Agency Through Illness: An Analysis of the Blue Castle (1926) by L.M. Montgomery



Author Information

Emma Todd, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, United States

Abstract

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s The Blue Castle (1926) challenges the presumptions about gender, illness, and the male gaze in the late 19th century and early 20th century through the portrayal of her own female protagonist with a terminal illness. In this essay, I will be presenting the tropes of the Femme Fragile and the Victorian Sickroom and investigating how Montgomery uses these tropes to give her female protagonist agency through her illness. I will be using Susan Sontag’s "Illness as Metaphor", Robert Mcruer’s "Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence" and Laura Mulvey’s "Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema" to support my theoretical approach.


Paper Information

Conference: PCAH2026
Stream: Literature/Literary Studies

The full paper is not available for this title


Virtual Presentation


Comments & Feedback

Place a comment using your LinkedIn profile

Comments

Share on activity feed

Powered by WP LinkPress

Share this Research

Posted by James Alexander Gordon