1. This is a book I had never heard of, much less read, until I began to teach children's literature. I discovered then that this is one of the "canonized" texts in children's literature, a book that has touched generations of readers as the back cover of my Dell edition notes. This blurb speaks of "readers," not "female readers," but I suspect that one reason I did not hear about this book when I was young was that I was a boy. The Secret Garden is thought of as that obsolescent phenomenon, the "girl's book." As I sit here tonight, however, in my blue funk I choose to think of this book as a very bad "boy's book."
2. Why a boy's book when the book is so clearly about the change in a little girl, a change that is so powerful that she--the little girl who changes--can effect a change in others around her? That's just it. Mary changes, but in doing so she changes for the worse. She becomes a docile and meek young thing ready and willing to recede into the background and allow that priggish young fellow Colin to take over, to take all the credit for life in the garden, to take authority unto himself. As the book moves along, the character who was front and center at the beginning, Mary, moves into the background as boys emerge as the dominant characters. First we have Dickon, a goody-goody cross between George MacDonald's Curdie (and perhaps Thomas Day's Harry Sandford from Sandford and Merton) and Kenneth Grahame's Great God Pan. Here is the boy of the moors, friendly with animals and wise in the ways of nature--a kind of northern Tarzan who takes Mary as his special project for protection and teaching.
3. Mary tries throughout the novel to find space for herself. She has from her early days in India been drawn to attempt garden-making. This is clearly an indication of her need for a place of her own--what Virginia Woolf later will articulate in A Room of One's Own. Mary feels the need of a place of her own, a place she can claim as herself, not a place in which she is diminished by the presence of another or the presence of a mother. Never having been mothered, at least reassuringly, Mary's desire is to be a mother, to nurture something even if this something is a few plants in a pitifully small garden. A girl's fate, however, is to occupy someone else's place. A mother's role is to be displaced. In England, Mary finds a garden and begins to claim it as her own. This garden once belonged to another mother who found her place of beauty and fulfillment to be a place of death. As I indicated above, however, Mary cannot claim this place without the assistance of Dickon (remember Lilias Craven required the assistance of Ben Weatherstaff) who quickly fills the garden with his charges: fox, crow, squirrel, etc. Still Mary perseveres; she accepts her place beside the male.
4. Meanwhile, Mary tries to emerge from the shadow of this boy wonder by snooping about the house--a place she tries to claim as her own since Dickon has no presence here. Houses and females have always gone together, although often the house closes so closely around the woman (cf. Alice in the White Rabbit's house) that hysteria results. The woman becomes confined to some region of the house where she can rail to her heart's discontent (vide Jane Eyre and the madwoman in the attic). Here, in The Secret Garden, the madwoman in the distant part of the great house turns out to be a sickly male. On one of her snoops, Mary discovers Colin and he will eventually and effectively complete the displacement of Mary from her place in the book, in the garden, and in the world.
5. As the book progresses, Colin becomes more and more assertive. I know, I know--he has always been assertive, but I mean to say that he becomes less petulantly assertive and more acceptably assertive. Of course, I mean "acceptably" in terms of the novel's sense of value. He remains to the last, for me, a prig of the highest order. But I think the book sanctions his sanctimonious and self-righteous self projection. Look at his lecture to the assembled in chapter 23, "Magic." Something began "making things out of nothing," he begins. This made him "curious," he says. "Scientific people are always curious." Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would have it. First note the confusion of categories: in a chapter entitled "magic" we have reference to the curiosity of scientific people. What arouses this curiosity is a totally unscientific assumption: that something began making things out of nothing. Only god makes something out of nothing, and we know that Burnett's story has a spiritual significance. But what is going on here is a sanctioning of masculine reason, rational inquiry, scientific thought in the guise of irrational, feminine mystery. Burnett wants to promote a "feminine" message, but she does so by adopting a masculine discourse. Colin will improve his physical health through small "experiments." Colin also becomes High Priest leading his little congregation in incantation. Scientific or Spiritual leader--Colin emerges as the dominant figure in the book. He is given to lecturing in the garden, and the best thing about lecturing, as Ben Weatherstaff says, is that "a chap can get up an' say aught he pleases an' no other chap can answer him back." The final words of the book are "Master Colin."
6. What I can't figure is why Burnett allows Mary to drift to the background. Mary has brought the transformation in the garden and in Colin about. Now she retreats to silence. Perhaps an analogue here is Mrs. Sowerby whose name always reminds me of a sow as well as a sower. She is fertility personified. She is a nurterer, a role Mary willingly takes on: note that Mary is ready to allow Colin to eat her share of food so the adults in the house won't know he is getting healthy. Susan Sowerby is also much in the background. She enters the garden as something of a Virgin Mary figure, and Colin's eyes "quite devoured her face" (275). She is, he says, "just what I wanted." He wishes she were his mother too. Boys need mothers, but for their own desires to be fulfilled. In other words, males need females to fill their desires, to give them a sense of their importance; girls accept this role of nurturer. A girl's desire is deemed to differ from a boy's. Whereas Colin desires the gratification of being master, Mary can only be mistress in the sense of helpmate. To be mistress in the sense of proprietor is to be contrary. Mistress Mary is quite contrary as long as she desires her own garden; once she relinquishes this desire and accepts a place in a dominant male's garden she is no longer contrary.
7. So what to conclude. I don't really like what goes on in this book, although I have always taught it and written about it with appreciation. My sense of the book's structure of images has always carried me through a typical "male" reading of the book, one in which I as reader dominate the interpretive activity. It has been my practice to read the book as typical of nineteenth-century fantasies for children which sees the child as a Romantic type, pure and unsullied, representative of imaginative and humane values, wiser than adults, closer to nature than adults, a reminder of pastoral's critique of urban and only apparently civilized life. The Romantic myth, however, is one perpetuated by the likes of Colin to maintain an unquestioning positioning of traditional hierarchies, especially hierarchies of gender. Yes, I still think of the book as a fine introduction to literary symbol (tree, garden, bird, key, nature, animals, child, wise old woman, sea, house, wind, laughter) and romance for the young reader, but I am now more willing to question the implicit positioning of both the subjects within the book and the subject who reads the book.
8. To conclude on this latter point, I wonder who is the ideal reader of this book: the young girl or the young boy? Will girls learn to accept their status as nurturer and helpmate through reading this book? Will boys have confirmed for them their own status as Masters of gardens and houses?
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