Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

In view of her progressive ideas about education and her openness to alternative medicine and new forms of spirituality, Burnett is surprisingly conservative in her representation of social class. Like the moorland breezes that carry the scent of gorse and heather into the secret garden, Dickon is an ambassador from a simpler, less civilized, and more openly sensual world. His unselfconscious friendliness seems at first to transcend class boundaries. As Mr. Roach, the head gardener, observes, “He’d be at home in Buckingham Palace or at the bottom of a coal mine” (p. 159). But it is only in the enchanted space of the garden that Colin and Mary can meet with Dickon in full equality, and even there, through references to the invalid boy as a king or rajah, we are subtly reminded of Colin’s future position as the owner of Misselthwaite Manor and Dickon’s employer. As the novel progresses, it is Colin who increasingly becomes the main focus of both Mary’s and the narrator’s attention. A true product of the industrial age, Colin goes beyond Dickon’s simple acceptance of the magical healing power of nature, thinking instead of ways to harness and employ it: “I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us—like electricity and horses and steam” (p. 184). Unlike Dickon, who lives in a timeless present, he plans a future as a scientist and athlete in the world beyond Misselthwaite. In the final chapter, Colin, followed by Mary, runs out of the garden and into his father’s arms, leaving Dickon behind.

One of the most striking features of The Secret Garden, and one that lies at the heart of its lasting appeal, is the extraordinary contrast between the psychological realism of the development of the two central characters and the fairy-tale setting in which they appear. While Mary and Colin are convincing and recognizable portraits of spoiled and troubled children, the characters that surround them appear to be drawn from nineteenth-century romance and fantasy. Dickon is a highly idealized figure, at once both a “common moor boy, in patched clothes and with a funny face and a rough, rusty-red head” (p. 80) and a “Yorkshire angel” (p. 146), a version of Pan or the Green Man, complete with his pipe and animal familiars. As much as the roses and the robin, he is a part of the magic of the secret garden. Similarly, his mother, Susan Sowerby, is both an overworked peasant woman and a Pre-Raphaelite Madonna:

Other minor characters, such as Mrs. Medlock, the sour and secretive housekeeper, and Colin’s father, the misanthropic Archibald Craven, would be at home in the Gothic stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The Craven’s family home, Misselthwaite Manor, is furnished with all the requisites of Gothic gloom: tapestry-covered walls, suits of armor, family portraits, hidden corridors, and deserted chambers.

In atmosphere and setting, The Secret Garden owes much to the Victorian romantic novels that Burnett devoured as a child. In particular, the novel has an obvious debt to the writings of the Brontë sisters: Burnett’s friend Ella Hepworth Dixon described it “a sort of children’s Jane Eyre”(Gerzina, p. 262). The secrecy surrounding Colin Craven and his mysterious screams in the night is reminiscent of Bertha Rochester; Archibald Craven is a sexless version of the morose and brooding Edward Rochester; and the plain-featured and fearless orphan Mary Lennox has much in common with Jane Eyre herself Elements from Withering Heights are also present, though heavily sweetened and domesticated. Burnett frequently refers to the Yorkshire wind as “wuthering,” and in Dickon she creates a benign equivalent of the wild, moorland child Heathcliff. By naming a minor character, the local athlete Bob Haworth, after the Yorkshire village in which the sisters were born, Burnett acknowledges and even signals The Secret Garden’s many echoes of the Brontës.

The novel’s Gothic background only serves to emphasize the contrasting realism of the central characters. Colin and Mary stand out from their nineteenth-century setting as two very modern children whose experiences can resonate with and offer reassurance to contemporary readers. Their unattractive but convincing tantrums and selfishness set them apart from the child heroes of Victorian novels, including Burnett’s own Cedric Fauntleroy. While Victorian victims and orphans are typically restored to fortune through the intervention of adult benefactors, the recovery of Colin and Mary, though aided by Susan Sowerby, is brought about by their encounter with another child, Dickon, and their discovery of the magic of the secret garden. Victorian novels for the young promote passivity and obedience, but The Secret Garden assures its readers that even the most unhappy and damaged of children can learn to form healthy friendships and create beauty and order in their lives.

The early chapters of the novel, which was originally titled Mistress Mary, trace the emotional growth of Mary Lennox with the precision of a psychological case study. While her self-absorption and lack of sensitivity to others is plausibly explained by parental neglect coupled with spoiling by her Indian servants, we also learn, in the very first chapter, that Mary is attracted to gardens and gardening—a sign that she is capable of appreciating nature and therefore, in Burnett’s terms, of redemption: “She pretended that she was making a flower-bed, and she stuck big scarlet hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth” (p. 8). After her arrival at Misselthwaite, Mary’s first positive attachment is to a robin. Like many disturbed children, she finds it easier to relate to animals than to other humans. When she meets Ben Weatherstaff, the lonely and ill-tempered gardener, Mary forms her first friendship and begins to learn about herself by seeing her own characteristics mirrored in others. As Weatherstaff points out, “Tha’ an’ me are a good bit alike.... We was wove out of th’ same cloth. We’re neither of us good lookin’ an’ we’re both of us as sour as we look” (p. 35). It is Weatherstaff who provokes Mary’s curiosity about the hidden garden. Just as the old gardener’s grumpiness offers her a mirror of her outward behavior, so the neglected and uncultivated garden reflects the child’s inner life:

With her discovery of the secret garden, Mary is no longer a powerless outsider. From being a secret herself, the child nobody knew, she has become the possessor of a secret: Knowledge of the garden is hers to bestow or to withhold. Unlike any of the previous relationships in her life, her new friendship with Dickon is based not on the dependency of a child on an adult, nor on the tyranny of a spoiled child to a servant, but on a shared secret and a common passion. Cultivating the secret garden with Dickon, Mary loses her contrariness and grows in the self-knowledge and self-confidence that make it possible for her to form other positive relationships. As she later confesses to Colin, “I should have detested you if I had seen you before I saw the robin and Dickon” (p. 146).

Mary’s meeting with her cousin Colin marks the culmination of her emotional development in the novel. Colin is the last in the series of mirrors by which she learns about herself Like Mary, Colin is rejected and hidden, starved of the company of other children and accustomed to ordering servants around. Although Mary refuses to tolerate his tantrums, she understands his isolation and powerlessness and for the first time in her life feels empathy for and desire to help another person. When Mary introduces Colin to Dickon and the secret garden, her own cure is complete, and Colin’s healing begins.

In the final chapters of The Secret Garden, Burnett’s attention shifts from Mary to Colin. Mary assumes a supportive and nurturing role as her cousin develops from a self-pitying invalid into the robust and self-possessed young heir of Misselthwaite. Some feminist critics have seen Colin’s displacement of Mary from the center of the narrative as an indicator of Burnett’s espousal of traditional gender roles. Danielle E. Price, for example, complains that “Mary is forgotten in what becomes a story of father and son, and we remember, if we had ever forgotten, who owns and who will own all the gardens on the estate” (p. 11). An alternative explanation for the story’s change of focus is that Burnett, who often embarked on a novel without knowing exactly where the plot would lead her, became increasingly emotionally involved with Colin as she used the character to invent a happier outcome for the sufferings of her son Lionel.

It is Burnett’s intense involvement and identification with the experiences of her two protagonists that lifts her writing above the formulaic quality of much of her other work and accounts for The Secret Garden’s extraordinary emotional power. Child readers respond instinctively to the author’s evident personal investment in the novel, and they relate to the psychological authenticity of the two main characters. Readers of all ages appreciate Burnett’s success in writing “some happiness into the world” without compromising emotional truth. Like all human joy, the triumphant conclusion of The Secret Garden is shadowed by loss. As Colin and Mary come running out of the garden, we know they are leaving childhood behind. They cannot linger in Eden. The garden has completed its work of healing and renewal, and the children are now ready to grow up. Yet, as we have known all along, the secret garden is as much a symbolic as a physical space. Though Colin and Mary no longer play there, it remains for them, as for Burnett herself, and for generations of readers, a lasting imaginative refuge, a garden of the heart.

 

Jill Muller
was born in England and educated at Mercy College and Columbia University. She currently teaches at Mercy College and Columbia University. She is the author of Gerard
Manley
Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism (Routledge, 2003), in addition to articles on Joyce, Newman, Hopkins, and the medieval women mystics. She also wrote the Introductions to the Barnes & Noble Classics editions of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

W
hen Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor
¹
to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government
²
and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah,
^a
who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib
^b
she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived. The young English governess who came to teach her to read and write disliked her so much that she gave up her place in three months, and when other governesses came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one. So if Mary had not chosen to really want to know how to read books she would never have learned her letters at all.

One frightfully hot morning, when she was about nine years old, she awakened feeling very cross, and she became crosser still when she saw that the servant who stood by her bedside was not her Ayah.

“Why did you come?” she said to the strange woman. “I will not let you stay. Send my Ayah to me.”

The woman looked frightened, but she only stammered that the Ayah could not come and when Mary threw herself into a passion and beat and kicked her, she looked only more frightened and repeated that it was not possible for the Ayah to come to Missie Sahib.

There was something mysterious in the air that morning. Nothing was done in its regular order and several of the native servants seemed missing, while those whom Mary saw slunk or hurried about with ashy and scared faces. But no one would tell her anything and her Ayah did not come. She was actually left alone as the morning went on, and at last she wandered out into the garden and began to play by herself under a tree near the veranda. She pretended that she was making a flower-bed, and she stuck big scarlet hibiscus
^c
blossoms into little heaps of earth, all the time growing more and more angry and muttering to herself the things she would say and the names she would call Saidie when she returned.

“Pig! Pig! Daughter of Pigs!” she said, because to call a native a pig is the worst insult of all.

She was grinding her teeth and saying this over and over again when she heard her mother come out on the veranda with some one. She was with a fair young man and they stood talking together in low strange voices. Mary knew the fair young man who looked like a boy. She had heard that he was a very young officer who had just come from England. The child stared at him, but she stared most at her mother. She always did this when she had a chance to see her, because the Mem Sahib—Mary used to call her that oftener than anything else—was such a tall, slim, pretty person and wore such lovely clothes. Her hair was like curly silk and she had a delicate little nose which seemed to be disdaining things, and she had large laughing eyes. All her clothes were thin and floating, and Mary said they were “full of lace.” They looked fuller of lace than ever this morning, but her eyes were not laughing at all. They were large and scared and lifted imploringly to the fair boy officer’s face.