{"id":144334,"date":"2020-04-14T11:47:30","date_gmt":"2020-04-14T15:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=144334"},"modified":"2023-09-19T11:55:57","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T15:55:57","slug":"quarantine-reads-the-secret-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/04\/14\/quarantine-reads-the-secret-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"Quarantine Reads: The Secret Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this series, writers present the books getting them through these strange times.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t be the only one who\u2019s been having trouble focusing on books lately. Everything feels either depressingly dark or depressingly light; I don\u2019t want to be reminded of the news, but how can I care about anything else? I\u2019ve tossed aside several novels in the last week. Only The Secret Garden <\/em>has held my attention. Only The Secret Garden <\/em>takes place in a universe I recognize.<\/p>\n

When I was a teenager and my little cousin Anya was a toddler, I indoctrinated her into loving Agnieszka Holland\u2019s 1993 film adaptation. I dusted off my beloved videotape (it came with a free locket necklace) and played it for her. Then I played it again, and again and again and again, until the two of us could act it out from memory. Anya was always the heroine, Mary Lennox; I played all the other characters, Peter Sellers\u2013style. One perk of having a cousin twelve years younger than you: it gives you an extra window of time\u2014long after you\u2019re supposedly too old\u2014to play make-believe.<\/p>\n

My little cousin Anya is not little anymore; she was about to graduate from college before, you know, all this. Now she\u2019s staying with family in Connecticut. She\u2019s just a half hour drive from my New Haven apartment, but of course we can\u2019t visit each other. We\u2019ve been texting a lot. Yesterday I awoke to this text from her:<\/p>\n

Going to get through this by going back to doing Secret Garden re-enactments. Honestly, it\u2019s a parallel situation\u2014I have to leave home because of a contagious illness and live out in the country, finding hope and new life as spring blooms\u2014only issue is I wouldn\u2019t be able to hang out w Dickon because of social distancing [plant emoji]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a substitute for the hug I wish I could give her, I\u2019ve decided to reread The Secret Garden<\/em>. Frances Hodgson Burnett\u2019s 1911 novel is available for free<\/a> on Project Gutenberg, so you can read it, too.<\/p>\n

I should warn you that it may not take your mind off things. As Anya correctly recalled, the plot is set in motion by an epidemic. The 1993 film changes it to an earthquake, which is more cinematic but (I now think) less harrowing than the novel\u2019s opening chapter, titled \u201cThere Is No One Left\u201d:<\/p>\n

The cholera had broken out in its most fatal form and people were dying like flies\u2026. There was panic on every side, and dying people in all the bungalows.<\/p>\n

During the confusion and bewilderment of the second day Mary hid herself in the nursery and was forgotten by everyone. Nobody thought of her, nobody wanted her, and strange things happened of which she knew nothing. Mary alternately cried and slept through the hours.<\/p>\n

\u2026When she awakened she lay and stared at the wall. The house was perfectly still. She had never known it to be so silent before.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With brutal swiftness, nine-year-old Mary is orphaned, removed from colonial India\u2014the only home she\u2019s ever known\u2014and taken to stay with a distant relative in England. But the pathos of her plight is complicated by the novel\u2019s constant, peculiar insistence on her personal unpleasantness. We\u2019re informed in the opening passage that Mary is \u201cas tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived,\u201d and hardly a paragraph goes by without a reminder that she is \u201cdisagreeable,\u201d \u201ca self-absorbed child,\u201d \u201cspoiled and pettish.\u201d Back in India, \u201cMary had always slapped her Ayah in the face when she was angry\u201d; in England, she demands to be dressed by servants \u201cas if she had neither hands nor feet of her own.\u201d Upon learning that a servant girl expected her to be ethnically Indian, Mary throws a fit and screams, \u201cYou thought I was a native! You dared! You don\u2019t know anything about natives! They are not people\u2014they\u2019re servants who must salaam to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

(I\u2019ve occasionally seen The Secret Garden<\/em> criticized for colonial attitudes, a complaint that has always puzzled me. The novel has aged poorly in several ways, but I don\u2019t know how you could miss the message that colonialism is a soul-eroding abomination, even for those who benefit from it.)<\/p>\n

Mary is terribly alone at Misselthwaite Manor. The house has a hundred rooms, most of them \u201cshut up and locked\u201d; outside is nothing but windswept Yorkshire moor, and Mary feels \u201cso horribly lonely and far away from everything she understood.\u201d Sometimes she hears a voice in the walls\u2014it sounds, she thinks, like \u201csomeone crying.\u201d The servants tell her it\u2019s only the wind, and indeed Mary can \u201cscarcely distinguish it from the wind itself.\u201d But late at night, the sobs are unmistakable. She finally goes investigating and finds a little boy, Colin, hidden away in a secret room. They mistake each other, at first, for \u201ca ghost or a dream.\u201d Neither is sure the other is real. They can hardly believe they\u2019re not alone.<\/p>\n

(My downstairs neighbor is sick. All day and all night, through the floor, I can hear her coughing. I never knew the floor was so thin.)<\/p>\n

Colin has been hidden away, it turns out, because he\u2019s chronically ill; his father doesn\u2019t want to be reminded of him. \u201cNo one believes I shall live to grow up,\u201d Colin tells Mary (\u201cas if he was so accustomed to the idea that it had ceased to matter to him at all\u201d). Like Mary, Colin is both a victim of tragedy and a monster of privilege, and Mary is reminded uncomfortably of herself as she watches him abuse his servants. \u201cWhen she had had a headache in India,\u201d she reflects, \u201cshe had done her best to see that everybody else also had a headache or something quite as bad. And she felt she was quite right; but of course now she felt that Colin was quite wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

What could have been a saccharine story\u2014a little girl discovers a secret garden, makes friends, and helps a disabled boy learn to walk\u2014has uneasy psychological stakes. You might even call them spiritual stakes. Tending a secret garden is meaningful work that teaches Mary about human connection, but her character growth goes deeper than that. She comes to understand, I think, that her former life was steeped in evil.<\/p>\n

(Evil<\/em> is a heavy word to hang on anything, let alone a little girl, and just a few weeks ago it wouldn\u2019t have occurred to me to use it. But some things\u2014violence, exploitation, dehumanization\u2014are evil. We shouldn\u2019t be afraid to say so.)<\/p>\n

I used to consider the second half of The Secret Garden<\/em> inferior to the first. As I recalled it, Mary was increasingly sidelined from the narrative until she disappeared altogether, replaced by Colin as protagonist. This unexpected point-of-view shift always frustrated me. Why should Colin\u2019s story take priority over Mary\u2019s? Was it just because he was a boy?<\/p>\n

On this reread, however, I realized it\u2019s not so simple. Mary does recede into the background, but the shift isn\u2019t a neat swap from Mary\u2019s perspective to Colin\u2019s perspective. It\u2019s a shift from Mary\u2019s perspective to multiple<\/em> perspectives. The first half of the novel is omniscient but locked into Mary\u2019s mind, almost claustrophobically so. There are times, in fact, when the narrator doesn\u2019t sound omniscient at all, but more like the dissociated interior monologue of a depressed person<\/a>:<\/p>\n

She had begun to wonder why she had never seemed to belong to anyone even when her father and mother had been alive. Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but she had never seemed to really be anyone\u2019s little girl. She had had servants, and food and clothes, but no one had taken any notice of her. She did not know that this was because she was a disagreeable child; but then, of course, she did not know she was disagreeable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But as the novel goes on, the narrator\u2019s consciousness expands. It begins to inhabit other points of view. We get to see through the eyes of Colin; his doctor, Dr. Craven; the housekeeper, Mrs. Medlock; the groundskeeper, Ben Weatherstaff; everyone\u2019s first literary crush, local boy Dickon; Dickon\u2019s mother, Mrs. Sowerby; and, in the end, Colin\u2019s reclusive father. There\u2019s even an entire chapter, whimsical and wonderful, that takes the perspective of a wild robin:<\/p>\n

One day the robin remembered that when he himself had been made to learn to fly by his parents \u2026 he had taken short flights of a few yards and then had been obliged to rest. So it occurred to him that this boy was learning to fly\u2014or rather to walk. He mentioned this to his mate and when he told her that the Eggs would probably conduct themselves in the same way after they were fledged she was quite comforted and even became eagerly interested and derived great pleasure from watching the boy over the edge of her nest\u2014though she always thought that the Eggs would be much cleverer and learn more quickly. But then she said indulgently that humans were always more clumsy and slow than Eggs and most of them never seemed really to learn to fly at all. You never met them in the air or on tree-tops.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The world seems to be getting bigger and fuller, and Mary doesn\u2019t vanish but merely takes her place in it, among all the others. It\u2019s no coincidence, I think, that the shift in perspective occurs right after this monologue from Dickon\u2019s mother:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was at school my jography told as th\u2019 world was shaped like a orange an\u2019 I found out before I was ten that th\u2019 whole orange doesn\u2019t belong to nobody. No one owns more than his bit of a quarter an\u2019 there\u2019s times it seems like there\u2019s not enow quarters to go round. But don\u2019t you\u2014none o\u2019 you\u2014think as you own th\u2019 whole orange or you\u2019ll find out you\u2019re mistaken, an\u2019 you won\u2019t find it out without hard knocks.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No one owns the whole orange. Everyone has a right to their own bit of a quarter. There\u2019s enough orange to go around\u2014or there can be, if we share.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s real beauty in the universe of this book. The garden scenes are ecstatic, charged with a childlike, polymorphous-perverse eroticism:<\/p>\n

\u201cSee here!\u201d said Dickon. \u201cSee how these has pushed up, an\u2019 these an\u2019 these! An\u2019 Eh! Look at these here!\u201d<\/p>\n

He threw himself upon his knees and Mary went down beside him. They had come upon a whole clump of crocuses burst into purple and orange and gold. Mary bent her face down and kissed and kissed them.<\/p>\n

\u2026They ran from one part of the garden to another and found so many wonders that they were obliged to remind themselves that they must whisper or speak low. He showed her swelling leafbuds on rose branches which had seemed dead. He showed her ten thousand new green points pushing through the mould. They put their eager young noses close to the earth and sniffed its warmed springtime breathing; they dug and pulled and laughed low with rapture until Mistress Mary\u2019s hair was as tumbled as Dickon\u2019s and her cheeks were almost as poppy red as his.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Years ago I read an article that referred to the garden as the \u201ccentral symbol\u201d of this novel, which is an uncontroversial statement, but the phrasing galled me. The garden is a garden is a garden. As symbols go, springtime is surely the most hackneyed of them all\u2014but springtime, like so many other clich\u00e9s, is also a stark reality. It\u2019s happening for real outside my window as I write this. The sun is really shining, a real live robin is singing somewhere, and actual daffodils are blooming in the grass beside my stoop. (My downstairs neighbor planted them.)<\/p>\n

And over walls and earth and trees and swinging sprays and tendrils the fair green veil of tender little leaves had crept, and in the grass under the trees and the gray urns in the alcoves and here and there everywhere were touches or splashes of gold and purple and white and the trees were showing pink and snow above [Colin\u2019s] head and there were fluttering of wings and faint sweet pipes and humming and scents and scents. And the sun fell warm upon his face like a hand with a lovely touch\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cI shall get well! I shall get well!\u201d he cried out. \u201cMary! Dickon! I shall get well! And I shall live forever and ever and ever!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There was a time, once, when I would have scoffed at this passage. Of course Colin isn\u2019t going to live forever\u2014no one does! As if Frances Hodgson Burnett didn\u2019t know that. She had a son who died of tuberculosis when he was sixteen. He\u2019d been dead for twenty years when she wrote The Secret Garden<\/em>. It\u2019s easy to forget\u2014or it used to be easy to forget\u2014the nearness of death in those days.<\/p>\n

Her narrator continues:<\/p>\n

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one\u2019s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one\u2019s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun\u2014which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s easy, too, to overlook the point of this passage: that this feeling comes \u201conly now and then,\u201d and only \u201cfor a moment or so.\u201d Then it\u2019s gone again.<\/p>\n

I have one very distinct memory of playing The Secret Garden<\/em> with Anya. We were acting out the final scene of the movie: the three children are playing blind man\u2019s bluff, and Colin, blindfolded, runs into his father, who doesn\u2019t yet know that Colin can walk. Colin runs his hands across his father\u2019s face, puzzled, before removing his blindfold. Since I was playing all the non-Mary characters, this scene was my time to shine; I was a high school theater kid, so I really hammed it up. As Colin, I closed my eyes and ran my fingers breathlessly through the air, tracing the shape of an invisible person, my mouth open in amazement. I dragged it out so long, toddler Anya lost her patience. \u201cHurry up!\u201d she yelled from the sidelines, and I laughed\u2014I\u2019m laughing now, remembering it\u2014because I\u2019d been so wrapped up in myself that I forgot (how could I forget?) that she was in the room.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

James Frankie Thomas is the author of \u201cThe Showrunner,\u201d which received special mention in the <\/em>2013 Pushcart Prize Anthology. His writing has also appeared in <\/em>The Toast,<\/em>\u00a0The Hairpin, and\u00a0<\/em>Vol. 1 Brooklyn. He holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The plot, as you may remember, is set in motion by an epidemic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62714],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quarantine-reads"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nQuarantine Reads: The Secret Garden by James Frankie Thomas<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 14, 2020 \u2013 The plot, as you may remember, is set in motion by an epidemic.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/04\/14\/quarantine-reads-the-secret-garden\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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