I’ve been reading The Secret Garden again.
I read it every Spring, and then I think about for a while because it really has a lot of layers for such a simple book. This year my musings have focused on the way the story shifts so entirely from Mary to Colin about halfway through—a fact which has always bothered me. Why does Mary get shunted aside like that? How dare Colin say things like “This is my garden now”? What a jerk! And no one objects! But I think I’ve figured out something that hadn’t occurred to me before: The story isn’t about Mary OR Colin; it’s about Those Who Need Healing and Those Who Heal. And Mary moves from the first group to the second with uncanny ease.
Take a moment and consider Mary. She’s an unusual child. Here you have a ten-year-old girl who has never formed an emotional bond with anyone in her entire life. That’s a scary thought. Her parents were strangers to her, and the people she saw daily gave her things to shut her up, but they certainly didn’t love her. Even her Ayah, who sang to her and told her stories, was not a human in Mary’s eyes. This was partly due to the fact that the Caste system in Imperial India was so ingrained, Mary absorbed it as gospel. “Natives aren’t people—they’re servants who must salaam to you!” She says at one point. And being attached to, or fond of, these “not people” was clearly unthinkable. On top of all this, she has been “ill in one way or another” all her life. Imagine spending a decade with a chronic low-grade flu. So to sum up: She has criminally neglectful parents, no teacher, no pets, no friends, no purpose and bad health.
So far, this is the background of a sociopath. She should have some severe PTSD from constant emotional starvation, and she should be a wreck. But no…The worst that can be said about her is that she’s cranky. That’s it. She’s determined not to show an interest in anything; she dislikes people and is certain that they dislike her right back. She has shut herself away from humanity, needing nothing, asking nothing and giving nothing. Cranky. Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction to the life she’s had. Frankly, it’s amazing that she isn’t setting fire to cats or cutting herself. And not only that, but once removed from this setting it takes her less than two months to recover completely.
And the funny thing about that is, she’s still not in what we’d think of as a healthy place. Going from being neglected in hot, wet India to being neglected in cold, bleak Yorkshire should not have created a huge change in her outlook. Instead of being surrounded by people who don’t like her, she’s surrounded by hundreds of empty rooms and bare, wintry gardens. Six of one, half dozen of the other, we may be thinking. But there IS one thing at Misselthwaite that starts the domino effect leading to Mary’s transformation: Martha.
Martha is the first person in Mary’s world who refuses to dislike her. She is endlessly cheerful and chatty; Mary trots out her various misanthropic behaviors, and Martha doesn’t even register them. Does Mary, thwarted, step up her attack and become even more antisocial and hateful? No! Another win for Mary. She allows herself to feel an interest, for the first time, in another human being. And an interest in Martha opens the door to a curiosity about Dickon, and “Mother,” and gardens and Ben Weatherstaff and all the rest. Martha even awakens Mary’s mind backwards in time: Mary never found India fascinating when she lived there, but seeing it through the lens of Martha’s interest—and, vicariously, that of Martha’s enormous family—makes her want to tell stories of the things she’s seen.
The Robin is Martha’s outdoor counterpart. Here Mary encounters another “person” (because natives may not be people, but a bird certainly is) who likes her. Effortlessly. She thinks of him as “Ben Weatherstaff’s Robin,” but he really does fill the role of her familiar; he leads her to the Key, and the Door, but most importantly, the Robin makes Mary smile for the first time in the story. Literal keys and doors are not the only ones being discovered.
When Mary meets Dickon, she tells him about the Secret Garden: “Nobody cares for it, nobody wants it…They’re letting it die, all shut in by itself” she says, and then bursts into tears—another first. It may be that she’s crying because that description also fits her self. She and the Garden are linked; leading Dickon into the Garden was a declaration of vulnerability. Pretty powerful actions from a girl who has carefully kept herself divorced from humankind, since, hitherto, needing affection would probably have killed her. Perhaps she senses here that Dickon isn’t quite human, but more of a prepubescent Green Man. Think about it: He protects the wild creatures, he smells like leaves, he speaks the languages of birds. When he says “we mun try to look like bushes and trees” he says it without a trace of irony, and Mary even expects him to turn green and sprout twigs. So she chose wisely when she chose to trust him.
Dickon is obviously one of the Healers; Martha, in a rather more prosaic way, is too. But their mother, Susan Sowerby, is practically a goddess of healing. We barely see her, but her influence is all over the story. It is she who reminds Mr. Craven that he should meet his niece before leaving on his travels; it is she who sends the skipping rope that gives Mary something to do. She came up with the idea of sending food to the children at the Manor to help them keep their secret, and she was the one who wrote to Mr. Craven, telling him to come home. She is the champion of all that is good and wholesome and loving and comfortable. She could mother the world. But when she meets Colin and Mary, Colin gets the tears-and-hugs treatment, while Mary just gets her hair ruffled and a kind word in passing. Why would Susan Sowerby be so dismissive of a little girl? Because she recognizes that Mary is not like Colin, who is still damaged; nor is she like Susan’s other children, who need to be mothered. Mary is one of the Healers now, and Susan greets her as an ally.
Colin may be healing, but he still has a long way to go. He is obnoxiously possessive; we can tell how much he values something by seeing how often he refers to it as “mine.” Mary does not. In her eyes, who the Garden belongs to is an insignificant detail; what matters to her is that it is alive. She also has no vanity, no duplicity, and a startling amount of empathy. The evening before Colin’s tantrum, for example, she resolves to go see him in the morning, even though they’ve just had a fight. And then, after the tantrum, and after she’s shouted him into sanity, this girl who has never known affection and spent the majority of her life in a low-grade state of hating everything, sits down and gently talks him to sleep. It’s breathtaking.
So it really is natural that Mary leaves the spotlight halfway through the book. Magical people belong in the supporting roles, and she, like Dickon and Susan, is one of the magical people. When we picture the story from a certain angle, it’s not about a sour, unloved little girl being healed by an English garden; it’s about a sad man, his hysterical son, an empty house and a neglected garden all being cured and made whole by the arrival of a child who is magic in disguise—who silently calls her comrades to join her in making this place Live. Which is what a Healer does.
I read it every Spring, and then I think about for a while because it really has a lot of layers for such a simple book. This year my musings have focused on the way the story shifts so entirely from Mary to Colin about halfway through—a fact which has always bothered me. Why does Mary get shunted aside like that? How dare Colin say things like “This is my garden now”? What a jerk! And no one objects! But I think I’ve figured out something that hadn’t occurred to me before: The story isn’t about Mary OR Colin; it’s about Those Who Need Healing and Those Who Heal. And Mary moves from the first group to the second with uncanny ease.
Take a moment and consider Mary. She’s an unusual child. Here you have a ten-year-old girl who has never formed an emotional bond with anyone in her entire life. That’s a scary thought. Her parents were strangers to her, and the people she saw daily gave her things to shut her up, but they certainly didn’t love her. Even her Ayah, who sang to her and told her stories, was not a human in Mary’s eyes. This was partly due to the fact that the Caste system in Imperial India was so ingrained, Mary absorbed it as gospel. “Natives aren’t people—they’re servants who must salaam to you!” She says at one point. And being attached to, or fond of, these “not people” was clearly unthinkable. On top of all this, she has been “ill in one way or another” all her life. Imagine spending a decade with a chronic low-grade flu. So to sum up: She has criminally neglectful parents, no teacher, no pets, no friends, no purpose and bad health.
So far, this is the background of a sociopath. She should have some severe PTSD from constant emotional starvation, and she should be a wreck. But no…The worst that can be said about her is that she’s cranky. That’s it. She’s determined not to show an interest in anything; she dislikes people and is certain that they dislike her right back. She has shut herself away from humanity, needing nothing, asking nothing and giving nothing. Cranky. Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction to the life she’s had. Frankly, it’s amazing that she isn’t setting fire to cats or cutting herself. And not only that, but once removed from this setting it takes her less than two months to recover completely.
And the funny thing about that is, she’s still not in what we’d think of as a healthy place. Going from being neglected in hot, wet India to being neglected in cold, bleak Yorkshire should not have created a huge change in her outlook. Instead of being surrounded by people who don’t like her, she’s surrounded by hundreds of empty rooms and bare, wintry gardens. Six of one, half dozen of the other, we may be thinking. But there IS one thing at Misselthwaite that starts the domino effect leading to Mary’s transformation: Martha.
Martha is the first person in Mary’s world who refuses to dislike her. She is endlessly cheerful and chatty; Mary trots out her various misanthropic behaviors, and Martha doesn’t even register them. Does Mary, thwarted, step up her attack and become even more antisocial and hateful? No! Another win for Mary. She allows herself to feel an interest, for the first time, in another human being. And an interest in Martha opens the door to a curiosity about Dickon, and “Mother,” and gardens and Ben Weatherstaff and all the rest. Martha even awakens Mary’s mind backwards in time: Mary never found India fascinating when she lived there, but seeing it through the lens of Martha’s interest—and, vicariously, that of Martha’s enormous family—makes her want to tell stories of the things she’s seen.
The Robin is Martha’s outdoor counterpart. Here Mary encounters another “person” (because natives may not be people, but a bird certainly is) who likes her. Effortlessly. She thinks of him as “Ben Weatherstaff’s Robin,” but he really does fill the role of her familiar; he leads her to the Key, and the Door, but most importantly, the Robin makes Mary smile for the first time in the story. Literal keys and doors are not the only ones being discovered.
When Mary meets Dickon, she tells him about the Secret Garden: “Nobody cares for it, nobody wants it…They’re letting it die, all shut in by itself” she says, and then bursts into tears—another first. It may be that she’s crying because that description also fits her self. She and the Garden are linked; leading Dickon into the Garden was a declaration of vulnerability. Pretty powerful actions from a girl who has carefully kept herself divorced from humankind, since, hitherto, needing affection would probably have killed her. Perhaps she senses here that Dickon isn’t quite human, but more of a prepubescent Green Man. Think about it: He protects the wild creatures, he smells like leaves, he speaks the languages of birds. When he says “we mun try to look like bushes and trees” he says it without a trace of irony, and Mary even expects him to turn green and sprout twigs. So she chose wisely when she chose to trust him.
Dickon is obviously one of the Healers; Martha, in a rather more prosaic way, is too. But their mother, Susan Sowerby, is practically a goddess of healing. We barely see her, but her influence is all over the story. It is she who reminds Mr. Craven that he should meet his niece before leaving on his travels; it is she who sends the skipping rope that gives Mary something to do. She came up with the idea of sending food to the children at the Manor to help them keep their secret, and she was the one who wrote to Mr. Craven, telling him to come home. She is the champion of all that is good and wholesome and loving and comfortable. She could mother the world. But when she meets Colin and Mary, Colin gets the tears-and-hugs treatment, while Mary just gets her hair ruffled and a kind word in passing. Why would Susan Sowerby be so dismissive of a little girl? Because she recognizes that Mary is not like Colin, who is still damaged; nor is she like Susan’s other children, who need to be mothered. Mary is one of the Healers now, and Susan greets her as an ally.
Colin may be healing, but he still has a long way to go. He is obnoxiously possessive; we can tell how much he values something by seeing how often he refers to it as “mine.” Mary does not. In her eyes, who the Garden belongs to is an insignificant detail; what matters to her is that it is alive. She also has no vanity, no duplicity, and a startling amount of empathy. The evening before Colin’s tantrum, for example, she resolves to go see him in the morning, even though they’ve just had a fight. And then, after the tantrum, and after she’s shouted him into sanity, this girl who has never known affection and spent the majority of her life in a low-grade state of hating everything, sits down and gently talks him to sleep. It’s breathtaking.
So it really is natural that Mary leaves the spotlight halfway through the book. Magical people belong in the supporting roles, and she, like Dickon and Susan, is one of the magical people. When we picture the story from a certain angle, it’s not about a sour, unloved little girl being healed by an English garden; it’s about a sad man, his hysterical son, an empty house and a neglected garden all being cured and made whole by the arrival of a child who is magic in disguise—who silently calls her comrades to join her in making this place Live. Which is what a Healer does.