Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James, brother of Burnett’s friend Henry, describes a new and uniquely American contribution to religious thought and practice that he calls “the religion of healthy-mindedness.” The basis of the movement, also known as the “new thought,” was a belief in the power of the human mind and the ability of faith to influence events in the physical world. Attributing the rise of this philosophy to the “extremely practical turn of character of the American people,” James observes:

Noting that practitioners claim remarkable effects on their physical health, he records that “one hears of ... people who repeat to themselves, ‘Youth, health, vigor!’ when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day” (p. 88). This late-nineteenth-century meld of religion and therapy, with roots in the writings of, among others, Swedenborg and Emerson, found expression in a range of spiritual and self-help movements from Christian Science to Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 classic The Power of Positive Thinking. Christian Science, a sect founded in 1866 by Mary Baker Eddy, claimed that physical illness was illusory and could be cured by right mental attitudes and a true understanding of the scriptures. Among those who were profoundly affected by the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy were Frances Hodgson Burnett and her son Vivian. Unlike her son, Frances never formally embraced Christian Science, but, as Vivian Burnett observed in The Romantick Lady, his 1927 biography of his mother, “her method of thought, consciously or unconsciously, was influenced importantly by what she learned from Christian Science” (p. 376). Although we may question Vivian’s specific claim that The Secret Garden “is generally credited with being a Christian Science book” (p. 377), the novel is certainly a devout testament of the Jamesian “religion of healthy-mindedness.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett first encountered the new theories of “metaphysical” healing in 1885 when her friend Louisa M. Alcott, author of Little Women, persuaded her to seek treatment for nervous exhaustion from Mrs. Newman, a leading practitioner of the so-called Boston Mind Cure. Burnett was so impressed by Newman that she stayed in Boston for a month under her care. Later in her life, after the best European doctors proved unable to cure her son Lionel of tuberculosis, she turned increasingly to alternative healers. Two failed marriages to physicians did little to restore her faith in conventional medicine. Her low opinion of the medical profession is expressed in The Secret Garden, in her unsympathetic portrayal of Colin’s uncle, Dr. Craven, who is unable to cure, or even correctly diagnose, his nephew’s largely psychosomatic illness and indeed secretly hopes for the boy’s death. It is Mary Lennox who brings about Colin’s cure by introducing him to the healing power of the secret garden.

In a 1909 New York Times interview Burnett described her belief in a divine energy that could be channeled by the human mind:

The Secret Garden depicts this “beautiful thought” at work in the cure of Colin Craven. Until he encounters his cousin Mary, Colin is a victim of the power of negative thinking. He has spent his whole life surrounded by people who resent his very existence, blaming him for his mother’s death in childbirth and expecting him to become a hunchback like his father. The pessimistic atmosphere around him provokes an imaginary illness so overwhelming that he is actually unable to walk. Colin’s recovery begins when his cousin refuses to accept his negative beliefs, introducing him to the magic of the secret garden and encouraging him to have faith that, like the flowers in the garden, he too can grow and flourish. Burnett is so determined to propagate her belief in the power of thought to change reality that at one point, near the end of the novel, she even interrupts the narrative to address young readers directly with her explanation of the relationship between mind and body:

For Burnett, the source of healing thought is a God who is always present in the world and cannot be defined by any one set of religious teachings. By the time she wrote The Secret Garden she had largely abandoned the Anglican Christianity in which she was raised. In addition to her interest in Christian Science, she had studied Hindu scripture and dabbled in theosophy, an occult philosophy drawn from both Eastern and Western traditions, first expounded by Madame Helene Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine (1888) and extremely fashionable in the first decades of the twentieth century. Burnett’s diverse spiritual interests are reflected in The Secret Garden. Although Dickon Sowerby celebrates the power of the garden by singing the doxology, a Christian hymn of praise, the children also perform healing rituals inspired by Indian “fakirs and devotees” (p. 184), and Colin recites a mantra similar to those recorded by William James in his description of “the religion of healthy-mindedness” :

The “magic” that brings about Colin’s cure is not specifically linked to Christianity; indeed it has a very pagan association with the seasons and cycles of nature. The divinity in the garden is nurturant and creative, not a lawgiver but a “Joy Maker” (p. 212), having as its priestesses the novel’s two positive maternal figures, Colin’s dead mother, Lilias, and Dickon’s mother, Susan Sowerby. It was Lilias Craven who originally cultivated the secret garden, filling it with the roses and other flowers she loved. Her death in childbirth following a fall in the garden caused her distraught husband to lock up the place and bury the key. Yet, as Susan Sowerby assures Colin, the spirit of Lilias Craven continues to reside in the garden, overseeing her son’s cure: “Thy own mother’s in this ’ere very garden, I do believe. She couldna’ keep out of it” (p. 213). Sowerby herself does not appear in the novel until very near the end, but she is constantly helping the children from behind the scenes. In a letter to the English publisher of The Secret Garden, William Heinemann, Burnett describes Susan Sowerby as “a moorland cottage woman who is a sort of Madonna” and the novel’s “chief figure” (Gerzina, p. 262). It is Sowerby who gives voice, in Yorkshire dialect, to Burnett’s view of God:

Burnett uses the uneducated but wise Susan Sowerby as a mouthpiece not only for her religious vision of a God who transcends creeds and sects, but also for her ideas about child-rearing. It is Sowerby who sends Mary Lennox a skipping rope and persuades the girl’s uncle, the misanthropic Archibald Craven, not to hire a governess but to allow his niece “fresh air and freedom and running about” (p. 95). As the mother of twelve children, she recognizes the importance of physical exercise and the role of unstructured play in developing body and mind. Although her opinions are represented as timeless country wisdom, Susan Sowerby is actually expressing ideas that were progressive and still quite controversial when The Secret Garden was first published.

During the Victorian age, upper-class children had been expected to behave like miniature adults. Little girls were dressed in tight and confining clothes and trained in domestic virtues and such accomplishments as sewing and playing the piano. Outdoor exercise was viewed as tomboyish and undignified, likely to build unfeminine muscles and bring an unwelcome tan to fashionably pale complexions. It was not until the late nineteenth-century that the kindergarten movement, based on the writings of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), began to challenge these restrictive child-rearing practices. Froebel’s organic theory of child development employed horticultural metaphors to argue that both boys and girls, like gardens, require space, clean air, and brightness in order to flourish; and that young children learn best in an environment in which nature is celebrated but controlled.

Froebel was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy of childhood, expressed in Émile (1762), and like Rousseau he looked back nostalgically to an idealized agrarian past when people lived in harmony with nature. Burnett, an admirer of Froebel and a supporter of charities that tried to bring his educational methods to inner-city children, also had a romanticized view of the old-fashioned rural poor that finds expression in her creation of the Sowerby family in The Secret Garden. Though the Sowerbys are poor, they are presented as invariably cheerful, healthy, and content with their lot. They appear to accept their lower-class position and yet, unlike the downtrodden and obsequious colonial servants of Mary’s early experience, they have no hesitation in speaking their minds to those of higher rank. Susan Sowerby’s simple country life gives her an instinctive understanding of the needs of children. Her son Dickon, who spends his days outside on the Yorkshire moors, is attuned to the seasons, wise in the ways of animals and birds, self-reliant, resourceful, and honest. He and his siblings are naturally possessed of the qualities that Froebel and Rousseau sought to instill in children. Colin Craven and Mary Lennox, on the other hand, are “a hard, little, unloving girl and a sickly boy” (p. 117) who must overcome the psychological damage inflicted by their over-civilized, unhappy upper-class families and learn to be more like Dickon.

At once spoiled and neglected, their parents dead, absent or indifferent, both Colin and Mary have grown up without siblings or friends, attended by servants who indulge their every whim but do not love them, and deprived of opportunities to exercise their bodies or their minds. Both children have been hidden in confined, airless places. Mary, raised in the heat and languor of colonial India and abandoned after her parents’ death from cholera, is described as “the child no one ever saw” (p. 11). Colin, rejected by his father and believed to be a hopeless invalid, never leaves his bedroom in Misselthwaite Manor. Neither child has experienced the fresh air and freedom of the Yorkshire moors, and until they meet Dickon they are entirely alienated from nature and fearful of the outdoors. Mary dismisses the moor as “an endless, dull, purplish sea” (p. 23) and Colin protests, “I hate fresh air and I don’t want to go out” (p. 103).

In contrast to the measured and stilted language of Mary and Colin when we first meet them, Dickon’s dialect speech is a breathless tumble of active verbs: “Th’ world’s all fair begun again this mornin’, it has. An’ it’s workin’ an’ hummin’ an’ scratchin’ an’ pipin’ an’ nest-buildin’ an’ breathin’ out scents” (p. 124). His words imitating the fertility and profusion of nature, he is a conduit of vital energy. It is Dickon who buys Mary her first packet of seeds and teaches her how to cultivate the secret garden. Mary, in turn, arouses Colin’s interest in the outside world by telling him about Dickon and the garden. She encourages her cousin to begin the process of healing by emulating Dickon’s love of the moorland air:

Colin, who never wants to meet anyone because of self-consciousness about his supposed handicap, is first won over by Dickon’s tame animals, a fox, a crow, two squirrels, and a newborn lamb; and then by Dickon himself: “I would never have let him come to see me if he had not been an animal charmer—which is a boy charmer, too, because a boy is an animal” (p. 184).

As Mary and Colin recover, they become more and more like Dickon, even to the extent of imitating his Yorkshire speech and consuming Susan Sowerby’s pails of fresh milk and cottage buns rather than the food at Misselthwaite Manor. The children gain happiness and vigor as they grow to share Dickon’s understanding of nature. Their progress can be measured in their changing attitudes toward the moor. From her initial impression of the land around Misselthwaite as bleak and empty, Mary learns that:

The moor is Dickon’s world too, out of bounds to Mary and Colin, who never actually play there. Burnett knows that her upper-class hero and heroine cannot participate directly in the primitive pastoral life represented by the Sowerbys. Instead, following Froebel’s theory of child development, she allows them to grow up in the natural yet controlled space of the garden. As Dickon observes, the secret garden is not all “clipped an’ spick an’ span” (p. 87); there is plenty of room for “runnin’ wild an’ swingin’ an’ catchin’ hold of each other” (p. 87). But nature’s exuberance is disciplined by weeding and pruning, and contained within walls. Colin and Mary learn about planting and “nest-buildin’ ” (p. 126) as a prelude to healthy adult sexuality, but they must also be trained in restraint and decorum in order to take their places in upper-class society.