Title: Digging Up The Secret Garden : Noble Innocents or Little Savages?
Author(s): Christine Wilkie
Publication Details: Children's Literature in Education 28.2 (June 1997): p73-83.
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 June 1997) In the following essay, Wilkie offers a reading of The Secret Garden that highlights alternative, lesser-studied aspects of the story, including elements of primitivism and paganism.
]
Written just after the turn of the century, The Secret Garden 1 is a pivotal work that has always attracted a great deal of critical attention, not least recently because of a serialized TV adaptation, a prestigious film in 1993, and also in
1993 a video reissue of the 1949 film. It is the site of competing and varied legacies of Romanticism relating to issues of sexuality and liberation. The work has been read as a paean to nature in which a child is brought into healing and restorative relationships, and we have only to scan the titles of essays about it to see how this has been a dominant reading: "Secrets and Healing Magic in
The Secret Garden ";
The Secret Garden "; 2 "Gardens, Houses and Nurturant Power in
3 "Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden : The Organ(ic)ized World." 4 Such readings might be summed up in the words of Gwyneth Evans when she describes The Secret Garden as one among many children's fictions about "gardens in which children work with nature, creating beauty through growing things and at the same time experiencing spiritual and emotional growth," 5 or in the words of Judith Plotz, when she quotes the popular cliches used to describe the work as "a charming, escapist and safely canonical book for girls and nostalgic women." 6 Margaret Mackey's comprehensive essay on the incidence of secret garden adaptations (which is symptomatic of its fascination) is predicated on the assumption that it belongs to this tradition.
7
These kinds of critical readings have played up the nurturing, pastoral qualities of Romanticism, emphasizing
Bildungsroman characteristics of growth and change much favored by children's literature criticism, to establish The
Secret Garden as a paradigmatic text in the canon of children's literature's unceasing evocation of the Romantic child. This spectre now stalks a baffling range of literary landscapes in, for example, the "gardens" of New York's
Central Park in Felice Holman's Slake's Limbo, 8 the streets of wartorn London in Michelle Magorian's Goodnight
Mr. Tom, 9 and the Wongadilla farmstead of Patricia Wrightson's Australian outback in The Nargun and the Stars.
10
Judith Plotz has come closest to aligning The Secret Garden with Romanticism's less talked-about darker nature
(though she does not make the connection explicit). She identifies it as a forerunner of Lady Chatterley's Lover in its configuration of characters, in individual characters themselves, and in the dominant themes.
11 She finds parallels in the triadic relationships central to the two texts, by tracing the associations between Mary Lennox and Connie
Chatterley, between Colin Craven and Clifford Chatterley, and between Dickon Sowerby and Oliver Mellors. She cites them as examples of the platonic hierarchy of mind/spirit/passion, embedded in themes of rebirth: what she calls the movement out of death as a given, into a vision of life's being coaxed out of the body of death.
However, I shall propose that The Secret Garden has potential for more radical readings than those cited above, which have situated it in narrowly conceived ideas of Romanticism appropriated from the early works of
Wordsworth. This was a beneficent, asexual, innocent interpretation of nature bedded in Rousseauism and the nineteenth-century cult of the child as the noble savage. Radical readings of the kind I have in mind would reposition the work in Darwinism, in the philosophies of Christian Science, the Occult, and in the turn-of-thecentury Neo-Paganism with which Grahame struggled so ineffectually to come to terms. They will address the pagan in nature that was the root of high Romanticism in the works of Coleridge and Shelley. Nineteenth-century philosophies such as these are deeply at odds with Christianized versions of "mother" nature because they celebrate

the lascivious, amoral appetites of pre-Christianism, archaic ritualism, and the pagan culture of the female in the cult of the "Great Mother."
I shall argue that The Secret Garden embodies a transition from the Dionysian to the Apollonian by demonstrating that the garden's wild state, as well as the state of unreconstructed Colin and Mary, embodies this cluster of nineteenth-century ideas that extend the Wordsworthian, Rousseauist terms of previous commentators. Western classic style has seen the triumph of Apollonian male rationalism over the Dionysian female cult of nature. I shall hope to demonstrate that the story of The Secret Garden recapitulates these same historical movements: "from nature to society, from chaos to order, from emotion to reason, from female to male." 12 The Secret Garden is the story of transition from the world of Dionysus to the world of Apollo. Dionysus is the orgiastic God of fruitfulness and vegetation. His is the world of nature unbounded, of insatiable appetites, of feasting and drinking. It is, in other words, an aspect of the world of primitivism (which I shall discuss in more detail below) that we find represented in the secret garden's wild state and tempestuous children. On the other hand, Apollo's world is one of rationalism, politics, science, and psychology: it is everything to which Colin will aspire and, in this connection, I shall offer an alternative reading for the book's concluding chapters that have been negatively dismissed by recent feminist readings.
In this paper I shall also examine the series of structural oppositions in the novel that exemplify these polarities in primitive thought. And I shall set the child characters, Mary Lennox, Dickon and Colin Graven, in one strain of
Western thought that connects directly with the cult of the child in primitivism, popularized in the nineteenth century, of a sentimentalized, innocent child, in the strain of the early Romantics, 13 but with traces as far back as
Juvenal. In it the child is perceived as an image of prelapsarian Adam and thus an exemplar of primitivist thought.
14
In discussing the roots and origins of primitivism, Hayden White tells us that, "Primitivism sets the savage, both past and present, over and against civilised man as the model of the ideal." 15 In The Secret Garden both Mary and Colin are described as "savage" (pp. 155-156). Between them, in this early part of the story, they combine the manifestations of archaic (High Romantic) concepts of wildness situated in untamed desire, impetuousness, and animality. But, according to Bernheimer, there are two images of wildness: a benign imagery of wildness that has
16 been traced back to classical archetypes, and a malignant imagery that goes back to biblical times.
The two sets of images apparently became fused (and confused) during the High Middle Ages, thereby creating the anomalous conception of the state of wildness of a Wild Man that is both good and evil. If therefore we include Dickon, as the archetypal "Noble Savage," we have in the combination of these three characters, Mary, Colin, and Dickon, an archetypal motif that represents both aspects of the "Wild Man": the benign and the savage.
17
The benign image of wildness is captured in Book One of "The Prelude," where Wordsworth describes his boyhood self as a "naked savage" playing in the sunshine and indulging in pastoral pleasures. But, as Paglia says, because
Wordsworth refused to acknowledge the sex or cruelty in nature, his child of nature is an innocent, "noble savage" borrowed from Rousseau (Paglia, p. 300). He lacks the evil quality of savagery associated with pre-Christian, pagan times to which White and Bernheimer refer. I have already suggested that these pre-Christian conceptions of wildness are fused in the early characters of Mary and Colin: Colin's so-called inherited, so-called deformity can be read as a manifestation of spiritual impoverishment. To realize his own innate ambitions, and his historical destiny, he must transcend his state of Dionysian wildness and become an Apollonian beautiful boy. To this end he must achieve intellectual as well as physical beauty to take his place in the Apollonian line of civilization and science by transforming his supposedly crippled body.
Here, it is interesting to note that an equally coherent subtextual reading can be derived from the founding principles of Christian Science (to which sect Burnett belonged), which promotes the triumph of Spirit (Mind) over material laws. The seminal text of its founder member, Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health, proposes "Disease is mental not material. ... Mortals think sickly thoughts and become sick. The so-called laws of matter, and of medical science, have never made mortals whole. ... Truth casts out evil and heals the sick." 18 So, Burnett sets Mary Lennox against
Colin's doctor as an inept purveyor of medical science, to recognize, and eventually to cure, Colin's mind-induced sickness: "Half that ails you is hysterics and temper" [shouted Mary]. ... You didn't feel a lump! ... If you did it was only a hysterical lump. Hysterics makes lumps. There's nothing the matter with your horrid back--nothing but hysterics!" (p. 156). Elsewhere in the Eddy text we read that the "mythology of pagan Rome has yielded to the mere spiritual idea of deity, so will our material theories yield to spiritual ideas" (p. 339). This is Burnett's celebration of

the theosophy of spirit: Mind (which, in her creed, is synonymous with spirit) will triumph over body through unity with material laws of science.
When we first meet Mary she is wild, passionate, bewildered, and hostile; and in primitivist thought, her physical attributes of sallowness, thinness, and plainness are themselves evidence of her interiorized state of wildness.
Hayden White tells us that another component of the Wild Man Myth is linked to language and linguistic confusion:
"Cursedness or wildness is identified with the wandering life and linguistic confusion ... to be wild is to be incoherent or mute; deceptive, oppressive and destructive; sinful and accursed; and, finally a monster, one whose physical attributes are in themselves evidence of one's evil nature" (White, p. 162). Mary is rootless: She comes from an unknown, far-off land, the unknown Other of India (the wilderness, the desert). Initially she is oppressive and destructive: In the opening pages she has been described as something akin to a monster ("the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen" [p. 7]), and she is linguistically confused when confronted with the Babel of
Yorkshire dialect.
The garden, too, is an ambiguous symbol: The tensions it encompasses give The Secret Garden much of its fascination. It is both alfresco and enclosed. It is private, but it is also a place to meet strangers. The open air, the natural and vegetative, the wild: These are recurrently symbolic in many cultures. By the end of the nineteenth century in British bourgeois culture, nature was still seen as largely beneficent, recuperative, Edenic, and pleasurable. The early Romantic movement, superficially, at least, had rescued nature and landscape from its fearsome and aversive barbarian connotations of the Enlightenment. The wild moors and mountains had been given positive connotations in the wake of the Romantics' investing recuperative, regenerative qualities in Lake District mountains and the Swiss Alps. So, although the Brontës continued to invest the moors with menacing
Enlightenment connotations, these came to be less written about than pastures and gardens.
19 Catherine Earnshaw ran off to the moors, but Tennyson's Maud was invited into the garden. Alice had her adventures in a surrealized
Oxford College Garden, Mole found his sybaritic meaning of life on the well-managed banks of the upper Thames, and Peter Rabbit was traumatized in a well-managed cottage garden. The Wild could be tamed and reproduced in gardens that were fashionably natural.
In the United States, where Frances Hodgson Burnett spent most of her adult life, the wilderness was still an imaginative magnet and physically available to initiate Children on the Oregon Trail, or children in The Little House on the Prairie.
One element of the pastoral syndrome more prominent in white North American culture than in
English is the vision of the Peaceable Kingdom, of Isaiah's idyllic prophecy that, "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them " (Isaiah 11,6) (my emphasis), memorably represented in a series of images by the
American artist Edward Hicks.
20
The vision of the Peaceable Kingdom, a powerful instance of a lighter side of Romantic and post-Romantic conviction of the beneficence of nature, has a double function. It is a vision of Eden before human beings' relationship with nature was spoiled by the Fall, which drove them from the idle pleasures of gathering to the painful industry of hunting and agriculture. It is also a prophecy of a redeemed world in which pleasure, leisure, innocence, and peace between species would be restored. Being the Peaceable Kingdom is one aspect of the secret garden and it depicts a branch of primitivism that first appeared in the fourteenth century and was later adopted by Rousseau in his image of the Noble Savage. The Peaceable Kingdom is "Arcadian, a peaceful place where the lion lies down with the lamb ... innocently and frivolously; it is the world of the enclosed garden, the world of the picnic ... this is the gentle savage of Spenser's Faerie Queen " (White, p. 172). Dickon brings wild creatures into the garden and they lose their savage natures. This is just one of many instances throughout the book where Frances Hodgson Burnett blends images of the popular Christian, primitivist, and pagan traditions to carry multiple meanings. She does it again in her use of mother images, two dead and one living. These multifaceted images exist most especially in the character of "mother" Susan Sowerby, whose eventual meeting with Mary in the garden at a climactic moment in the narrative suggests at once the great Nature Goddess of paganism and the Virgin Mother of Christianity.
The secret garden is unquestionably a therapeutic and regenerative site. But, more than this, it is a site of oppositional paradoxes. Within it Rousseauist pleasures flourish alongside the menacing presence of the pagan, while Arcadian pressures reinforce religious beliefs in the innocence and virtue of what is natural and Edenic; so, there is nostalgic longing for Christian innocence and goodness with an emphasis on the seasons, regeneration, and

good health that sits side by side with ancient fertility rite, incantation, and the occult. And newer hybrids of older weeds grow there too as late Victorian culture begins to fertilize scientific invention, and the cult of antinature in industrialism overtakes nature.
21
In their very secret garden, at the orgiastic high point of their ménage à trois, Mary and Colin, with Dickon as the resident figure of Pan ("animal charmer, and boy charmer" [p. 206]), sit down with the creatures--lamb, fox, raven, and rabbit--in a mystic "white magic" circle that carries all the characteristics of pagan ritual. And they make ritualistic chant. Here, in this fertile womb of enclosure, they feast off the fruits of Dickon's moorside kitchengarden and "mother's" kitchen, and grow fat into good health.
In his essay The Cult of Childhood, George Boas describes two strands of primitivism: the chronological and the cultural which, respectively, distinguish the idea of primitivism as an ontological condition from the idea of primitivism as a historical stage of cultural development.
22 In chronological primitivism, the history of the race is contained in the life cycle of the individual and in this context the child is regarded as the obvious first stage of any individual's biography. In Greek and Roman traditions the degeneration of Creation was confronted by the call for a return to the primitive condition of the race; a return to the childhood of the race (Boas, p. 11). This longing for a lost innocence, which developed almost simultaneously with growth in the natural sciences and the fear of reason, gave new impetus to the cult of childhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Boas, p. 21). The other strand of primitivism, cultural primitivism, was invested in the exemplars of the woman, the child, and the rural folk, as the repositories of intuitive wisdom (Boas, p. 12). And in The Secret Garden, the women (both dead and alive); the children (both "wick" [a Yorkshire dialect word used by Dickon, meaning alive] and dying) and the folksy, rural
Dickon, comprise a significant triad of characters in the frame of primitive thought.
Mary Lennox is the archetypal child of the race insofar as she manifests both the pagan and benign traits of primitivism. When we first meet her, she is the unarrested savage, but in the course of the novel she achieves a degree of nobility. To this extent, she aligns herself, narrotologically, with Dickon, the archetypally benign primitive child who, in the garden, now presents himself as exemplar of that most famous of Noble Savages, Rousseau's
Émile. Dickon is the child of prelapsarian primitivism; he represents a return to the Golden Age, the Age of Kronos, the replica of Adam before the Fall. Like Émile and Dickon, Mary Lennox is innocent of the arts and sciences, unspoiled by the artifices of civilization; but she is unlike them because, in her transformed state, she retains a residual Dionysianism and is in the strain of High Romanticism by her being libidinal, erotic, and impulsive. She will not be hidebound by book learning during her period of latency at Misslethwaite Manor because the Garden and
Nature will be her teacher. The garden is the spatial agency for her psychic and bodily transformation, the site where she moves from deforming secularism and the "civilizing" influences of Misslethwaite Manor, which have kept her savage, to the libidinal and erotic freedom the garden offers in its wild state.
The narrative events take place between the house and garden, which respectively carry all the negative and positive connotations embedded in primitive thought: the artifice of Civilization versus the Wild. The house is deformingly constricting, death-inducing, and cavernous, and it embodies a superfluity of laws, orderliness, and government. It is hierarchical and class-ridden and its dark corridors harbor dark thoughts and corruption and decay. Inside the house the memory of Colin's dead mother is petrified in an artist's picture behind a rose-colored silk curtain (p. 120). But by contrast, outside the house, she has a garden memorial of overgrown but tenaciously live roses.
The garden is enclosed, but in contrast to the house it is liberating, wild, and health-inducing and egalitarian. It is also anarchic, Dionysian, and is the scene of Mary's sexual awakening. The garden is first announced to her by an unknown boy of strange speech from the wild moors, and recalls the Christian icon of the closed garden ( hortus conclusus ) familiarly depicted in paintings of The Annunciation.
In it, another Mary, another virgin, had a sort of sexual initiation by the Angel--another annunciating male of alien background and strange speech. The hortus conclusus is often featured with a closed door whose unlocking with a key signifies the loss of virginity; also with a trellis of roses and, significantly, roses are the most abundant flora inside the secret garden.
We might be forgiven for overlooking indicators of erotic Dionysianism in The Secret Garden because they have been shrouded in Christian mysticism. Paglia talks about Christianity's inability to tolerate the pagan integration of sex, cruelty, and divinity: "It thrust chthonian nature into the nether realm, to be infested by medieval witches.
Daemonism became demonism, a conspiracy against God. Love, tenderness, pity became the new virtues" (Paglia,

p. 138). In this connection, it is neither farfetched nor prurient to find sexual connotations in the imagery and language of The Secret Garden, nor in its chapter headings and, indeed, in its title; the text is littered with references to incidences of nesting and with images and the language of penetration. The red-breasted robin, which is an icon and symbol of fertility and regeneration in pagan ritual, precedes every textual mention or experience of the garden and positively "courts" Mary in explicitly sexual gestures: We learn of "stirred blood" and "newly awakened appetite." Dickon's eyes are likened to the wolf's eyes from the most erotic scene of the great seduction tale, Red
Riding Hood (p. 185). But most especially there is eroticism in the language that describes Mary's excited entry into the garden. When she first encounters the garden, and following her first meetings with Dickon and with Colin, we are told that, "Mary's heart began to thump and her hands to shake" (p. 72 passim ). In a very telling passage, when
Mary and Colin are alone in Colin's bedroom, she recounts to him Dickon's version of fecund proliferations in the wild moors; speaking of eggs and nests, "making holes and burrowing," "bees and butterflies"; and we read that
Colin "lay back on his cushion and was still, as if he were thinking. And there was quite a long silence. Perhaps [the narrative voice intrudes] they were both of them thinking strange things children do not usually think of" (p. 131). In this parallel scene, in the 1993 film, the children sleep together on the bed until dawn.
But if Mary Lennox is the type of the primitive child of the race, Colin becomes a figure of the progress of the race and the march of science. Unlike Mary, whose teacher has been nature, Colin has acquired all his experience and scientific knowledge from book learning. "When I grow up (he announces after the magic of the garden has made him stand) I am going to make great scientific discoveries. ... I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us--like electricity and horses and steam" (p. 206). Colin, in his Apollonian triumph, will control the magic, control nature, tame it, use it, explain it. But this is not the white rabbit magic symbolized in Dickon's selection of garden creatures because the tradition of Christian Science would replace the "magic" with spirit, in which case Colin's science will be explained as the triumph of mind over matter.
"'What is it? What is it?' It's something. It can't be nothing! I don't know its name, so I call it Magic ... Magic in this garden has made me stand up and I know I am going to live to be a man" (p. 207). The Spirit (Magic) of the garden will cure even the skeptical Ben Weatherstaff of what the doctors have called his "rheumatics." "'That was the wrong Magic,' he [Colin] said. 'You will get better'" (p. 211).
The work has been criticized for what appears to be an explicitly antifeminist narrative shift from an early focus on
Mary to a concluding and exclusive focus on Colin, 23 and there have been some awkward late twentieth-century attempts to redress the balance in media adaptations. But in the reading I offer it could not have been otherwise, because the shift from Mary to Colin represents a nineteenth-century belief in the logical outcome and inevitable progress of the race: survival of the fittest, and the supercession of nature by science, that also might carry an ambivalent reading as the Principles of Christian Science. Colin, now healed and beautiful, is a figure of Apollo but, equally, he might be the High Priest ("Colin really looked quite beautiful, Mary thought. He held his head high as if he felt like a sort of priest," p. 210). Colin presents himself in the concluding chapter as everything that is antithetical to nature and as the antitype to the Noble Savage. He is the figure of Western science and logic; everything institutional ("the Athlete, the Lecturer, the Scientific Discoverer," p. 255); he is hailed in the concluding paragraph as "the Master of Misslethwaite." He stands in opposition to everything Dickon has represented. Dickon, as the child of nature, has been the only site of constancy in this book acting as a narrative agent, almost, for the transition of Mary and Colin. Dickon and the garden, which has been their alma mater, have served their purpose and, with no further narrative function, they disappear from view. When we last view the garden, through the eyes of
Archibald Craven, it is described as "a wilderness" with moribund connotations contained in its late autumn state of
"violet," "purple," and "sheaves of late lilies" (p. 255). Mary has gone native by aligning herself with Dickon and
Ben Weatherstaff in their distinctively noble brand of nature and the alien tongue; she speaks their language: "Aye it is a graidly one" (p. 186) and "Aye that we mun" (p. 189). She drops her consonants and utters "thees" and "thous" of the Yorkshire dialect. There is no place for Dickon's and the garden's noble nature in Colin's Apollonian world of artifice and experimentation; and no place, either, for Mary, much tamed, but who has drunk the perennially potent cup of Dionysian savagery. They must be suppressed in the name of progress.
1. Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden.

2. Gillian Adams, "Secrets and Healing Magic in The Secret Garden.
"
3. Phyllis Bixler, "Gardens, Houses and Nurturant Power in The Secret Garden.
"
4. Heather Murray, "Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden : The Organ(ic)ized World."
5. Gwyneth Evans, "The Girl in the Garden: Variations on a Feminine Pastoral" p. 20.
6. Judith Plotz, " Secret Garden II : or Lady Chatterley's Lover as Palimpsest," p. 15.
7. Margaret Mackey, "Strip Mines in the Garden: Old Stories, New Formats, and the Challenge of Change."
8. Felice Holman, Slake's Limbo.
9. Michelle Magorian, Goodnight Mr. Tom.
10. Patricia Wrightson, The Nargun and the Stars.
11. Judith Plotz, " Secret Garden II : or Lady Chatterley's Lover as Palimpsest."
12. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Neferti to Emily Dickinson, p. 100.
13. Robert Pattison, The Child Figure in English Literature, pp. 47-75.
14. George Boas, The Cult of Childhood, p. 8.
15. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, p. 170.
16. Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, p. 120.
17. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 176.
18. Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, pp. 270-5.
19. The Secret Garden 's similarities to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre are well documented in Waiting for the Party:
The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1847-1924.
Ann Thwaite, p. 220.
20. John Silkin, "Edward Hicks (1780-1894) The Peaceable Kingdom," pp. 36-40.
21. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, pp. 182-96, and passim.
22. George Boas, The Cult of Childhood, p. 11.
23. See, for example, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser's "'Quite Contrary'; Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden ";
Lissa Paul's "Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory Knows about Children's Literature"; and Phyllis Bixler,
"Gardens, Houses and Nurturant Power in The Secret Garden.
"

Adams, Gillian, "Secrets and Healing Magic in The Secret Garden.
" In Triumphs of the Spirit in Children's
Literature.
Francelia Butler and Richard Rortert, eds. Hamdon: CT Library Professional Publications, 1986, pp. 42-
54.
Bernheimer, R., Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology.
New York: Octagon
Books, 1970.
Bixler, Phyllis, Frances Hodgson Burnett.
Boston: Twayne, 1984.
Bixler, Phyllis, "Gardens, Houses and Nurturant Power in The Secret Garden.
" In Romanticism and Children's
Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, James Holt McGavran, ed. Athens: The University of Georgia Press,
1991.
Boas, George, The Cult of Childhood.
London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1966.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson, The Secret Garden.
London: Puffin, 1992 (originally published, 1911).
Eddy, Mary Baker, Science and Health.
Boston, MA: First Church of Christ Scientists, 1971 (originally published,
1875).
Evans, Gwyneth, "The Girl in the Garden: Variations on a Feminine Pastoral," Children's Literature Association
Quarterly 1984, 19.1 (Spring), 20-4.
Holman, Felice, Slake's Limbo.
London: Nelson, 1992.
Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox, "'Quite Contrary': Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, " Children's Literature
1983, 11, 1-15.
Mackey, Margaret, "Strip Mines in the Garden: Old Stories, New Formats, and the Challenge of Change,"
Children's Literature in Education 1996, 27.1, 3-21.
Magorian, Michelle, Goodnight Mr. Tom.
London: Longman, 1988.
Murray, Heather, "Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden : The Organ(ic)ized World." In Touchstones:
Reflections on the Best of Children's Literature, Perry Nodelman et al., eds., vol 1. West Lafayette: Children's
Literature Association Quarterly, 1985.
Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
London: Penguin Books,
1990.
Pattison, Robert, The Child Figure in English Literature.
Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1978.
Paul, Lissa, "Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory Knows about Children's Literature." In Children's
Literature: The Development of Criticism.
Peter Hunt ed. London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 148-57.
Plotz, Judith, " Secret Garden II : or Lady Chatterley's Lover as Palimpsest." Children's Literature Association
Quarterly, 1994, Spring 19.1, 15-19.
Silkin, John, "Edward Hicks (1780-1894) The Peaceable Kingdom" Stand, March, 1978, 19.2, 36-40.
Thwaite, Ann, Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1974.

White, Hayden, Tropics of Disclosure: Essays in Cultural Criticism.
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978.
Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City.
London: The Hogarth Press, 1993.
Wrightson, Patricia, The Nargun and the Stars.
London: Viking Penguin, 1975 (originally published 1973).
Source Citation (MLA 7 th Edition)
Wilkie, Christine. "Digging Up The Secret Garden : Noble Innocents or Little Savages?" Children's Literature in
Education 28.2 (June 1997): 73-83. 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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