doing, she is empowering those children, mothers, daughters, sisters, her audience to take action too.

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But this is not a book about the striving for intellectual fulfilment necessarily.This is the book for facing the inevitable and taking a personal courage, a quiet courage to realise and so support our virtue, our standards, our inner voice that we as Stoics value so highly.

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Going back to the story, fears are consuming Valance's mind.She, as a daughter, is afraid of her mother's sulky fits.She's afraid of offending her Uncle Benjamin.She's afraid of becoming a target for her Aunt Wellington's contempt.

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She's afraid of Aunt Isabel's biting comments, Uncle James's disapproval.She's afraid of offending the whole clan's opinions and prejudices.She's afraid of not keeping up appearances and to say what she really thinks of anything.

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And of course, she's afraid of poverty.In her old age.She can never escape from this overwhelming sense of fear.This is a large clan.This story is based in Ontario, Canada, and it's very much a community that she has around her, but an oppressive community.

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And so this is where the need for stoic resolve is so apparent.She needs to remove herself from the chains of external forces and liberate herself through stoic courage.She goes to the doctor, she has bad news, she has told there's a limited time that she can expect to live, and she decides something needs to change.

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Having the Blue Castle in my imagination is no longer enough.And of course, if we relate that to Stoic philosophy, Marcus Aurelius said it is not death that a man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live.

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So she is at the crossroads and she needs to make a decision.And this is so relevant, this quote.In today's episode, Valancey faces death, but instead she turns 180 to face the time she has remaining.

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With courage and fortitude, she takes a stand and she walks away from her old life.And obviously at this time was unheard of.So she's displaying this quiet, enduring courage.

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She's not slamming doors, she's not making a big scene.She is walking away quietly.She's aligning closely with these stoic principles of integrity, self mastery, and she's focusing on what is within her control.

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These are not grand, reckless gestures, but her mind is fundamentally transformed from timidity, from being overlooked into one who is living authentically or seeking to live authentically and acting rightly despite her fear and societal pressure, which of course aligns with these key aspects of Stoic courage.

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For Stoics, courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it, the will to act rightly regardless.Valance is trapped by a fear of her overbearing judgement or family.But she realises when she believes this diagnosis is terminal, she has nothing left to lose.

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So she decides.She makes a conscious decision.I'm going to stop being afraid.Whatever I do, I am not able to change these external forces in my life, but I can change my approach to myself and how reactive I am to them.

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And of course, this represents the dichotomy of control, what we can control, our own actions and responses and what we cannot, which are of course external events and other people's opinions.So she's shifting her focus from appeasing her family to honouring her own in a citadel, and this allows her to break free.

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So this endurance, this active persistence through adversity leaves everybody behind.But of course, it places her in a dilemma.How will she survive?She's been shunned, but she has a friend that she can go and support and so live with, and that is what she chooses to do, albeit in hardship.

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She's confronted herself and she's working to improve her character, to improve her opportunities and her choices that she has available to her in the time she has left.In one of her journals, Montgomery wrote that she was sorry when she'd finished writing the book.

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I have enjoyed it very much.It seemed like a refuge from the cares and worries of my real world, she said in February 1925.I'm sorry.It's done.It's been for several months.A daily escape from a world of intolerable realities.

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She was writing this book at a time when she herself was extremely worried about her husband's mental illness.She was writing about finding happiness, which was within her control.She had the capacity to move beyond external limitations and choose to focus on something else, and this work on the Blue Castle is said to have helped her postpone her work on the third and last novel in the Emily series.

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So she wrote another childhood series, another series for children, the Emily series, which was very much said to be autobiographical.But she found it very difficult to complete the final book because she felt that Emily was a character closer to her own personality, and writing the final book meant confronting her own life's disappointments, particularly her difficult marriage to you and MacDonald.

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So instead of completing that, she said, I am going to write a novel for adults.She only ever wrote 2, and this was the only adult novel that she wrote, the only novel she wrote that was outside of Prince Edward Island.So this dissatisfaction with the ending that she would have to give Emily, the pressure, the external pressure she felt from her readers to give Emily this traditional happy romantic ending, which of course she did not experience in her own life.

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She removed herself from that until she was ready to deal with it, and she wrote The Blue Castle instead, which in itself is an empowering move.She was quoted as saying.It was painful to have to turn her feisty little alter ego into a creature of bland domesticity.

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And of course we can see elements of this disappointment being addressed in The Blue Castle.Valenci Sterling said.I've had nothing but a second hand existence in the first half of the book.All the great emotions of life have passed me by.

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Have I ever really loved anybody?Then after Cousin Sarah said I'm glad I never had any children.If they don't break your heart in one way, they do it in another, Valenci replied.

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Isn't it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up before it could be broken?It must have felt something splendid that would be worth the pain.So she's willing to take courage and struggle in order here to realise something worth having.

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Which relates well to the quote by epicteters.The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it.So she leaves.But of course, at that time, a loss of 1's position in society was scarcely less threatening than death itself, and the family and friends attempt to bring her back into the fold, as it were.

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But of course, she understands they're only concerned with a veneer of respectability and of what people are saying about her.They're not really concerned about the well-being for herself.This is the prison.Valency has escaped and of course she has no intention of going back.

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It's as though Montgomery is living out her fantasies not in the Blue Castle, but in this novel.So now Valency is free to attend the Church of her choice.The pastor here is notably different from the pastor in her old church.

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He's humble.He has very little status in the community.He lives in a shabby little house quote in an unfashionable street.But he is sincere.She says Old Mr. Towers believes exactly what he preached.And somehow it made a tremendous difference.

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So there's that juxtaposition here between the insincere and then sincere humility, on the one hand, that she's now choosing a more humble existence and the societal expectation and a family that is consumed with how they appear, which is of course the very opposite.

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So let's have a look at stoic courage and how we can implement this into our lives.Stoic courage is the inner strength to face life's challenges, fears and discomfort by acting rationally and virtuously even when we are afraid, focusing on what's within our control rather than external forces.

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Doing the right thing despite fear.Enduring hardship, making tough decisions and pursuing personal growth.Embodying the Stoic principles of wisdom, justice, temperance and Stoic fortitude.

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Those principles valued by the Blue Stocking Group.We are acting despite fear.We are not suppressing the fear, but we are willing to act rightly whilst feeling the fear.

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We see difficulties as opportunities to build resilience, to live authentically.We seek to uphold wisdom and justice even when it costs us, and we embrace our capacity to persist through suffering and adversity.

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We know we need to do what needs to be done, and we understand that true harm is coming from within, not from external events or people.We understand we have the power to change the way we react to external events or people, and this leads to our journal task for the day.

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So we're thinking about managing emotions, confronting eternal weaknesses, choosing reason over panic in all situations.We are remembering, as Marcus Aurelius tells us, we have power over our mind, not outside events.

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So if we realise this, we will have strength.I would like you to reflect on a time you were at a crossroads in your life where you were faced with a yes or no, go or stay, give or take.

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And as with all reflective exercises, this task is about documenting in order to come back to it and gain knowledge from that at a later stage.So pour out those thoughts, dump down those memories so that you can go back to them and consider just how quietly courageous you have been in your life or you could be in your life moving forwards, and whether you can learn anything from your actions of the past.

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As I said in a previous episode about Virginia Woolf and her journaling style, where she wrote rapidly for short bursts, maybe 15 or 20 minutes, and allowed thoughts to flow without hesitation, believing it loosened the ligaments and tapped the unconscious.

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This is what we are going to practice here today.And of course, don't forget to take some time to tap into my audio books and listen to the stories we're learning from because this is literary empowerment.

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Thanks for coming, and I'll see you next time.Bye.Hey Stephanie here, thank you for listening to the Female Stoic podcast.

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It is an honour and I just want to say I really appreciate you being here.It's amazing the power of women in literature and the stoic messages they have to share.Please, if you can, return the favour by spreading their words and sharing this podcast far and wide so more of us can benefit from their wisdom.

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And don't forget to leave a review if you like what you've heard.See you next time.