Rather, she learns to take care of herself, to experience un-lonely solitude in the natural landscape. For Mary, it's not a benefactor or romantic love that catalyses her growth. Slowly, she begins to interact with the seasons, the dirt, and the flowers – as well as the stories of people who love this landscape, including Ben, the groundskeeper, and Dickon, Martha's brother. (Not coincidentally, Mary is 10 years old.) She gets closer and closer to the garden before, with the help of a robin, she discovering the key. It also makes Mary far more interesting than, say, Pollyanna, the title character of Eleanor H Porter's 1913 novel.īecause she has nothing else to do, she begins to wonder about a locked-up garden on the grounds left abandoned for a decade. Mary's self-centredness undercuts the sentimentality common in Victorian-era portrayals of children. She complains about the food and waits expectantly for someone to put on her shoes for her. Brimming with colonial imperiousness, Mary says of the house staff in India: "They are not people – they're servants who must salaam to you." She has a tantrum when she meets Martha, a Misselthwaite servant with a Yorkshire accent, calling her the "daughter of a pig". While readers might feel their hearts soften at Mary's situation, her disagreeableness – not to be confused with rascally Tom Sawyer-style mischievousness – is off-putting. Mary doesn't miss her dead parents, and given that they didn't want her it's hard to blame her for this. She's later found in her nursery and shipped off to Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors to live with an uncle she's never met. We meet her in India, in the midst of a cholera outbreak that wipes out her British parents and their servants. Rather she is spoiled, homely, mean and sometimes violent. Mary Lennox is not a good-hearted, put-upon creature, cut from the cloth of Oliver Twist or Cinderella (or Anne Shirley, Pip, Jane Eyre or Heidi). The classic novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, published 100 years ago this summer, takes the traditional children's literature trope of the orphan protagonist and twists it. There's something strange about The Secret Garden.
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