I like your reading a lot. It makes sense to me, and also it lets me discard a lot of my irritable grumbling about what the hell Walton was doing with all that. I just could never tell what the whole "is it real?" question was doing. E.g. that moment where Mor thinks, "oh, yes, of course, the aunts are witches." And I was like "paranoid delusion! paranoid delusion!" And then . . . nothing. It was as if that question was supposed to be doing something very important in the book that never materialized.