Title: The Mem Sahib, the Worthy, the Rajah and His Minions: Some Reflections on the Class Politics of The Secret
Garden
Author(s): Jerry Phillips
Publication Details: Lion and the Unicorn 17.2 (Dec. 1993): p168-194.
Source: Children's Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 122. Detroit: Gale, 2007. From Literature Resource
Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Full Text:
[(essay date December 1993) In the following essay, Phillips studies the legacy of British colonialism in India
through an analysis of class structures and sociological politics in The Secret Garden, particularly with regards to
Mary Lennox's experiences as an "Anglo-Indian orphan."]
Introduction: The Empire's Homecoming1
The preeminent influence on twentieth-century British society has arguably been the decline of the British Empire.
For over three hundred years, the construction and maintenance of the imperial system provoked themes which
reverberated at every level of the British polity--that is to say, it set limits, effective cultural parameters, on what it
was and what it meant in terms of lived experienced to be British in relation to foreigners from the four corners of
the globe. Empire--and the perennial desire for its enlargement--is massively implicated in the historical and
political categories whose overlapping constitutes the ground for interrogating the British story of modernity. Chief
among these categories are the organization of material interests and forces around mercantilism, finance, and
industry; the development of a powerful and far-reaching military; the establishment of a bureaucratic state and
"disciplinary" political culture to define and administer law and order, rights and obligations, the necessity of work
and patterns of acceptable play; and, finally, the generation of an ideology of the national culture, and its
concomitant bounded identity. Clearly, the British Empire was not the sole cause of any one of these historical
trajectories, but its pervasive influence is detectable in all of them. Thus, the end of empire has had significant
consequences on a number of fronts, ranging from the macroeconomic to the micropolitical.
For example, as the high tide of imperial ideology has receded, it has left behind a social landscape strewn with
murky controversies concerning citizenship, ancestry, race, and the law. 2 At this moment of writing, British
immigration legislation expresses a political will to deny certain groups of British subjects the right of citizenship
and ergo the right of residence (e.g., Hong Kong Chinese); at the same time, the door is kept open (or at least
unlocked) for those foreign nationals whose cultural profile is ideologically acceptable (e.g., South Africans of
English descent). This deliberate inequity can only be understood in relation to a fundamental historical impasse, a
vexed and sometimes vicious legacy: the diverse racial make-up of the former British Empire and the existing
Commonwealth. Race alone has turned the notion of Britishness upside down and inside out. Where the empire was
"an extension of the English nationality" (John Robert Seeley qtd. in Bennet 273), postcolonial nationalism has
sought to contain national identity within an implacable existential frame. The paradoxical result is that Britishness
has simply exploded into a speculative politics about whether or not nationality can be defined as an ethnic or legal
identity, a language or language of values, a cultural state of mind or an essential state of being. Britishness has been
invested with differential racial, legal, moral, cultural, and political value; it has become a signifier with
overdetermined significance. In short, where imperial certainty once ruled, ideological uncertainty has gained apace.
The open-endedness of the debate about British identity throws brilliant light upon the enduring legacy of empire-the way it returns home, what might be called its blowback effect. I borrow the term "blowback" from espionage
jargon, in which it refers to "unexpected--and negative--effects at home that result from ... operations overseas"
(Simpson 5). The return of the imperial program inevitably establishes a critical dialogue with the domestic
institutions of "the mother country," the same institutions that promoted the program in the first place. The effect
can often be unsettling, nowhere more so than in the field of social class. The measure of social class is a powerful
analytic tool for prising open the ideological secrets of nation building and national self-regulation. Class allows us
to appreciate the political meaning of blowback; through a reading of class, we can detect the cultural impact of the
end of empire on how elites control their subordinates at home.
The concern of this essay can be summarized thus: if one form of empire--colonialism--is the great program of
extending home away from home, then what happens when the program collapses and how does the mother country
cope when the colonies have to return home? This cardinal question guides my reading of the narrative poetics and
politics of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911). A central text in the canon of children's literature,
The Secret Garden is not so much a discourse on the end of empire as an embryonic commentary on the possibility
of blowback.
The Allegorical Inference
Ideological extrapolations play a major role in my reading of The Secret Garden. The political discourse of the text
has an unusually rich relationship to that which is "not said" or only partially expressed. Insofar as the silences and
the stutters run concurrently with clear ideological statements, the narrative demands a speculative reading, a
symptomatic critique that respects hybrid patterns. Such criticism is dedicated to what I shall call the allegorical
inference.
Allegorical inferences in no way cheapen the text. Indeed, they heighten the sense of the trickster that is narrative.
As an aesthetic intervention into the political status quo, literary narrative orders layer upon layer of ideological
values; some of these values are known, others are well-kept secrets, which run into one another like different
colored threads in a weave. A dramatic investigation of significant social priorities, the allegorical inference
comments on the influential power of partial truths, the natural province of ideology. Reductive arguments-overstated "deep" analyses--always cheat on the richness of cultural themes; thus, vulgar Marxism and Freudianism
eschew those aspects of the text that do not play into their respective critical agendas. The allegorical inference
arises from the crossover or overlap of discrete ideological values. In my reading of The Secret Garden, the concept
addresses the promotion of social fantasy through an aesthetic of Utopia; the re-issue of a colonial lingua franca in a
domestic setting; the celebration of romantic ideals of nature and the self; the consolidation of patriarchal
imperatives; and, finally, the proclamation of a discourse of social engineering having to do with the physical and
spiritual well being of the average child. As demonstrated by the range of issues involved, the textuality of The
Secret Garden must be seen as a veritable ideological riot. The approach of the allegorical inference seeks to realize
the complex motives of these discourses involved in the riotous action.
"India Is Quite Different from Yorkshire"
Barrackpore is, I see, to save me from India ... a charming place, like a beautiful English villa on the banks of the
Thames--so green and fresh.--Emily Auckland
Mary Lennox's passage from India to Yorkshire is best understood as a kind of pilgrimage--a homecoming to an
ideal space and place of values she has always known but never seen. Her relationship to Yorkshire, to England
generally, is typical of a child whose parents serve the British Empire as colonial settlers, government agents,
military personnel, or otherwise. Mary is Anglo-Indian--born in India of English parentage. She grows up
accustomed to the reality of India but attuned to the spirit of England, culturally, linguistically, and ethically. Mary
identifies with England, but India is all she has known; in other words, she lives in India, but John Bull inhabits her
soul. The cultural fashioning of colonial children, to be sure, is beset with ironies, ambiguities, and schizophrenic
desires about "the pleasures of exile" and the lure of "back home." The mother country defines her manners, her
values, her social position, and her racial identity, and yet, is still only a partial truth of her day-to-day reality. The
glorious garden called England, is near and far, everywhere and nowhere. 3
This is the peculiar dynamic, the maddening dialectic, that we find operative in Emily Auckland's statement. To
Emily, the quintessential Mem Sahib, Barrackpore is "charming" to the extent that it reminds her of "a beautiful
English villa on the banks of the Thames." The resemblance, however, is more than fanciful, it is also purposeful in
that it lessens or even negates what is unacceptable and intolerable about the Indian scene generally. Barrackpore,
the little island of England in the midst of India, is less important for itself than for the memory of home that it
triggers. In this way, the best parts of India become copies of English ideals; the copy, the recycled image, saves the
colonist from having to face India in the raw. In other words, one aspect of India--its similarity to a certain English
setting--is used to block off experience of the whole. The confusion of values and desires registered here is typical
of the Anglo-Indian predicament.
The Secret Garden uses a shock tactic to seize the attention of the reader. Swiftly, almost brutally, the opening
pages of the novel remove the ground from beneath Mary's feet; a wave of cholera kills her parents and evacuates
their household. Mary is left "all alone ... in a deserted bungalow" (10). Burnett uses the omnipotent, deadly power
of the writer to turn her character into an orphan, dependent on the good will of strangers and the hospitality of
relatives. In the construction of the orphan, I detect a generic value, which yields the possibility of an allegorical
inference.
From Jane Eyre to Oliver Twist and from David Copperfield to Heathcliff, child orphans are key figures in the
world of nineteenth-century narrative. The figure of the child orphan was typically a critical ideological commentary
on provocative issues of class and gender and the attendant discourses on power and justice, propriety and
unfreedom. In fine, the orphan figured as a metaphor for the instability of identity, the crisis of representation, in
certain social relations. For instance, the character of Jane Eyre is a powerful critique of the patriarchal will to typify
and control the identity of itinerant and indigent young women.
In the bestowal of an orphan's fate to Mary Lennox, The Secret Garden pays homage to the fundamental concern of
much nineteenth-century fiction: the displaced person within. Yet, in another way, the text asks many difficult
questions about a figure who might well be the index of our troubled modernity: the migrant, the refugee, the exile-the displaced person without. In this century of great travels, the fortune of nations--the rise and fall of hegemonic
economic powers--has led to an unprecedented cultural mix of ethnicities and races and cultures and religions
throughout every continent of the globe. Thus, the displaced person without, the stranger in search of a home, is an
awesome reflection on problems of social identity in the contemporary world. A few of these problems can be
reached through the principle of the allegorical inference in The Secret Garden.
Mary Lennox is an English child born, and raised to nine years old, far from England's shores. Her predicament is
testing, beguiling; she is a foreigner who leaves home, which is not home, and returns, in a manner of speaking, to a
native land she has never actually known. Little wonder, then, that the confusion of cultural values, which is the
ideology of British colonialism, radically disorients Mary's sense of place in the world. The children of the English
clergyman taunt Mary because she has to ask, "where is home?" They know that "home" is "England, of course" (89). Mary's failure to recognize her true point of origin eloquently conveys the double bind she is caught in: England
is the home of meaning in her world, and yet the notion of "home" seems meaningless. The meaning of
homelessness is crucial to the class politics of blowback. For the great ideological issue inherent in the literary
discourse of the child orphan is, of course, the crucial and exorbitant question of assimilation--how is it to be done
and is it desirable? The Secret Garden is a relentlessly complex meditation on just this issue.
At the center of The Secret Garden is an anatomy of social hierarchy, a laboratory of class relations: the great
country house. The trope of the great house is a mainstay of Victorian fiction, particularly the gothic romance with
its heightened interest in declining aristocracy. The gothic romance enabled prose fiction to delve into sexual,
religious, psychological, and political controversies--"deep" troublesome areas that social realism, for one reason or
another, would often balk at or avoid. In the initial characterization of Misselthwaite Manor, the great house in
which Mary is to reside, the action of the text is placed on the edges of a gothic stage. En route to England, Mary
learns that her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven, "lives in a great, big, desolate old house in the country and no one goes
near him. ... He's a hunchback and he's horrid" (9). On Mary's arrival in the mother country, Mrs. Medlock, the
housekeeper, gives her a description of the house itself: "a grand big old place in a gloomy sort of way. ... The house
is six hundred years old, and it's on the edge of the moor, and there's near to a hundred rooms in it, though most of
them's shut up and locked. And there's pictures and fine old furniture and things that's been there for ages" (13).
Although Mr. Craven is a victim of rumor and the target of much exaggeration, the basic tenet of the gossip is valid:
the master of Misselthwaite Manor has ceased intercourse with the world. Since the accidental death of his young,
attractive wife, Archibald Craven has renounced all but the most basic of familial and social duties; he lives only for
the past. He is a man of lost ambitions who is locked inside his own secret world of grief. Mr. Craven may not be a
"hunchback"; but, in Burnett's eyes, he is just as surely incapacitated by his refusal to let the past die. Burnett
implies that a "gloomy" old house, strongly suggestive of the dead weight of history, is the natural objective
correlative for Mr. Craven's damaged psyche. For, no less than a lonely heart, the manor is packed with forgotten
treasures that are largely inaccessible. Thus, I propose that The Secret Garden uses a gothic register but only to
subvert the gothic's usual political calling. Gothic romances are often heroic obituaries for the nineteenth-century
aristocracy; in contrast, Burnett sets herself to the task of rescuing the great country house and the decrepit members
of the elite class who own such properties. Her narrative structure performs this "socially symbolic act" by exploring
the social value of a returning colonial elite, symbolically figured in Mary. We have to look to the ideologies of
discourse and to the dialogic standing of each character to appreciate the intricacy of the salvage process.
When Mrs. Medlock tells Mary about what life in Yorkshire holds, Mary thinks to herself that "it all [sounds] so
unlike India" (9); yet the dramatic tension of the first half of The Secret Garden derives precisely from the
emigrant's failure to appreciate the cultural differences between her old and new home. In India, as a child of the
colonial elite, Mary exercised total authority over native domestic servants. Such power (I shall call it Oriental
despotism: power without just limits) forms her cultural identity, determines her capacity for moral empathy, in
ways that accord with the subjective world of the "Mem Sahib," the canonical feminine ideal of the British Raj--the
good, stable wife who efficiently manages a native-run household. That this vaunted ideal sentimentalized the
difficult reality of the Mem Sahib's life, Burnett hints at in her portrayal of Mary's mother, who is selfish, callous,
vain, and frivolous, an instance of the type of woman--"[she] cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay
people" (1)--Calcutta society was notorious for. Not infrequently, this woman, with her genius for exacerbating
racial tension in her careless treatment of the natives, was seen, particularly by Rudyard Kipling, as a blot on the
empire.
According to Pat Barr in her defense of the "Victorian lady" abroad, the Mem Sahib carried over her frustrations,
difficult feelings induced by the patriarchal character of colonial society, into her dealings with domestic servants; in
this view, her despotism is a form of transference, a compensation--played out in class and racial privilege--for her
own subjection to the "Sahib" (her husband or father), the manly ideal of the British Raj. If Barr's interpretation
holds, then Burnett is not so much interested in the transference process as in its moral and political effects. For, the
relationship between the Mem Sahib and the subaltern, the house mistress and her minion, is premised on a
sadomasochistic model, a power that knows few limits and therefore corrupts. The embryonic stirrings of this power
are rendered visible in "Missie Sahib" Mary's "tyrannical" behavior. With her parental guidance found wanting and
with no fear of sanction or reprimand, Mary insults and even assaults "her Ayah," her Indian body servant. This is
power colored by total egoism; bear in mind its title in this essay--Oriental depotism.
Constituted on religious and racialist values and operating in the service of the British imperial state, Oriental
despotism is the appropriate class system for India, crude faults and all; it cannot function in England without
controversy. This "territorializing" of a certain political ideology--Oriental despotism--is the key to a distinct
pedagogic vein that runs through the book. When Mrs. Medlock collects Mary's luggage at the train station, we are
told that "the little girl did not offer to help, because in India native servants always picked up or carried things, and
it seemed quite proper that other people should wait on one" (16-17). Although England exported its manners to the
colonies, that which is "proper" to India might be wholly improper to England. That is to say, the fitting of propriety
to a colonial setting makes it unfit for unreconstructed re-entry into Britain. Mem Sahibs and Ayahs have no real
place in the British class system. Mary's "sentimental education" is aimed at her recognition of this point.
Authority learns about itself from those it subjects; as Hegel suggested, the subordinate classes are existential
mirrors for the self-serving desires, the political subjectivity, of elites. The action of The Secret Garden expresses a
profound interest in the reflective culture of power. Mary is first estranged from her Missie Sahib perspective by the
behavior and demeanor of Martha, the "untrained Yorkshire rustic" (26) turned housemaid:
Mary listened to [Martha] with a grave, puzzled expression. The native servants she had been used to in India were
not in the least like this. They were obsequious and servile and did not presume to talk to their masters as if they
were their equals. They made salaams and called them "protector of the poor" and names of that sort. Indian servants
were commanded to do things, not asked. It was not the custom to say "please" and "thank you," and Mary had
always slapped her Ayah in the face when she was angry.(22)
Mem Shaib and Ayah--colonist and native, sadist and masochist--these are the opposing players in the theatre of
Oriental despotism. Note that the master's desires annihilate the individuality of the servant; the servant loses her
self as the master develops her own. "Good natured Yorkshire Martha" (24-25) fails to appreciate the awesome
character of protective power and thereby negates "Mistress Mary's" ability to utterly control her. In contrast to the
typical "Indian servant," Martha refuses to see herself as a mere instrument of her social superiors. She resolves to
do her duties, but no more; she is thus able to hold onto a core of self-worth, the very quality power would destroy.
In Martha, Mary sees the limits of her own authority, the relativity of despotism, and its possible inapplicability to
the Yorkshire scene. The lesson is also learned from her initial confrontations with Ben Weatherstaff, the head
gardener. In "her imperious little Indian way," Mary first speaks to him as if he were "a native" (23). She soon
discovers that "a cross, sturdy old Yorkshireman was not accustomed to salaam to his masters, and be merely
commanded to do things" (83). In short, she discovers the crucial difference between the colonial and British class
systems; the former rests on power without dialogue, the latter on power with a vein of consensus. I now turn to the
motif of the garden--its significance for reading class.
"Gardens and Fresh Air"
... a new kind of garden ... a garden of children. This is the true garden. All others come as the prophecy of the
human garden of paradise.--Margaret McMillan
No great house is complete without its garden. In the trope of a perfect verdant space--cultivated by religious,
political, and aesthetic values (picture Eden or Arcadia)--the garden has long figured as an image of pastoral Utopia.
Mythically, the garden is a site of innocence, eloquent of harmony and order and opposed to mundane history. In
aesthetic terms, the exquisite artifice of the garden, what Kipling called its "glory," represents nature at its most
cultured or culture at its most admirable. In purely political terms, as demonstrated by the works of Jane Austen, the
pastoral ideal of the garden holds a certain sway over the imagination of the landowner; the garden implies an
ordered workforce, based on divided labor, with the landowner as its natural spiritual head. A summary is
warranted: whether as a myth of social freedom or a myth of ordained rule, in pastoral dreams of political
transcendence, all Utopian roads lead to a garden.
So many themes flow into Misselthwaite Manor's garden that its meaning is textually overdetermined. A
symptomatic reading, careful in its use of the allegorical inference, can tease out the nexus of values manifest in the
"deserted," "closed," and "mysterious" garden (adjectives that converge on the category of the "secret") and discover
what "symbolic capital," what cultural meaning, is realized for dreams of social perfection in the discourse of the
exchange. Burnett invites us to read the garden as metaphor. Metaphor compels the signifier to release new meaning
from itself; the signifier, however, can cause metaphor to "turn," to fall into a self-sustaining controversy, which
ruins the desired order of thematic significances. This perplexed scenario can be argued for in less abstract terms by
reading Burnett's principal metaphor. Three discourses meet inside the walls of "the secret garden": a
Wordsworthian romanticism, a progressivist child psychology, and an Oriental mysticism. As the metaphor of the
garden turns, it forces this putative trio into conversation; competition; and, possibly, contradiction--a subversion of
the comfortable Utopianism of the text.
In one respect, Wordsworthian romanticism names a rhetoric of values in which the perfect space of nature, the
Utopian moment of culture, becomes a figuration of the self as opposed to an objective entity in the world. That is to
say, the Wordsworthian critique of materialism (the industrial society) is at bottom an assertion of an individualistic
spiritual code. A celebration of imagination, of that which is unschooled, the code naturally involves a search for the
archetypal child, or what Carolyn Steedman calls "the meaning of childhood" (63) for a fallen adult world. The
Wordsworthian child is a complex ideological commentary on the adulteration of "virgin" subjectivity, the forced
narrowing of our capacity for reverie, and creative self-understanding. In losing our ability to commune with nature,
we lose a vital part of ourselves.
Not to be confused with the cloying little "angels" of Victorian fiction (cf. Little Lord Fauntleroy), the
Wordsworthian conception of the child exerted a powerful and lasting hold over literary and social institutions,
which represented the meaning of childhood for British culture at large. In The Secret Garden, Wordsworthian
themes are extensively quoted in the character of Dickon. Dickon--"a common moor boy ... as strong as a pony" (89,
176) who knows "how to talk to the wild creatures" (171) and who, though practically illiterate, knows "all the
flowers by their country names" (185)--constitutes the ideal standard of physical and mental harmony by which the
other characters are to be judged. Indeed, his role in the text is to bring Mary and Colin to an awareness of what they
might be capable of if only they relinquished their pride. The emphasis on Dickon's athleticism and his unschooled,
superior intelligence rests on the Wordsworthian conviction that pristine nature is the best parent of the child;
however, it also alludes to a contemporary social discourse concerned with weakened, stunted, and indolent
children's bodies, what might be called a Spartan regimen for the needy young.
From the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the First World War, the social definition of childhood
underwent significant reinterpretation. Broadly speaking, the working-class child was transformed from a laboring
subject into a target for "disciplinary" education.4 The transformation took place within a rhetoric of spiritual well
being (i.e., a society was "civilized" to the extent that it protected its children) and a rhetoric of social hygiene as an
expedient political goal. Both rhetorics converged in areas of state policy. A key thinker and a major activist in these
areas was Margaret McMillan, journalist, writer, educator, and Labour party propagandist. McMillan was acutely
aware that, in many industrial areas, children were "a constituency in need of rescue" (Steedman 9). As a socialist,
she believed that, if one were to have any chance of rescuing working-class life from the hell it was steeped in, one
had to rescue the castaways of the age, slum children. Clearly influenced by the romantic theories of Friedrich
Froebel, the famous nineteenth-century proponent of the kindergarten, McMillan--in 1911, the year in which The
Secret Garden was published--established a "camp school" (i.e., a city garden) for the sick and impoverished
children of Deptford, South London. Bridging the divide between education ideology and welfare policy, the camp
school was an ideal cultural space designed to counter the spiritual deficits of urban working-class childhood. The
organizing principle of the project was explicitly Wordsworthian. The garden sought to realize the organic unity,
what Wordsworth called "the primal sympathy," that allegedly existed between the child and the natural world. 5
McMillan's descriptions of the camp are never less than lyrical; she called the camp "a new kind of garden ... a
garden of children" (McMillan, Rachel McMillan 88), a place where "our rickety children, our cramped ... and ...
deformed children get back to earth with its magnetic currents, and the free-blowing wind" (qtd. in Steedman 90). In
comparison with the raw squalor of the city, the garden offered a transcendent moral aesthetic--that of nature itself.
"Will [the] children ever forget the healing joy of such nearness to the Spirit as is possible even in Deptford?" asked
McMillan (qtd. in Steedman 84-86).
The significance of Margaret McMillan's camp school for reading The Secret Garden resides in a crucial
ideological vision promoted by both urban project and text: the notion that gardens constitute a form of social
therapy and that they can rescue culture from political controversy, even from national decline. In the true spirit of
the liberal reformer, McMillan was interested passionately in giving vent to the imaginative capabilities of the poor,
but, in order to substantiate her cause, she tapped into a social hygiene debate, "a vocabulary of national efficiency"
(Steedman 54), which had as its absolute subject the imperialist (and quasi-racist) discourse of a declining national
culture. As Steedman puts it, "in the first years of the twentieth century ... the rather casual public interest in the
health of schoolchildren suddenly became a widespread fear over the apparent deterioration of the British workingclass" (54), the very class that was needed to maintain the empire. 6 Thus, the urban garden was not only called upon
to take the slum out of the working-class child, it was also set the task of building fit bodies and keeping the bulldog
spirit in place. The dovetailing of progressive Wordsworthian tenets with the reactionary politics of empire belongs,
perhaps, to the history of the relationship between British socialism and nationalism, a history that cannot be dealt
with here. But we can glimpse some of the contours of that history in the textuality of The Secret Garden, where the
garden as therapeutic political space is center stage.
A shorthand definition of the ideal "disciplinary" regime for training children's bodies, and cultivating their spirits, is
the phrase "gardens and fresh air" (139). This regime is particularly associated with Susan Sowerby, Martha and
Dickon's mother, who functions as a stark corrective to the example of Mrs. Lennox, the mother who fails to
appreciate her familial duties. Susan's advice to others on how to raise children would not look out of place in a
Margaret McMillan treatise.7 For instance, her prescription for lifting Mary out of her habitual Indian enervation is
that Mary should be given "simple healthy food" and must be encouraged to "run wild in the garden ... she needs
liberty and fresh air and romping about" (109). Little wonder, then, that Mr. Craven sees Susan as "healthyminded"
(109). Susan's philosophy, however, is more than a matter of social medicine; it is very much a politics of fitting
social elites to rule over their particular cultural domain.
The narrative of The Secret Garden can be seen as structured by the incompletion of the three characters--Mary,
Colin, and Mr. Craven; we are led to suspect that their respective social failings--Mary's cultural ignorance, Colin's
hypochondria, and Mr. Craven's chronic depression--will, one way or another, find resolution at the close of the tale.
The elitist ramifications of the Spartan ideal of health are manifest in the teleological characterization of Colin.
Colin, like Mary, has had his identity shaped by the psychological impact of surviving a fractured family; his
(unfounded) fear that he will eventually develop a "hunchback" is a none too subtle way of stating that he carries the
paralysis of the Craven estate on his back. In other words, his indolent, impotent body implies a social critique of the
functioning of Misselthwaite Manor. Colin's retreat from his body (coupled with his father's retreat from parental
responsibility: "I don't know anything about children" [107]) incites him to practice on his subordinates emotional
manipulation and outright tyranny. "He [Colin] ... could have anything he asked for and was never made to do
anything he did not like to do" (117). A despot to the bone, "everyone is obliged to do what pleases" him (117). The
similarity of Colin's behavior to the initial deportment of his Anglo-Indian cousin is all too obvious; both Colin and
Mary act despotically because their (socially ratified) egoism keeps them from knowing better. As we have seen,
Mary is eventually "decentered" by her relations with Martha and Ben Weatherstaff. For Colin, the situation is
somewhat different; his overweening social power is entirely home grown, whereas Mary's is the strange fruit of
elsewhere. How, then, does Burnett undo the authoritarianism, the despotic ego, of the "very spoiled boy" (28)?
Quite simply, she sends him to the Wordsworthian clinic--the "garden of children"--where he imbibes the "magic"
elixir of "spirit." Note that throughout The Secret Garden a theme of spiritual egalitarianism consistently undercuts
the realpolitik of class-based elitism. The animality of Dickon does not suggest slowness or barbarism (the orthodox
snobbish line on "unsophisticated yokels"), rather, it pertains to the free and ideal state of nature, the true home of
ethical values. Mindful of the romantic democracy of the imagination, where vital insight is less about erudite
learning than the flight of individual desire, Burnett celebrates the preeminence of immediate experience in the very
simplicity of Dickon. In this sense, the "common cottage boy" (154) is as much, or even more than, his evident
social superiors. For Colin's alienation from the body makes him ignorant of what sensual life has to offer: "I hate
fresh air and I don't want to go out" (116), he insists. As Mary tells Dickon, Colin knows "a good many things out of
books but he doesn't know anything else" (148). The literate but unworldly Colin might thus be seen in the ideal
space of the garden as an upper-class version of the deserving slum child. "I should not mind fresh air in a secret
garden" (121), says he, after listening to Mary's promotions.
Work and play in the garden enable Colin to transcend his fear of the body; a "rapturous belief" in the wonder of the
sensual life and the "realization" of its dependence on nature takes hold of him and infuses him with backbone or
moral character (248). Translated into a social context, Colin's "epiphany" valorizes the garden as a moderating
political influence. In fine, brute despotism--getting one's "own way in every detail" (264)--is critically undermined
by a moralistic appeal to a culture of discipline, a value system of humility and consideration for "other people"
(152). Thus, as Utopian social therapy, the secret garden implies that political stability, balanced relations between
elites and their domestic subordinates, is more at home in discipline than in despotism. Notice that Colin's
recuperation makes him fit not only for child's play but also to inherit the title and paternal status of his father--the
attribution "Master Colin" is the last phrase of the entire narrative, which draws all the uncertainties of the text into a
closed social statement, like tributary roads converging on Rome. Allegorical inferences, therefore, lead me to assert
that Margaret McMillan's dream of using the garden to take the slums out of working-class children, becomes in
Burnett's novel, a dream of using the garden to put the young, gentleman back into the heart of the great house. But,
inside that house, political controversy still reigns.
A Rajah in Yorkshire
I have been talking today about the acts and symptoms of British rule in India. What is its basis? It is not military
force, it is not civil authority, it is not prestige, though all these are part of it. If our rule is to last in India it must rest
on a more solid basis. It must depend on the eternal moralities of righteousness and justice.--Lord Curzon
What intrigues me is the notion that despotism is forever expelled and yet somehow retrieved by the text. This
curious "respiratory" action--forcing out the irritant only to draw it back in--directly relates to a concatenation of
cultural values associated with race, class, and gender; the remittal of these values covers a range of ideology and
discourse from cultural authenticity to social harmony, from national well being to political authority. This range
begins and ends at the same difficult point in history--the problematic of the empire coming home, the ambiguous
challenge of blowback.
I contend that the narrative interest in making damaged children whole creates a space, a sort of political reserve, for
rehabilitating the language and cultural values of empire. The Secret Garden is premised on the idea that
environment determines character; class, region, and nationality are seen as the parameters of consciousness. Mary's
egoism, her lack of courtesy and manners, precisely results from her upbringing in the colonial setting, where
servants minister to every need and desire and encourage indolence and complacency. Thus, Burnett tells us that
Mary "was a disagreeable child ... who did not know that she was so herself" (11). As Mary learns, à la belle étoile,
to temper privilege with grace, only then is the author ready to concede that she is "getting on" (44) in terms of
moral development. The point is clear: children owe their natures to the nature of their social conditioning--"where
you tend a rose ... a thistle cannot grow" (257). Yet, the general reasoning that informs this worthy platitude is
somewhat contradicted by the outcome of the textual struggle between elite political philosophies. I am saying that
the "thistle" of despotism grows in such a way as to strangulate discipline's "rose."
Despotism is properly an Oriental phenomenon. Despotism belongs to India. 8 This is first implied by the narrative
critique of Mary and is then openly stated in a telling anecdote, which Mary relates to Colin:
Once in India I saw a boy who was a Rajah. He had rubies and emeralds and diamonds stuck all over him. He spoke
to his people just as you spoke to Martha. Everybody had to do everything he told them--in a minute. I think they
would have been killed if they hadn't.(130-31)
This carefree anatomy of the "exotic" barbarities of "the East" is not short on the typical Orientalist ruses which
Edward Said, in Orientalism, alerts us to. Note how Mary passes from innocent eyewitness to political ethnographer
("I saw" ... "I think"); notice also the implicit connection between outrageous luxury and violent rule, which has
been, and remains, a standard Western trope of the Oriental political scene. The fact that Burnett can furnish such a
description at a time when despotism was gaining widespread association with British imperial rule might be seen as
an instance of the literary sleight of hand colonial discourse excels in; yet, the passage also dances to the tune of
blowback. The memory of the Rajah is brought forth by the (very British) class structure that allows Colin (the
gentry) to abuse Martha (the peasantry) with impunity.9
Despotism is a creature of the East. The spiritual trajectory of the text is to remove those aspects of the East
considered unsuitable for elite social performance in an English setting. The transformation of the colonial subject
anticipates a similar transformation in Master Colin, her home-based cousin. Thus, it seems fair to say that both
characters are disoriented, stripped of alien authoritarian political tendencies. This staging of the English class
question on an Orientalist platform is not as one way as it might seem. Class relations at the manor are filtered
through the ideal(izing) medium of the garden in a way that challenges the liberal conception of social hierarchy and
allows the narrative to arrive at what must be called back-door despotism. The key to it all is a symbolic power, a
metaphorical valence accorded the proper noun "India."
India is signified in the text by at least two modes of discourse, both Orientalist at root: on the one hand, the rhetoric
of despotism (values and images of servants and potentates, minions and rajahs) and, on the other, the rhetoric of
mysticism (the discourse on "fakirs," "animal charmers," storytelling, and priests, those farthest removed from the
cares and concerns of this world). Now The Secret Garden criticizes the former and largely celebrates the latter, but
elements of the rhetoric of despotism are smuggled into the praise of mysticism. This secret readmission of the
inadmissible (power without limits) through the back door, as it were, is betrayed by the functional value of
"magic." Magic, we are told, constitutes the index of Oriental mysticism and is particularly associated with the
Eastern "tradition" of storytelling. Leaving aside the questionable ethnographic values which typically inform this
kind of cultural constructionism, Burnett's interest in magic, in prerational intuitive force, while leading her in life to
spiritualism, leads her text to the heart of mundane politics: the issue of the appropriate balance of power. As her
Ayah was to her in India, Mary, in Yorkshire, becomes a function of Colin's feeble body, which is overly fixated on
itself and socially performs without proper limits. To calm his volatile nerves and to send him off to sleep, Mary
massages Colin's hand and sings "a very low little chanting song in Hindustani" (124; cf. 152). If Mary is an "Ayah,"
then Colin should be the equivalent of a colonial elite. But this is not so; he is described as a "boy rajah" (135), a
"young rajah" (175), "Mr. Rajah" (153), "a rajah flesh and blood" (204); at no point in the text is he equated with the
"Sahib," the British imperial ideal. Thus, colonialism and the English class system are conveniently displaced into
the alleged social patterns of the Oriental scene. This might not matter if the text did not claim for this displacement
an absolute political value.
The politics of Oriental despotism, summarily dismissed in the great house, comes into its own in the garden. Colin
is waited on by servants, literally hand and foot. His authority is so total that "Mary could not help remembering
how the young native prince ... had waved to command his servants to approach with salaams and receive his
orders" (176). A chapter later, Burnett describes "the rajah," Master Colin, waving his hand to command his
"manservant" and his "nurse" (192). Fired by the challenge of manual labor (i.e., the Spartan regimen) and the fear
of appearing less than fit to rule in front of his social inferiors, the "fretful invalid" (254) is soon on the road to
becoming a "real boy" (241), confident, intelligent, athletic. The fact that magic--the rhetoric of mysticism ("that
sense of the beauty of land and sky" [265])--makes for a social reality of the garden that undercuts its value as a
place of spiritual equality is an ideological contradiction hardly resolved by the text. If resolution does occur, then it
is achieved in a manner that represents an uncertain assimilation of colonial power, a power which had largely
operated free from the moderating measures deemed necessary at home. Power has its secrets, and it is to these we
now turn.
The Secret Dreams of Power
And there you'll see the Gardeners, the men and / 'prentice boys / Told off to do as they are bid and do it without
noise.--Rudyard Kipling, "The Glory of the Garden"
On the whole, however, it may be admitted, that our Indian government is the best example of a well administered
despotism, on a large scale existing in the world ... our rule in India must needs be despotic.--Sir Charles Wentworth
Dilke
The province of magic is essential human equality, the classless society. Magic and the Spartan regimen of health
overlap in the character of Dickon. With his Pan-like pipes, Dickon can charm animals "just as the natives in India
charm snakes" (131). "There really was a sort of magic about Dickon. ... 'He'd be at home in Buckingham Palace or
at the bottom of coal mine'" (188). Dickon encapsulates the best of what "the East" has to offer; his intelligent
spirituality liberates him from the strictures of class and enables him to exist as a "free spirit" in a society of radical
unequals. It is clear that Burnett wants us to think of Dickon as a juvenile fertility god. But the mythological angle
does not close down the house of political debate; it creates yet another point of entry. For, if gods are metaphors for
various social interests and schemes of power, then whose garden of interests does Dickon cultivate?
Far from being an independent spiritual hero, Dickon is a creature of a ruling elite fantasy, a secret desire of the
more reactionary face of the British class system--a rank domestic subaltern. No master could ever find Dickon
wanting; the "common cottage boy" (154) is the perfect trusty retainer, a mirror in which a master might find a fair
reflection of himself, a prime worthy. The worthy is a dream of the "self sacrificing person" (150), invariably
apolitical and lower class. Burnett gives us a glimpse of how the colonial model of the worthy (the Ayah or body
servant) might insinuate itself in the politics of the mother country as a consequence of blowback.
That which is latent in Dickon becomes wholly manifest in the character of Ben Weatherstaff. If you recall, Ben
Weatherstaff, the blunt old boy of the earth, had aided in the collapse of Mary's despotic ego by refusing to provide
it with a suitable narcissistic reflection. Burnett openly states that Yorkshire peasants are in no way as pliable as
their Indian counterparts. But then the narrative proceeds to contradict this statement; in the dreamy space of the
secret garden, Ben completely submits to the "Oriental" authority of Master Colin, as he doffs his cap and even
recognizes the heir to the manor as a kind of "king" (211). Thus, as regards the children's drama of nature worship,
for all that, Ben is usually opposed to participating in "prayer meetings," "this being the rajah's affair he did not
resent it, and was, indeed, inclined to be grateful at being called upon to assist" (220). Perhaps the acme of Ben
Weatherstaff's loyalty is the fact that he, seemingly untroubled by differing levels of culture or class, can accept
Colin as part of a regional family. "Tha'rt a Yorkshire lad for sure," he insists.
The issue of belonging is felt everywhere in the text. For an elite to be recognized by a subordinate as belonging to
the same cultural grouping clearly confers upon elite status an air of political legitimacy. This, as might be imagined,
was no small problem for the British Empire, dependent as it was on the consent--albeit enforced--of at least some
of the colonized peoples. For the colonial elite, belonging to India meant exercising power firmly but fairly, what Sir
Charles Wentworth Dilke called a "paternal despotism" (qtd. in Bennet 238). This moderate ideal of immoderate
power migrates to England in the guise of the Yorkshire worthy, who accepts authority without complaint. For
contra the notion of their distinct cultural difference, a clear interest is shown in the possibility of Yorkshire as a
substitute India, a surrogate colonial space. The theme develops on the back of an ethnography of the rural poor.
From the germ of Mary's reckoning that "Yorkshire people seemed strange" (66), a branch of allusion grows to keep
them just so: "to talk about Dickon meant to talk about the moor and about the cottage and fourteen people who
lived in it on sixteen shillings a week--and children who got fat on the moor grass like wild ponies" (134). We reach
the lives of the poor through indirection; the Yorkshire peasantry is not so much shown as narrated through
stereotypical indices--indigence, rough readiness, and "cottages crowded with children" (257). It is no difficult task
from here to find parallels with colonial India. Thus, to Mary, "broad Yorkshire" becomes the equivalent of a native
Indian "dialect," "which only a few people understood" (55). Mary, soon to be followed by Colin, learns Yorkshire
on the basis that "in India a native was always pleased if you knew his speech" (100). But, often, the colonizer
learned the language not to "please" the colonized but to cement his own social control.
I sense that what we have been talking about is the dream life of the imperial ego, the colonizing mentality which
abhors resistance--be it in the form of a territorial border, a cultural otherness, or a language difference. As a product
of the history of colonial conquest, the imperial ego has long stood as the destination of so much nationalist and
class ideology--"Britishness" just is the ability to manage empire. Hence Gladstone's assertion that "the sentiment of
empire may be called innate in every Briton. If there are exceptions, they are like those of men born blind or lame
among us" (qtd. in Bennet 264). "Gardens and fresh air" are a distant echo in Gladstone's statement. He would have
us believe that physical capability--interpreted as a willingness to go abroad and seize territory--is the greatest of
national political virtues.10 This sort of reasoning is the sine qua non of the imperial ego.
What happens to the imperial ego when it has no place to go? The Secret Garden elliptically explores this large
question--one of the largest of the twentieth century--through the characterization of Master Colin. Mr. Craven's
failure to put limits on his son's desires encourages Colin to feel "that the whole world belonged to him" (118).
Indeed, the "rude little brute" (212) is nothing less than a crypto Robinson Crusoe: "he had lived on a sort of desert
island all his life and as he had been the king of it he had made his own manners and had no one to compare himself
with" (212). Robinson Crusoe is the fullest expression, but also the reductio et absurdum, of the border-crossing,
other-hating, self-loving imperial ego. Crusoe lives for himself and has a world unto himself in which to do so--no
wonder his story has held such attraction for colonial discourse! Now Colin would be Crusoe; but a world of
difference exists between the "New World" and Yorkshire. It is only when Colin enters the secret garden--that is, an
ideal island--that his Robinson Crusoe fantasy becomes viable.11 In other words, the garden is a compensatory space
for the mental drama of colonialism--but a colonialism of certain cultural limits. An allegorical inference is the
evidence that I offer. At one point in the text, Susan Sowerby, the mother who knows best, relates to Mrs. Medlock a
parable about territory, ownership, morality, and aggression:
When I was at school my jography [sic] told as th' world was shaped like an orange an' I found out before I was ten
that th' whole orange doesn't belong to nobody. No one owns more than his bit of a quarter ... [if] ... you ... think as
you own th' whole orange ... you'll find out you're mistaken, an' you won't find out without hard knocks.(178)
Whether or not intended, the banal simile of the orange encodes a critique of the arrogance of imperial power, the
very power which Colin is keen to inherit. On this issue, the text pulls in two directions at once. For, although Colin
learns "that the whole orange does not belong to him," and thus discovers "the size of his own quarter" (190), within
that quarter he is both the Kubla Khan and Robinson Crusoe of Yorkshire.
In the view of the eminent apologist, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (quoted above), British imperialism in India is at
best a benign despotism. In her evocation of some aspects of blowback, Burnett implies that said despotism is also
the most efficient way of managing domestic class struggle. Overseas, the imperial ego expended much effort "to
reproduce in the alien environment some similitude of dear home" (Barr 25); at home, the same ego yearns for India.
The desire for India to be Yorkshire and for Yorkshire to be India is, at bottom, a desire for a working knowledge of
power, a desire for absolute order--a fixed social world of lords and peasants, or rajahs and subalterns. We are, of
course, expounding a never-never land, the land of fantasy, myth, and fairy tale. Witness the description of Dickon
pushing Colin in his wheelchair around the garden: "it was like being taken in state round the country of a magic
king and queen and shown all the mysterious riches it contained" (197). This sentimental vignette speaks volumes
about the precocity of the imperial ego and the culture of elitist Utopias.
Conclusion: Ugly Ducklings and Beautiful Swans
England in the East is not the England that we know. Flousy Britannia, with her anchor and ship, becomes a
mysterious Oriental despotism, ruling a sixth of the human race, nominally for the native's own good. ...--Sir Charles
Wentworth Dilke
When Mary first arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, she conducts an exploration of its great interior, "the hundred
rooms with closed doors" (48). What she discovers is not so much her roots as her own alienation from the august
cultural tradition of her ancestral family: "the portraits of men and women in queer, grand costumes made of silk and
velvet" make her feel like "a little girl from India" (49), who is trespassing in their house. The irony of colonialism-that one could be English in India but not easily English in England itself--could hardly be made plainer. It takes an
exchange of social energies to allow Mary to feel at home. As a displaced person from without, Mary transmits a
superior cultural force, which reinvigorates the stale and paralyzed order of the Yorkshire scene. (Mark that prior to
her arrival "everything" in the Manor is "locked up" [115].) In return, she discovers the garden of delights, which
she had dreamt of, but never realized, in India (8). Mary's passage from migrant to native plays out, at an individual
level, the dynamic of cultural reciprocity that always informs, to a lesser or greater degree, the lived experience of
assimilation.
However, the space that defines all the others is, ultimately, not the secret garden itself but the "little Indian room" in
Misselthwaite Manor, "where there is a cabinet full of ivory elephants" (242). This quasimuseum, with its exotic
curio collection, constitutes the beau idéal of assimilation. Neatly lodged in the great house, so that it might enter
the British cultural tradition, the cabinet of Oriental artifacts becomes a model of otherness displayed, framed, and
under control. In other words, the "Indian room" is really about the mother country, a quotation of national prowess
and a tribute to the British imperial spirit. Not unlike that promiscuous cultural dialectic where the other defines the
self, the Indian room makes the great house truly British--a curious cross-cultural irony whose sun has yet to set.
The Secret Garden is a richly confused text: the narrative "turns" on points of ideological dissonance. "The garden
of children" is simply a catch-all space--a meeting ground for social ideologies, literary conventions, and political
dreams. It makes known how ideology works by aesthetics, particularly the aesthetic of nature. Nature is the
metaphorical medium where desirable metamorphoses can occur: thus "the mysterious garden" creatively redefines
"Oriental" values while providing a spiritual laboratory in which children might grow. The Utopian drive of
ideology is to turn "thistles" into "roses," ugly ducklings into beautiful swans. The Secret Garden reflects and
refracts the work of ideology and leaves troubled all notions of Utopia.
According to Humphrey Carpenter, Burnett's novel is "the last [children's] book which uses the Arcadian image
quite so comfortably. It is the last occasion on which we meet with utopia pure and simple" (190). Carpenter argues
that growing suburbanization negated "the garden of England" as both a social reality and an attainable spiritual
ideal. I have endeavored to show that Utopia is neither "pure" nor "simple." And, moreover, as Raymond Williams
points out in The Country and the City, the sense that the garden of England is disappearing has marked English
literature for quite sometime. But the neofeudal politics of the garden ideal has remained extraordinarily resonant.
Doubtless, the end of empire has much to do with its preservation. The "paternal despotism" of the Raj may well
have found a home in the great British class system, articulating itself in the nostalgic dreams (and practices) of so
much contemporary politics.12 For instance, ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher clearly governed on the
assumption that a country was like a great household.
Ninety years ago, J. A. Hobson, in his classic study of empire, warned against the reactionary potential of blowback,
the possibility that thistles would strangle the roses and that ugly ducklings would take the place of beautiful swans.
I close this essay with a passage that still holds meaning for today:
[T]he South of England is full of men of local influence in politics and society whose character has been framed in
our despotic Empire, and whose incomes are chiefly derived from the maintenance and furtherance of this despotic
rule. Not a few enter our local councils, or takes posts in our constabulary or our prisons: everywhere they stand for
coercion and resistance to reform. ... It is, indeed, a nemesis of Imperialism that the arts and crafts of tyranny,
acquired and exercized in our unfree Empire, should be turned against our liberties at home. Those who have felt
surprise at the total disregard or the open contempt displayed by the aristocracy and plutocracy of this land for the
infringements of the liberties of the subject and the abrogation of constitutional rights and usages have not taken
sufficiently into account the steady reflux of this poison of irresponsible autocracy from our "unfree, intolerant,
aggressive" Empire.(Hobson 375)
Notes
1. A reduced version of this paper was presented at the 1992 Annual Convention of the Modern Language
Association in New York on the panel "Theories of Class in Children's Literature." I would like to express my
gratitude to those colleagues whose criticisms helped to shape the finished product.
2. Immigration was first turned into a major political issue in the 1950s. As early as 1954, Lord Swinton, the
secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, intimated that future immigration controls would necessarily be
racist: "I appreciate the force of the contention that, if we are to legislate for restrictions on the entry of British
subjects and their employment here, the legislation should be nondiscriminatory in form. This will not, however,
conceal the fact that the problem with which we are concerned is that of the colored immigrants from colonial
territories" (qtd. in Cale 15). The current concern over the question of asylum seekers addresses the same problem
that Swinton identified: too many people of color with a legal right to residence.
3. Sentiments of cultural presence and absence wrestle with one another interminably in the colonial situation.
Hence J. A. Froude's advice: "Let it be once established that an Englishman emigrating to Canada, or the Cape, or
Australia, or New Zealand, did not forfeit his nationality, that he was still on English soil as much as if he were in
Devonshire or Yorkshire, and would remain an Englishman while the English empire lasted" (qtd. in Bennet 247).
The breathtaking arrogance of Froude's formulation, its nationalistic obliteration of geography, reveals how imperial
Englishness is invested with far more significance than it can meaningfully carry. In other words, English national
identity becomes dangerously overdetermined and stretched too far, it becomes too thin--too anemic--to signify
anything essential about Englishness.
4. In her excellent study of the early history of the infant and child welfare movement in England, War Is Good for
Babies and Other Young Children (1987), Debroah Dwork shows how industrialism, imperialism, and militarism
played major roles in inaugurating "the establishment of a welfare system" (206), itself the forerunner of "the
modern welfare state" (207). Employing an incisive form of discourse analysis, Dwork persuasively argues that "the
philosophy of Eugenics, the policy of national efficiency, and the reaction to the Boer War did not create the infant
and child welfare movement, but they did focus attention and provide a stimulus for it. ... Furthermore, concern
about national degeneration provided a justification and a rhetoric for ... health care. It validated an enlarged role for
the physician to play in this issue of national importance. ... [T]his justification and rhetoric were used repeatedly to
convince the public (particularly the opposition) of the national, imperial importance of such seemingly mundane
matters as milk, meals, and routine medical examinations" (20-21). In this ideological context, the school became
the key site, and the schoolchild the key target, for the exercise of reformist knowledge and power. For instance,
Margaret McMillan was a member of the Bradford School Board from 1894 to 1902; during her eight-year tenure,
she "promoted the cause of physical health and hygiene. She introduced the use of school baths, instituted
programmes to provide meals for students, and it was she ... who undertook the first recorded medical inspection of
elementary school children in England" (Dwork 182). Opponents of child welfare systems argued that such
programs violated the essential privacy of the family and therefore expressed the antiliberal bias of socialism. In one
respect, there is much truth to this claim: the school welfare system effectively made the state the ultimate guardian
of the child. However, it should also be noted that capitalism has a direct interest in "socialist" initiatives insofar as
they secure healthy workers and capable soldiers. Thus, Thomas McNamara, a schoolteacher and liberal MP,
campaigned vigorously for educational reform and child welfare; not on the basis of radical political critique, but on
the (quasi-eugenic) grounds of "national efficiency." He stated: "All this [reform] sounds like rank Socialism. ... But
as a matter of fact it is, in reality, first class imperialism" (qtd. in Dwork 178). An interesting history of the
crosscurrents between child welfare, empire, and socialism--as played out in the themes of early twentieth-century
British children's literature--remains to be written.
5. In romantic ideology, childhood and the natural world stand as paradigms of "paradise lost." Indeed, in one sense,
romanticism is precisely the attempt to synthesize the "child" in all of us--the imagination--with the only Utopia
available to us on this earth, nature unspoiled. The key bridge between self and the natural world is small-scale
agricultural labor (hence the Wordsworthian celebration of the simple peasant). Elements of this view were
preserved in the regimen of McMillan's camp school. According to McMillan, children ought to learn how to tend
vegetables for "nothing trains the mind and fills it with wholesome memories better than carrying out all of this
work" (McMillan, Nursery School 91). As Carolyn Steedman puts it, "in McMillan's writing ... the garden is able to
do what working class mothers are increasingly seen as unable to do; to promote speech in children, to allow, as the
vegetable beds did, the naming of many things" (Steedman 12). The theme of the vegetable garden as the locus of
discourse and desire is explicit in The Secret Garden. Thus, Colin's discontent cannot be cured by "picture books"
and "medicine," but only by going "into a garden and watch[ing] things growing." For, as Mary tells us, such
activity "did [her] good" (128). Mary's realization is later echoed by Dickon: "I was thinkin' that if he [Colin] was
out here [in the garden] he wouldn't be watchin' for lumps to grow on his back; he'd be watchin' for buds to break on
th' rose bushes, an' he'd likely be healthier" (147). In The Secret Garden, children recover the lost world of the
peasant. Of course, in doing so, they rehabilitate a paternalistic social hierarchy where peasants are children to be
controlled.
6. A clear exposition of what the British establishment thought about the urban poor was provided by Lord Rosebery
in a speech at Glasgow University in 1900. His subject was Britain's "race problem": that is, how to improve the
imperial race. Rosebery was adamant that this could only be achieved in rural areas and not in the cities: "In the
great cities, in the rookeries and slums which shall survive, an imperial race cannot be reared. You can scarcely
produce anything in those foul nests of crime and disease but a progeny doomed from its birth to misery and
ignominy" (qtd. in Richards 33). For Rosebery and his cothinkers, there was no question that those who dwelled in
urban "foul nests" were in some sense responsible for their own fate. Even a relatively "enlightened" thinker like
William Beveridge, the main inspirer of the welfare state, shared Rosebery's elitist contempt for the so-called
dependent classes. "The line between independence and dependence," wrote Beveridge in 1906, "between the
efficient and the unemployable has to be made clearer and broader" (qtd. in Richards 33). Karl Pearson, the
prominent eugenicist and mathematician, played no small part in developing the type of classification system--a sort
of spiritual taxonomy--which Beveridge called for. According to Pearson, conflict between nations was really only
another manifestation of the eternal struggle for dominance, which Darwin had termed "the survival of the fittest."
Thus, for Pearson, the racial stock of a nation was crucial to its progress through history. Like so many other racial
theorists, Pearson was a socialist; in many ways he anticipated the concerns of National Socialism. Consider these
extraordinary words: "From the standpoint of the nation we want to inculcate a feeling of shame in the parents of a
weakling, whether it be mentally or physically unfit. We want parents to grasp that they have given birth to a new
citizen, and this involves ... a duty towards the community in respect of his breed and nurture" (Pearson, National
Life 27). Or consider the following proposals, which surely anticipate the racist totalitarianism depicted by Aldous
Huxley in Brave New World and, perhaps, in our own day by Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: "society
will have in some fashion to interfere and restrict the anti-social in the matter of childbearing." "Anti-social" for
Pearson meant "the propagators of inefficient and unnecessary human beings" (Pearson, "Socialism and Sex" 417,
424). Pearson's prejudice towards weaklings and his celebration of the yeoman Englishman is mirrored in The Secret
Garden to the extent that the sickly Colin is assimilated to the ideal of virility represented by Dickon.
7. In terms of sexual politics, the action of The Secret Garden unfolds in the ideological space between two ideal
poles: on the one hand, a discourse of the father, which articulates the social reproduction of the appropriate form of
manhood, and, on the other hand, a discourse of the mother, which relates to the role of the family in consolidating
the social order. To the extent that her narrative focuses on the demands of authority and propriety, Burnett
investigates the patriarchal imperatives hidden in the desire for the mother. Mary Lennox is rejected by her mother;
yet, her mother--or the mother imago--remains a telling object of desire. As Burnett puts it, "Mary had liked to look
at her mother from a distance" (7). The loss of her mother and father leaves Mary orphaned as well as stateless, the
implication being that the family is a model for the nation state. In the mother country, England, Mary searches for a
mother figure who will help her to assimilate to the prevailing cultural order (i.e., the father's word or "the law of the
land"). We are told that Martha's "familiar talk" captivates Mary: "when Martha told stories of what Mother said or
did they always sounded comfortable" (47). "I like your mother," said Mary, "she doesn't seem to be like the
mothers in India" (56, 79). Susan Sowerby, Martha's mother, becomes the human equivalent of the garden as
therapeutic space: "she is the comfortable wonderful mother creature" (229), the subject who knows best, as
evidenced by her impromptu pearls of wisdom ("Mother says as th' two worst things as can happen to a child is
never to have his own way--or always to have it" [166]). Susan becomes a surrogate mother not only to Mary but
also to Colin. In short, as a "motherly creature" (26), she attends to the ideal of the family as much as the ideal
garden attends to society. The analogy made between the Earth Mother and Mother Earth, between the great nurse
and the nursery garden, to be sure, is at one with the concerns of industrialism, the patriarchal family, and the
imperial state. Debroah Dwork has shown how early twentieth-century educational reformers promoted an "ideology
of mothercraft" (214) to supplement the nascent child welfare system, with its goal of protecting "the race" from
disease and degeneration (124-66). Dwork quotes a mother who argued for maternity centers or schools for
expectant mothers on the basis that "the child is the asset of the nation, and the mother the backbone" (165). Like so
many other social reform issues, the ideology of the strong woman as mother to the nation is sotto voce in Burnett's
text.
8. In his invaluable "Representing Authority in Victorian India," Bernard S. Cohn points out that, by the 1870s, what
he terms "the British theory of Indian sociology" (190) had fallen into serious disrepute. Some colonial officials saw
India as a feudal entity composed of "lords and peasant"; others saw it as a country fiendishly Balkanized by
ethnicity and religion. Cohn comments: "Indian titles had been a vexing question for the British rulers since the
early 19th century. There appeared to the English to be no fixed lineally ordered hierarchy or any common system of
titles such as the British were familiar with in their own society. What were thought to be royal titles such as Rajas,
Maharajas, Nawab or Bahadur, seemed to be used randomly by Indians, and were not attached to actual control of
territory" (191). Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India, believed in the importance of cultivating a "native aristocracy"
whose power would aid colonial rule. In 1876, Lytton wrote a letter to Lord Salisbury, the Indian secretary of state,
in which he opined: "Politically speaking, the Indian peasantry is an inert mass. If it ever moves at all, it will move
in obedience, not to its British benefactors [sic], but to its native chiefs and princes, however tyrannical they may
be" (qtd. in Cohn 191). In an article in the London Guardian entitled "Maharajas Seek to Regain Privileges for the
Princely Lifestyle on Which the Sun Never Set," Derek Brown reports that the powers of the Maharajas, Rajas, and
Nawabs, surviving the upheaval of independence, were "all swept away in 1971, when Indiri Gandhi, in the first
flush of socialist reform, removed the clauses on princely privilege from the constitution." According to Brown,
however, that is merely "one version of reality"; another version, so much nearer to the truth, suggests that princely
elites retain considerable powers. To the extent that these princes, who traditionally gained much of their powers
from the colonial authorities, continue to subvert the democratic ethos of contemporary India, then, it might be said
that the sun of empire has yet to set, that the British Raj lives on.
9. In 1907, the future Labour party leader, Ramsay McDonald, remarked that "the empire is governed by the most
narrow visioned of our social classes" (qtd. in Bennet 354); two years later, his fellow socialist Kier Hardie lamented
that "the gulf between the British official and the Indian people is widening" (qtd. in Bennet 358). Both McDonald
and Hardie viewed the empire as a prism for understanding the British class system better.
10. The equation of national identity with imperial prowess often involves racist presuppositions (cf. Karl Pearson).
Consider the jingoistic words of Joseph Chamberlain in a speech given at the Imperial Institute in 1895: "I believe in
the British empire ... I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest governing race that the
world has ever seen" (qtd. in Bennet 315). The twentieth century has borne witness to apocalyptic horrors partly as a
consequence of such arrogant formulations.
11. If The Secret Garden explores the ideological dynamics of blowback (the effect of the return of empire on the
domestic order), then, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe explores the ideological value of exporting aspects of the
domestic order overseas. Note that, for all that, Crusoe is a prototype of the bourgeois individualist. His political
self-conception is resolutely feudal: "I was king and lord of all this country" (101); "I was lord of the whole manor;
or if I pleased, I might call myself king" (129); "I had a seat in the country as most princes have" (253). In my view,
Robinson Crusoe rehabilitates feudalism by relocating it in the New World, just as the The Secret Garden
rehabilitates empire by relocating it in rural England. The former text involves the politics of projection; the latter,
the politics of inversion. See Phillips and Wojcik-Andrews for a discussion of the political dialectic between
colonial "master texts" and modern children's literature. We argue that Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons is
a classic attempt to preserve the libidinal charge of building and protecting empire. In this respect, it belongs in the
same discursive formation as The Secret Garden.
12. The end of empire continues to direct--some would say deform--contemporary British society. Consider the
vexed issue of the national economy. Economic data indicate that John Bull remains fatally wedded to the ghost of
the British Empire. As John Pilger puts it, "It can be argued Germany and Japan were compelled to leave behind
their imperial past. ... Britain has never made that basic change. Today, with manufacturing facing the biggest
investment collapse since the Second world war, British overseas assets investment stands at almost 30 billion
pounds. How can this be justified?" Britain's military expenditure remains comparatively high for the "unstated
reason" that it allows "a small ruling interest to cling to an emotional vision of what they imagine we once were. It is
time finally to leave behind the imperial past" (Pilger 10). What price empire, then? Endless conservative
governments dedicated to the postimperial daydream that things have to change so that they can remain the same?
Works Cited
Barr, Pat. The Mem Sahibs: The Women of Victorian India. London: Secker and Warburg, 1976.
Bennet, George. The Concept of Empire: Burke to Atlee, 1774-1947. 1952. 2nd ed. London: Black, 1962.
Brown, Derek. "Maharajas Seek to Regain Privileges for the Princely Lifestyle on Which the Sun Never Set."
London Guardian 3 Nov. 1992.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden. 1911. N.p.: Aerie, 1981.
Cale, Kirsten. "Immigration Controls Cause Racism." Living Marxism (1992): 12-16.
Carpenter, Humphrey. Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children's Literature. London: Allen &
Unwin, 1985.
Cohn, Bernard S. "Representing Authority in Victorian India." The Invention of Tradition. Ed. Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. 165-211.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. New York: Signet, 1961.
Dwork, Debroah. War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare
Movement in England, 1898-1918. London: Tavistock, 1987.
Hobson, J. A. Imperialism--A Study. 1902. 3rd ed. London: Allen & Unwin, 1938.
McMillan, Margaret. The Nursery School. London: Dent, 1919.
------. Life of Rachel McMillan. London: Dent, 1927.
Phillips, Jerry and Ian Wojcik-Andrews. "History and the Politics of Play in T. S. Eliot's 'The Burial of the Dead'
and Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons." The Lion and the Unicorn 14.1 (1990): 53-70.
Pearson, Karl. National Life from the Standpoint of Science. London: Black, 1901.
------. "Socialism and Sex." The Ethic of Freethought. London: Black, 1901.
Pilger, John. "Kinnock's Secret Speech: What the Labor Leader Should Do for Britain." New Statesman and Society
5.189 (1992): 10-11.
Richards, Frank. "The Underclass: A Race Apart." Living Marxism 37 (1991): 30-34.
Simpson, Christopher. Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War. London:
Weidenfeld, 1988.
Steedman, Carolyn. Childhood, Culture, and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan, 1860-1931. London: Virago,
1990.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Phillips, Jerry. "The Mem Sahib, the Worthy, the Rajah and His Minions: Some Reflections on the Class Politics of
The Secret Garden." Lion and the Unicorn 17.2 (Dec. 1993): 168-194. Rpt. in Children's Literature Review. Ed.
Tom Burns. Vol. 122. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Nov. 2013.
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