8

Frances Hodgson Burnett:

The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) takes up the

subjects of orphanhood, illness and the autonomous world of child-
hood, which characterize a number of fictions for girls in the late
Victorian period. The fantasies of female power which the novel
projects so powerfully remain, however, tantalizingly unresolved
as the tensions in the text between authority, gender and social
class gradually become more pronounced, and the achievements of
the heroine correspondingly marginalized. Like The Wide, Wide World
and Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden focuses on the experience
of juvenile isolation and alienation and follows the adaptation of a
young girl to a new and initially disturbing environment. Unlike
earlier texts, however, the moral emphases are subordinated to a
more searching psychological dimension. In its focus on processes
of socialization the story of The Secret Garden follows a regenerative
path, with pervasive images of death and debility transformed to
those of life and energy. From the opening chapters when sickly
Mary Lennox is found abandoned and forgotten in a desolate house
of death, her parents victims of a cholera epidemic, to the final pages
which show Colin Craven, bouncing with health, racing headlong
into his father's arms, the narrative pattern reinforces this polar-
ization of death and life. In addition, through the dramatic spatial
imagery, the dual focus on the enclosed interiors of Misselthwaite
Manor and the open natural exteriors of the gardens and the moors
beyond, the novel produces a paradigm of psychological growth, a
movement from inward-looking self-absorption towards integration
and relational activity.
Burnett wrote The Secret Garden towards the end of her long and
highly successful career as a novelist and dramatist. An English-
woman who had emigrated with her family to the United States at
the age of sixteen, she spent much of her time travelling between
Europe and America, and her own experience of cultural tension is

S. Foster et al., What Katy Read 172

© Shirley Foster and Judy Simons 1995
 The Secret Garden 173

realized in the sense of displacement which permeates much of her

writing. The Secret Garden, written shortly after her naturalization as
an American citizen, recreates both the foreignness and the attrac-
tions of the English country life which she had enjoyed for almost
ten years at Maytham Hall, a large manor house she had rented in
Kent and where her own passion for gardening had flourished.
After the break-up of her second marriage in 1902 and the death of
her first husband in 1906, Burnett had returned to America where
she tried to recreate the harmonious idyll of rural England in her
new home, Plandome, on Long Island, but the repressed unhappi-
ness of recent experiences continued to surface in her writing. The
repeated images of family trauma and boyhood illness in The Secret
Garden, for instance, recall the death of her adolescent son, Lionel,
from tuberculosis. The portrait of Colin Craven, lying pathetically
on a sickbed, suggests consumptive symptoms, while his ultimate
recovery can be read as a projection of her wish fulfilment, and
even as an attempt to assuage her guilt at having spent so much
time away from her children during their formative years. Such a
reading could also help to explain the shift in interest from Mary to
Colin in the final third of the novel, the emphasis on his accom-
plishments, and the triumphant reconciliation between parent and
child in the closing scenes.
Structurally The Secret Garden is relatively simple, following the
fortunes of the ten-year-old Mary after her parents' death when she
is taken from India to live in the Yorkshire mansion of her uncle
and guardian, Archibald Craven. From the time Mary arrives in the
bleak Yorkshire dwelling which is to be her future home, the story
concentrates almost exclusively on this one environment, Missel-
thwaite Manor and its surroundings. With her uncle absent abroad,
mourning the premature death of his young wife ten years earlier,
Mary is left alone at the manor without responsible adult guidance,
servants her only companions. Her story becomes one of discovery,
firstly of a garden, locked for ten years in memory of the dead Mrs
Craven, and secondly of her cousin, Colin, a bedridden child, shut
away in the house from which he never ventures out. The parallel
movements of the restoration of the garden to a flower-filled paradise
and the recovery of Colin to full health form the main narrative
thrust of the book, informing Mary's process of self-discovery as
she becomes the agent of this dual regeneration. She is aided in
these acts of transformation by a young local boy, Dickon, whose
close affiliation with the countryside helps Mary to understand the