Title: 'Us is near bein' wild things ourselves': Procreation and Sexuality in The Secret Garden
Author(s): Ulf Boëthius
Publication Details: Children's Literature Association Quarterly 22.4 (Winter 1997): p188-195.
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 winter 1997-1998) In the following essay, Boëthius reviews aspects of sexuality and birth in The Secret
Garden, drawing upon Émile Zola's short story La faute de l'abbé Mouret for inspiration.]
Us is near bein' wild things ourselves.
Us is nest-building too, bless thee.
Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) is full of mysterious allusions and half-uttered messages. The
reader imagines a voice whispering something beyond and between what is written. Lately an interesting discussion
has been going on about the gender relations in Burnett's novel, a discussion tied to the enigmatic ending, where
Mary is suddenly put aside as the principal character and replaced by her cousin, Colin, the heir to Misselthwaite
Manor. Referring to this ending, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser has claimed that Burnett "seems to be affirming male
supremacy" and making "a defense of patriarchal authority" (12).
Phyllis Bixler, on the other hand, maintains that the novel should instead be read as "a nearly utopian vision of
female nurturant power" ("Gardens" 210). She sees the garden as the main character and conceives of it as "an
image of powerful motherhood." According to Bixler, the children in Burnett's novel are surrounded by "a
community of mothers" connected with the garden: the housemaid, Martha; her mother, Mrs. Sowerby; and, last but
not least, the deceased Mrs. Craven, whose spirit remains in the garden ("Gardens" 212). Motherhood and nurturant
power can also be found in some of the male characters, above all in Martha's brother Dickon, but also in the
gardener Ben Weatherstaff. Another of these nurturant males is the robin, nesting and feeding his brood. In Bixler's
interpretation these nurturant powers also conquer and transform Misselthwaite Manor, a symbol of male power and
female dependence. She reads the scene in which the door to the garden is flung wide open and Colin leaps into his
father's arms as a metaphoric delivery in which the garden represents the maternal body. What the book is really
about, according to Bixler, is "the usually repressed desire to explore the secret mysteries of the mother's body as
well as her soul" ("Gardens" 223).1
Bixler's reading is in many ways convincing, but I think she misses an important point in this article. The Secret
Garden is a tribute not just to motherhood and nurturance but also to procreation itself. The novel is not only about
bearing and bringing up children but also about generating them. It is by penetrating the forbidden garden
(significantly, with the help of a male robin) that the children come to life. Although it is masked, sexuality is
nevertheless strongly present in The Secret Garden as a kind of imprint of the forbidden and repressed. With
remarkable frequency the text talks about the procreation of flowers and birds, while at the same time emphasizing
the similarities of human beings, plants, and animals. Burnett's novel is full of gaps, omissions, and incomplete
events, but that which is not to be mentioned by women or to an audience of children is indirectly conjured up over
and over again.
Some scholars--among them Bixler herself--have touched upon this point. In her latest work on The Secret Garden,
Bixler comments on "the latent sexuality of Mary's discovery of the garden with Dickon" (57). She also sees sexual
symbolism in the description of the garden (57), and, like Kathleen Verduin and Judith Plotz, stresses The Secret
Garden's similarities to D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.2 Claudia Nelson mentions that The Secret
Garden recognizes female sexuality and looks at physical matters in a positive way (Boys 27-28). But nobody has
paid adequate attention to procreation as a main theme in Burnett's text, even though The Secret Garden is very
much a novel not only of motherhood but also of fecundity. The work's fascination with this issue is apparent in its
imagery, which also reveals Burnett's use of a hitherto unnoticed source.
Burnett often borrowed from other authors; one obvious example is her rewriting of a tale from Frances Browne's
Granny's Wonderful Chair (1856) for St. Nicholas Magazine (Bixler, Burnett 51). In the case of The Secret Garden,
we already know that the novel is full of hidden intertexts. Scholars have noticed the similarities to Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights (see Thwaite 220ff., Silver), for example, and as Dennis Butts points out in the introduction and
notes to his edition of The Secret Garden, Burnett's work is also nourished by a range of classical fairy tales, from
"Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty" to "Riquet à la Houppe" and "Beauty and the Beast." To this complicated web
of tales we should add both Victorian sex-education manuals and a still more important influence: Émile Zola's
once-popular novel La faute de l'abbé Mouret (1875).
Burnett may have noticed Zola's novel on its first appearance in 1875, since during this year she was herself living
in Paris, like Zola writing a novel about the working classes, That Lass o' Lowries (Thwaite 46).3 But by the turn of
the century, La faute de l'abbé Mouret had many English readers; the first translation in 1886 was followed by two
new English editions in 1900 and 1904.4 Often seen as the leader of French literary naturalism in the 1870s, Zola is
famous for his brutal and provocative depictions of the working classes. Sexuality and animal instincts are major
themes in many of his novels, including La faute de l'abbé Mouret, a provocative panegyric to procreation and
sexual love that bears a striking resemblance to Burnett's classic children's book.
Zola's novel works like a kind of developer, revealing a hidden pattern in the other text. The Secret Garden can be
seen as a meeting between two different discourses, one male and naturalistic, the other female and juvenile.
Burnett's novel has, as we will see, derived important nourishment from Zola's. But to be integrated as a productive
force in this book for children, the discourse of the masculine French naturalist had to be transformed and changed.
To pay tribute to sexuality in Zola's open way was impossible in the discourses that governed Burnett's writing. The
prevailing standards for children's literature in 1911 also demanded that the brutal animality in the French novel be
softened and idyllicized. Nevertheless, marks of what has been cut away are left in Burnett's text. We can discern
them in the light of Zola's novel.
***
La faute de l'abbé Mouret is the story of an ascetic young priest, Serge Mouret, who so resists the powers of life that
he falls ill with a serious fever. He recovers when a sixteen-year-old girl called Albine takes him out in the spring
into a wild and long since closed garden, Paradou. Albine, an orphan, has made this garden her own; she lives in part
of an old castle on the fringe of Paradou, where she is being cared for by a male relative. She and Mouret fall in
love, and their affair culminates when they make love to each other under a huge tree in the garden. But Zola's
romance ends in tragedy. Mouret regrets his fall and abandons Albine, who smothers herself by means of flowers
and plants from the garden. The story ends with her funeral, at which Mouret officiates.
The novel is a tale of paradise; behind Serge and Albine we can glimpse Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.
The Virgin Mary also plays an important role. Since childhood, Mouret has loved the Holy Virgin even more than
he loves God and Jesus. He has also learned to connect her with the Garden of Eden. Zola makes a point of stressing
the similarities between Albine and St. Mary (French ed. 103, 105, 320, 346), just as Burnett's garden is related to
the biblical garden and Burnett's Mary has the same name as the Holy Virgin, who is traditionally symbolized by the
closed Garden of Eden (see Gunther 163, 166; Beretta 28).
But there are more specific similarities between the two novels than that both are based on the tale of Paradise. Both
focus on a wild and abandoned garden that an orphan girl has made her own. Near each garden lives a young man
who is stricken with mental illness caused by a cultural environment that obstructs everything that is healthy and
natural, although Mouret's counterpart, Colin, has been affected not by an ascetic religion but by an aristocratic
culture afraid of fresh air that has kept him in bed for years. Each young man is brought back to life and health by a
girl who is allied with the life-giving forces of nature; in both novels she opens the windows in the young man's
room, lets the fresh air in, and takes the convalescent into the garden, where everything is life, growth, and
procreation. The garden makes him healthy and strong again, but the recovery is accomplished by the sacrifice of
the girl. Abandoned by the recovered Serge, Zola's Albine commits suicide. Mary does not take her own life, but she
too is abandoned and apparently forgotten by the recovered Colin in the last pages of The Secret Garden, even
though it is thanks to her that he has achieved health. Finally, in both novels the reclamation of the young man and
the discarding of the girl take place against a backdrop of seasonal change. At the end of The Secret Garden, when
no one so much as speaks Mary's name, it is no longer spring but autumn, just as it is autumn when Zola's Albine
smothers herself. The autumnal colors here signal death, decay, and tragedy--despite The Secret Garden's
apparently happy ending.
Reading Burnett's novel in conjunction with La faute de l'abbé Mouret, in other words, sheds new light on the text.
That Mary is put aside at last does not necessarily mean that Burnett takes Colin's side and, as Keyser writes,
defends "patriarchal authority." The end of The Secret Garden is in fact deeply ambiguous. On the one hand Mary
stands out as a tragic victim, abandoned and forgotten by the person she has brought back to life. On the other hand,
the final pages of Burnett's novel also contain positive signals, the elements that make us believe that the author
takes Colin's side. Even if it is sad that Mary is forgotten (as is Dickon, for that matter), laughter, joy, and magic still
remain. "Master Colin" now exhibits a demeanor that many of the onlookers have never seen in him, "his head up in
the air and his eyes full of laughter" (306). Both the garden and Misselthwaite Manor have awakened from their
former torpor. Life and procreation continue; significantly, Mrs. Sowerby has gone to help a woman deliver a baby.
But the cruel cycle of nature does not care about individuals. They must sometimes be sacrificed--and disappear.
Zola's novel also makes this point. Albine's funeral is interrupted by Mouret's retarded sister, Désirée, who, with a
resounding laugh, exclaims, "The cow had a calf" (300). 5 These are the last words of the novel. Life goes on; the
powers of birth and procreation do not expire because Albine is being lowered into her grave. "One leaves, another
comes" ("Un s'en va, un autre arrive!"), Désirée bursts out after the butcher slaughters her pig (294; French ed. 400).
Joy and sorrow, life and death are indissolubly associated with each other; new life is being brought forth from
mulch and decomposition even while other life is necessarily ending in annihilation. Such is the way of the world, at
once joyful and cruel.
Another important similarity between Burnett's work and Zola's is that in both novels the garden is connected with a
story that functions as a background to the first: long ago a man and a beloved woman lived together in the garden in
divine happiness. When this happiness was destroyed because of the woman's sudden death, the man closed the park
and let the garden run wild. In Zola's novel this event happened about a hundred years earlier, while in The Secret
Garden only ten years have passed since the garden was closed. In both tales the death of the woman is associated
with a special tree, reminiscent of the tree associated with Adam and Eve and their lost happiness. In Burnett's novel
Mrs. Craven used to sit on a branch of this tree, but the branch broke and when she fell down she was so severely
hurt that she died. The associations with the biblical Fall are obvious. In La faute de l'abbé Mouret the connection
between the death of the woman and the tree is more abstract. "It was the joy of sitting there that killed her," Albine
thinks (138). The tree has, she continues, "a charming shadow that kills you" (my translation). 6 But in both novels
the spirit of the dead woman remains in the garden. Her sad departure can be said to presage Albine's death and
Mary's final exclusion from the narrative.
Death, however, is not the point of either story. In both works the garden represents life, growth, and generation.
Both also pay tribute to those powers in nature that make all living creatures--human beings, animals, and plants-breed and give birth to progeny. Zola's naturalistic and provocative depictions of human instincts are famous. For
him man is a part of nature; men and women are attracted to each other by the same instincts that also bring other
living creatures together. Thus he likes to depict plants and animals as human while simultaneously stressing the
naturally determined and animalistic aspects of human beings. In La faute de l'abbé Mouret, which is at once
naturalistic and romantic in a fairytale way, the differences between people and animals are minimal. Everything in
this novel propagates with violent intensity. The landscape is filled with passion and yearning. The powers of nature
are so strong that they threaten to conquer even the church where Abbé Mouret holds his services; the vigorous
plants are forcing their way through the windows, and the sparrows are flying in all directions under the vaults.
What the novel calls "the great act of love" (26)--in French, "grand labeur d'amour" (42)--has its center in the wild
garden where Albine presides. Here everything is heat, procreation, and breeding; every living creature is yearning
to give birth to new life. The procreation culminates when Albine and Serge meet under the huge tree of life:
All this swarming life trembled as if giving birth. An insect was conceiving under each leaf, a family was growing in
each tuft of grass. In the air, flies clung to each other, unable to wait until landing to be impregnated. The invisible
parts of life which inhabit matter, the atoms of matter themselves, loved, copulated, gave a sensual quiver to the soil,
and made the park a huge fornication.(186)7
This intense atmosphere also seduces Albine and Serge; the narrator comments, "The necessity of procreation
surrounded them, and they yielded to the demands of the garden" (186). 8
Procreation is also at the center of Burnett's novel, but she is not as open as Zola. A female author writing for the
young could not use the same sexual discourse as the famous French naturalist. But for all their differences, there are
obvious similarities between the two narratives. Both Zola and Burnett pay tribute to the earth. It is from rich and
fertile soil that new life is born. Albine awakes in Serge "the passion of the earth," and "He learned to love her by
looking to see how the grass loves" (257).9 Even Désirée has close connections to the earth, as it is "the earth which
made Désirée drowsy when she lay on her back" (236). 10 In The Secret Garden "th' good rich earth" and its
lifegiving force are still more in the foreground. Even back in India Mary sets plants, and in the secret garden she
spends most of her time digging in the earth. The importance of earth is also stressed in the chapter called "Might I
have a bit of earth?", in which Mary asks Mr. Craven for a plot "To plant seeds in--to make things grow--to see them
come alive" (121), and we learn at the same time that Colin's deceased mother, the spirit of the garden, "loved the
earth and everything that grows" (121). Furthermore, in both novels the earth is animated; while Zola talks about
"the breath" of the earth--"La respiration même de la terre" (338)--Burnett has her children sniff "its warm
springtime breathing" (161).
The sun, too, plays an important role. In La faute de l'abbé Mouret the sun (as so often in Zola) is the lifegiving
male principle; embracing the naked earth, the sun gives birth to new life (French ed. 231). From the first chapter
onward, the sun is seen as the main opponent of Roman Catholicism's negative attitude toward life. When at the end
of the chapter the sun is forcing its way into the church, even the Christ figure quivers "with the vitality of new sap,
as if death had been conquered by earth's eternal youth" (12).11 Ultimately it is also the rising sun that makes Serge
recover and gives him new life: "He was being born in the sun, in this pure bath of light inundating him" (116). 12
The sun is of equal importance in The Secret Garden. Burnett, too, pays tribute to "the strange unchanging majesty
of the rising sun" (217). If anyone can get Colin "just soaked through wi' sunshine" he will recover, Dickon thinks
(188). The sun transforms everything with its warmth, even the originally sad and contrary Mary (63). Like Zola,
Burnett personifies the sun and depicts it as male. It is when "he" has risen in the morning that everything awakes to
new life and the world is born anew (159). But while Zola uses the sun to honor virility, Burnett extols its motherly
and lifegiving warmth. When the sunlight warms the earth, "things will be stirrin' down below in the dark" (64). It is
the warmth of the sun that gets the green points to "push up and up and up" (157). Furthermore, Burnett stresses
more than Zola does that the sun is not alone in infusing life into things; in her feminine discourse, the rain is also of
great importance. It is when "th' sun shines on th' rain an' th' rain falls on th' sunshine" that spring starts (95).
In both discourses the sun and the procreative force are accompanied by hilarity and the joy of living. Zola's novel
bubbles with laughter. Everything that lives and multiplies laughs: the plants, the animals, the lustful girls in the
village of Artaud, indeed the whole paradisiac garden (French ed. 242). Désirée continually emits ringing bursts of
laughter, and one of Albine's most characteristic features is her merriment. In contrast, the serious Mouret, with his
negative attitude to life, does not laugh--until Albine helps him out into the sunshine in the garden. Paradou then
joins in Albine's laughter, which sounds like the song of a bird: "It was an endless laugh, cooing in the throat,
resounding, triumphant music, celebrating the pleasures of awakening. Everything laughed in this laugh of a woman
being born to beauty and to love, roses, scented wood, all Paradou laughed" (123). 13
Laughter plays a similar role in The Secret Garden. The dead Mrs. Craven had eyes that "was always laughin'"
(164). As in La faute de l'abbé Mouret, hilarity and joy are associated with life and procreation. When the sun
warms it, the earth becomes cheerful (64). The surly Mary reacts in the same way when she begins to weed the
garden, helping plants to new life; "without knowing it she was smiling down on to the grass and the pale green
points all the time" (81). When in the chapter entitled "Nest Building" Mary walks out into the secret garden very
early one spring morning, the sunshine, the smells, and the twitter of the birds make her almost ecstatic: "She
clasped her hands for pure joy and looked up in the sky and it was so blue and pink and pearly and white and
flooded with springtime light that she felt as if she must flute and sing aloud herself and knew that thrushes and
robins and skylarks could not possibly help it" (158). Dickon, similarly, reports of himself and the moor that "When
th' sun did jump up, th' moor went mad for joy, an' I was in the midst of th' heather, an' I run like mad myself,
shoutin' an' singin'" (160). Mary and Dickon also laugh for joy when, in the next moment, warm and tousled and
with poppy-red cheeks, they help the green points sprout up through the earth.
Though Burnett primarily focuses on roses and robins, she describes reproduction with an intensity that is not far
from Zola's. She writes about seeds that are put in fertile earth and about "swelling leaf-buds" (161). She describes
sensually (and in language full of sexual connotations) the roses that climb up the walls of the garden and unfold in
long garlands, "falling in cascades--they came alive day by day, hour by hour. Fair fresh leaves, and buds--and buds-tiny first but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling
themselves over their brims and filling the garden air" (240). And she uses hyperbole and metaphor in the same way
that Zola does; notice, for example, how fast the buds swell and burst in the passage above. Like the French author,
she tries to give the impression of something huge, overwhelming, and phallic: "Iris and white lilies rose out of the
grass in sheaves, and the green alcoves filled themselves with amazing armies of the blue and white flower lances of
tall delphiniums or columbines or campanulas" (240).
Burnett also writes about animal reproduction. But her animals are nicer and more idealized than Zola's; in The
Secret Garden there are no nasty-smelling rabbits and no cruel hens pecking out each other's bowels. Rather, in
Burnett's novel the avatars of animal reproduction are the spring songbirds, who are made human in so emphatic a
way that the reader understands that Burnett is not only thinking of animals but also of human beings. The focus is
especially on the male robin, which first goes "mate-huntin'" and then is "settin' up housekeepin'." He returns
throughout the novel, serving functions that range from helping Mary to find the garden key to witnessing Colin
learning to walk, an event that we see through his eyes. Through him, Burnett's convinced acceptance of the
reproductive instinct becomes clear.
From the first, the robin is portrayed as human; indeed, with his "red waistcoat," he is one of the principal male
characters. He is very fond of Mary. "Dang me if he hasn't took a fancy to thee," says Ben Weatherstaff (41). 14 For
her part, Mary talks to him from the beginning "just as if she were speaking to a person" (41). Indeed, much as the
cock Alexandre courts Désirée in Zola's novel, the robin courts Mary, "Makin' up to th' women folk just for vanity
an' flightiness," as the sour Ben Weatherstaff puts it (92). Once the robin finds a mate of his own kind, the
reproductive work of these animals accompanies the children's activities in the garden.
Like Zola, Burnett stresses the kinship of animals and human beings, emphasizing that children are animals with
such vigor as to strain against the bonds of her genre. Over and over again the children in The Secret Garden are
compared to nest-building birds. Mary is likened to a missel thrush, and her secret garden is called "the nest of the
missel thrush" (chapter 11). She soon shares her nest with Dickon, who draws for her a picture of a missel thrush in
her nest (123). Mary later suggests that she and Colin play missel thrushes in the garden. Imagine that we in secret
went into the garden, she says, "and pretended that--that we were missel thrushes and it was our nest, and if we
played there almost every day and dug and dug and planted seeds and made it all come alive--" (134). In the context
of La faute de l'abbé Mouret, where Albine in a similar way tempts the sick Serge to come with her into the garden,
Mary's hesitation about what to play is full of ambiguous meaning. Since Albine and Serge did not, as we have seen,
play missel thrushes but rather Adam and Eve in Paradise, Mary's hesitation permits a gap in which the reader may
momentarily contemplate this less innocent possibility for Mary and Colin.
A further ambiguity is that Dickon, who charms both Mary and Colin, is called an "animal charmer" (157)--while at
the same time, he is like an animal himself. Like Désirée, Mouret's innocent and bestial sister, he is a kind of
elemental being; while Désirée is compared to the mother-goddess Cybele (French ed. 71), the "wood fairy" Dickon
with his flute is similar to Pan (113, xxv). The tip of Dickon's nose moves like the tip of the nose of a rabbit, and he
knows the language of birds. He himself thinks that he perhaps is "a bird, or a fox, or a rabbit, or a squirrel, or even a
beetle, an' I don't know it" (101). As Colin does, Dickon stresses the similarities between human beings and animals;
"Us is near bein' wild things ourselves," he says to the robin (167). He also feels related to such animals as otters,
badgers, and water-rats. "They're same as us," he emphasizes, "only they have to build their homes every year"
(207). Finally, the male robin, contemplating Mary, Colin, and Dickon over the eggs in his nest, certifies "that in the
garden there was nothing which was not quite like themselves" (267). This emphasis on the animal in the children
sounds ambiguous in this context, since in the light of the mate hunting and reproduction of the birds, the "nestbuilding" of the two children takes on a special meaning; it is a matter not only of establishing a safe and protected
zone of one's own, but also of experiencing love and attraction. Again and again the narrator stresses how
"beautiful" Mary finds Dickon (114). Her feelings are reciprocated. "I likes thee wonderful, an' so does th' robin, I
do believe!" Dickon says (112). In this context we also have to notice that Dickon's name in vulgar English has
sexual connotations.15
The sexual connotations of the children's nesting are also stressed. Nesting is explicitly associated with the magic
that makes everything propagate. Especially striking is the scene in which Dickon and Mary are discussing whether
one kisses people in the same way as flowers. Mary rejects this idea, arguing that "Flowers are so different" (160).
But Dickon, who firmly denies the difference, gets the last word: "I've kissed my mother many a time that way"
(161). Flowers and people are not so different after all.
The discussion about kissing takes place while the two children are eagerly running from one part of the garden to
another, looking at all the wonders taking place "until Mistress Mary's hair was as tumbled as Dickon's and her
cheeks were almost as poppy red as his" (161). Their collaboration in the intense reproduction of the garden makes
them merry, warm, and excited; they experience all the "joy of earth" that abounds in the garden. The context gives
not only their physical excitement but also the "swelling leaf-buds" of the roses sexual implications. The scene ends
with Dickon's emphasizing the eternal and natural in the propagation of the birds: "It's a part o' th' springtime, this
nest-buildin' is," he says. "I warrant it's been goin' on in th' same way every year since th' world was begun" (162). 16
But of course The Secret Garden is not only about reproduction and propagation. Burnett puts children and
nurturing powers in the center. The depiction of the reproduction of the robins ends in an impassioned tribute to "the
immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs" (267). The whole garden knows "that if an
Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end"
(267).
In keeping with this sense of cosmic importance, the tribute to propagation has religious overtones. The children
sing thanksgiving hymns to "th' Big Good Thing" that "set th' seeds swellin' an' th' sun shinin'" (284). It is stressed
that they are honoring not the Christian God but a life giving force that could have many names. Colin speaks about
"Magic"; Mrs. Sowerby calls it "th' Joy Maker" (285). Moreover, the garden is described as a sanctuary. The
children gather under a special tree that is "a sort of temple" (246); here Colin, who functions as the High Priest of
their little community, gives a chanting sermon on Magic. When Colin's father enters the garden in the last chapter,
even he imagines that he is "in an embowered temple of gold" (303).
When Albine and Serge in Zola's novel explore the wild garden, they experience similar feelings. They walk in
under the trees "religiously, with something like awe, as the faithful enter a high church" (157). 17 The trees form a
huge sanctuary with naves, side aisles, pillars, and archs where religious silence reigns. As the lovers sit down under
the mysterious tree, the religious associations return. The huge "tree of life" rises in "a temple of silence and halflight; there was nothing but green, no bit of sky, no sign of the pale horizon, nothing but a rotunda draped all around
with the soft silk of leaves, hung with the satiny silk of moss" (182). 18 It is here that the Fall of Albine and Serge
takes place.
In Burnett's discourse, magic accordingly also becomes a moral power. When first Mary and later Colin have been
caught up into the work of rebirth of the garden, they are changed: they become not only stronger and merrier but
also less selfish, less spoiled, and more disposed to care about other living creatures. They also get more strong
willed and more disposed to "positive thinking," as Jerry Griswold puts it (200). Above all, their nurturing powers
awake. Affectionately, the children help the new shoots out of the mould and learn from Dickon how to take care of
the abandoned animals and give suck to the lamb. The unhappy Mr. Craven, too, undergoes a transformation. Like
Mary's mother, at the beginning of the novel he is criticized for being selfish and not caring about his own child.
Indeed, "He cares about nobody," Mrs. Medlock says (16). He has forgotten his home and his duties, has let his soul
"fill itself with blackness and [has] refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through" (290). But when
the garden is restored, Mr. Craven too in a mysterious way is given new life--and becomes able to love his
abandoned son.
Here Burnett differs significantly from Zola. In Zola the acceptance of the powers of life does not make people
better; they only get merrier, more vigorous, and better equipped for the struggle for life. Neither can we find in La
faute de l'abbé Mouret the same affectionate care for the young as in The Secret Garden. In Zola's novel it doesn't
matter if some nestlings die; we all know that there will be new ones all the time. Désirée herself is a master at
butchering: "No one was more adept than she at cutting off a goose's head with one stroke or at slitting a hen's throat
with a pair of scissors. Her love of animals had no difficulty accepting this massacre. It was necessary, she said; it
made room for babies growing up. And she was very gay" (187). 19
Nevertheless, motherhood and nurturing powers are important also in La faute de l'abbé Mouret. I have noted that
the novel ends with a delivery, as Désirée's cow gives birth to a calf, and it is to Désirée that childbirth and nurturing
are chiefly connected here. She nurtures her animals "with maternal tenderness" and knows their language better
than she knows the language of human beings (47; the French reads "avec des attendrissements maternels" [74]).
She even sleeps covered with her animals. To be surrounded by reproduction gives her an almost sexual satisfaction:
Something in her rejoiced when the hens brooded; she laughed like a beautiful girl receiving a compliment as she
carried her female rabbits to the males; she experienced the happiness of pregnancy in milking her goat. Nothing
could be healthier. ... The peace of a beautiful beast always shone in her clear gaze empty of all thought; she was
happy to see her little world multiply; she felt her own body grow as if she herself had been impregnated. She was
so identified with all these mothers that it seemed she was the common mother, the natural mother dropping
generative liquid from her fingers without any unhealthy tremor.(48) 20
Dickon, Désirée's counterpart in The Secret Garden, is likewise surrounded by animals that he affectionately
nurtures. It is emphasized that his animals are orphans. As Bixler has pointed out, Burnett is unprejudiced enough to
have even males represent the nurturing, maternal powers ("Gardens" 213). Not only Mary but also Colin learns to
feed Dickon's lamb from a bottle. Dickon also resembles Désirée in spending his life far away from education and
civilization. It is said of Mouret's sister that it was "her weak mind which made her like animals" (47--in French, "sa
pauvreté d'esprit qui la rapprocha des animaux" [74]). Dickon is not portrayed as mentally retarded; his closeness to
nature is instead indicated by his class and his Yorkshire dialect. Like Zola, Burnett associates healthiness and
naturalness with the working classes. When Mary and Colin are brought to a new life and are getting healthy and
strong, they both begin to use the same broad dialect as Dickon. The dialect in fact becomes the very sign of their
transformation.
But if Désirée and Dickon have their roots in the earth, there is also a maternal figure in The Secret Garden who
represents the more supernatural side of motherhood. This is Dickon's and Martha's mother, Mrs. Sowerby. From the
beginning portrayed as an affectionate and considerate mother to her twelve children, when she suddenly appears in
the garden in the last chapter of the novel there is something emblematic and mythic about her. She is said to be like
"a softly coloured illustration in one of Colin's books," and she has "wonderful affectionate eyes which seemed to
take everything in--all of them, even Ben Weatherstaff and the 'creatures' and every flower that was in bloom" (281).
Dickon's comment on her apparition emphasizes the iconic in her image: "It's Mother--that's who it is!" And Mary
and Colin, both orphans, immediately seek her:
Each of them kept looking up at her comfortable rosy face, secretly curious about the delightful feeling she gave
them--a sort of warm, supported feeling. It seemed as if she understood them as Dickon understood his "creatures."
She stooped over the flowers and talked to them as if they were children.(284)
This first mother then teaches the children about the power that sets the seeds swelling and the sun shining and that
"goes on makin' worlds by th' million--worlds like us" (284). She is like Colin's own mother, the equally mythical
Mrs. Craven, who also "loved the earth and things that grow" (121), and the chapter ends with Mrs. Sowerby's
saying to Colin that his own mother is in the garden. Ultimately Mrs. Craven's motherliness gets a new lease on life
when the children make the garden flower, at the same time that the garden and its maternal magic cause the
children to be reborn.
Here we arrive at the second intertext to which I seek to draw attention, since in its portrayal of mythic motherhood
in a sexualized setting, Burnett's novel comes very close to British sex manuals of the late nineteenth century. In
these works, too, as Nelson has recently pointed out, sexuality was often discussed "via botany or ornithology"
("Guidance" 112), just as we have seen it discussed in The Secret Garden. Nelson distinguishes "professionalist"
sex manuals, aimed especially at educators or physicians, from "maternalist" manuals aimed at children themselves.
The latter type of book had titles such as Baby Buds and The Human Flower, like The Secret Garden, it sought to
appeal "to children's sense of community with other beings" (112) and idealized the mother, whom its authors
considered best suited to give children their sex education. Like Susan Sowerby, the Victorian mother was often
seen, as the nineteenth-century journalist Andrew Halliday put it in 1865, as "the mainspring of all nature, the
fountain of all pure love" (qtd. in Nelson, "Guidance" 100); she could therefore, the maternalists argued, "discuss
sex with an authority [that] fathers [or other adult males] lacked" (100). For mothers, sex was often considered to be
something holy, connected with altruism, selflessness, and self-sacrificing purity. Accordingly, maternalists
reasoned that if mothers controlled the discourse of sexuality they could "re-create masculinity as nurturing and ...
maternal" (102), just as Burnett represents Dickon. This stance did not mean that the maternalists wanted to
eradicate sexuality. "On the contrary," Nelson writes, "even manuals aimed at children note that women may enjoy
sex" (100).
The maternalists (who included many men) idealized boys like Dickon for their frankness, their love for their
mothers, their purity, their tenderness toward weaker beings. Ultimately these sex educators hoped to transform
society by leveraging the filial piety of the Dickons of the world into a greater voice for women within public life
(Nelson, "Guidance" 101). Ronny Ambjörnsson's book on a Swedish maternalist of the 1890s, Ellen Key, is
characteristically called Samhällsmodern, "The Public Mother," a goal of which Burnett, a strong feminist,
presumably approved.
In its political similarities to late-Victorian sex manuals for children, The Secret Garden finally diverges from La
faute de l'abbé Mouret. Desirée is no holy angel in the house making children altruistic and spiritual by giving them
sex education. That the principal characters in Burnett's classic are two abandoned children highlights parental
affection (or its lack) in a way that is not the case in Zola's novel. Even so, while La faute de l'abbé Mouret is
primarily about the twenty-five-year-old Serge Mouret's fight against his sexuality, children play an important role
here as well. Albine is only six years older than Mary and Colin. Moreover, the sexually inexperienced Serge is
portrayed as a child who does not want to be a grown-up. "Make me five years old" ("Faites que j'aie cinq ans"), he
entreats the Holy Virgin (96; French ed. 136). What is more, when Serge recovers from his illness, he is reborn in an
almost literal sense, transformed into "a poor thing born the day before" (112). 21 He is compared to a plant in the
spring; Albine is said to help him push up through the mould (French ed. 177). Like a child, he has to learn how to
walk. What follows is the story of his developing into full masculinity; the process culminates with his making love
to Albine beneath the big tree. But before that we have been told a lot about mornings of childish play and merry
frolics by two young persons set free in the garden of Paradou (see especially French ed. 204ff.).
Readers of both works will notice that the merry rambles of Albine and Serge in Paradou bear a close resemblance
to Mary and Dickon's investigation of their secret garden. Similarly, the stress on the likeness of the children to
mate-hunting and procreating animals creates expectations that they too will be hit by the irresistible power of love.
But this does not happen. While Mary finds Dickon beautiful and they are apparently attracted to each other, their
relationship does not develop into a romance. Nor does the text say anything about love between Mary and Colin
when they in their turn play nest-building missel thrushes. They too are obviously attracted to each other, but
nothing is said about how their relationship proceeds.
Thus The Secret Garden is a text full of gaps and unfinished events. The title has a double meaning; the novel is
itself a garden full of secrets. These mysteries are often connected with hidden intertexts, which like Zola's La faute
de l'abbé Mouret function as keys to its inner recesses. Its complexity gives the novel an almost modernist touch;
Burnett's use of mythical references (especially the tale of Paradise) resembles the method that modernist pioneers
such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce were just about to develop.
To sum up, then, Burnett was in many ways governed by a juvenile literary discourse. Yet she has also considerably
widened this discourse, not only by writing an ambiguous and open text but also by challenging the rules of
children's literature. In The Secret Garden she contested the traditional view of how a heroine in a children's book
should behave: Mary is strong and obstinate and sometimes disobeys the grown-ups. Some of the males, as we have
seen, also have unconventional traits. Even today, men are not usually depicted as caring and nurturing. But The
Secret Garden is provocative also in other ways. For example, Burnett breaks the rule that a children's book should
have an unequivocally happy ending. And most provoking of all, by allowing Zola's La faute de l'abbé Mouret to
peep out through the cracks in the text and by using the imagery and ideology of Victorian sex-education manuals,
Burnett challenges the taboo that prohibited sex in novels for children. It was no accident that Lawrence drew upon
The Secret Garden when he extolled sexual love in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Clearly, he realized the subversive
potential of this unusual work.
Notes
1. Adrian Gunther, too, denies that The Secret Garden defends what Keyser calls "patriarchal authority." Gunther
claims that the novel pays tribute to a female value system, "one in which the real power may lie in standing aside
and letting someone else win" (160). Gunther regards Colin as a basically unpleasant character who "remains
intrinsically self-centered up to the very last line" (160).
2. Mary is said to have resemblances to heroines who divide their attention between "an eroticized lower-class male
and attenuated upper-class male" (56); besides Lady Chatterley, Bixler also mentions Catherine Earnshaw in Emily
Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
3. Burnett arrived in Paris in the early spring of 1875 and stayed for more than a year. During her stay she also wrote
"Esmeralda," a short story that became a successful play in 1881. Interestingly enough, a critic writing in The Times
found similarities between Esmeralda and Zola's works: the play was said to possess "a distinct value as what M.
Zola calls a document humain" (qtd. in Thwaite 78).
4. Information about the English translations can be found in The British Library General Catalogue. It should be
added that Burnett probably could read Zola's novel in French. She visited France at least six times between 1875
and 1899 (Thwaite 46, 196, 248), and during one of her early long stays she reported that she took "unlimited"
French lessons (Thwaite 78).
5. I use Sandy Petrey's translation of the novel. Zola writes, "La vache a fait une veau!" (406).
6. "C'est la joie de s'être assise là qui l'a tuée. L'arbre a une ombre dont le charme fait mourir" (193). Petrey does not
translate the last sentence; "charme" in French, as in English, refers to both magic and attractiveness.
7. "Toute cette vie pullulante avait un frisson d'enfantement. Sous chaque feuille, un insecte concevait, dans chaque
touffe d'herbe, une famille poussait: des mouches volantes, collées l'une à l'autre, n'attendaient pas de s'être posées
pour se féconder. Les parcelles de vie invisibles qui peuplent la matière, les atomes de la matière euxmêmes,
aimaient, s'accouplaient, donnaient au sol un branle voluptueux, faisaient du parc une grande fornication" (255).
8. "La fatalité de la génération les entourait. Ils cédèrent aux exigences du jardin" (255).
9. "Elle lui donnait la passion de la terre. Il apprenait à l'aimer, en regardant comment s'aiment les herbes" (349).
10. The sexual purport is lost in the translation. The original reads: "C'était la terre qui assouvissait Désirée" (324).
11. "[P]renait un frisson de sève, comme si la mort était vaincue par l'éternelle jeunesse de la terre" (22).
12. "Il naissait dans le soleil, dans ce bain pur de lumière qui l'inondait" (165).
13. "C'était un rire sans fin, un roucoulement de gorge, une musique sonnante, triomphante, célébrant la volupté du
réveil. Tout riait, dans ce rire de femme naissant à la beauté et à l'amour, les roses, le bois odorant, le Paradou
entier" (174).
14. As the watchman of the divine garden, Ben is the counterpart to Zola's Jeanbernat.
15. Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English notes that "Dick" as a synonym for penis appears
circa 1880.
16. Birds of spring also accompany the events in Zola's novel. Albine is again and again compared to a bird, and at
the beginning of La faute de l'abbé Mouret she gives Désirée the nest of a thrush with young birds in it. The latter
nurtures the nestlings and speaks to them in a language that they seem to understand, just as Dickon does in The
Secret Garden. Nevertheless, they are dead at the end of the novel (French ed. 90, 318). Their death presages that of
Albine.
17. In French, "religieusement, avec une pointe de terreur sacrée, comme on entre sous la voûte d'une église" (218).
18. The original speaks "d'un tabernacle de silence et de demi-jour; il n'y avait là qu'une verdure, sans un coin de
ciel, sans une échappée d'horizon, qu'une rotonde, drapée partout de la soie attendrie des feuilles, tendue à la terre du
velours satiné des mousses" (251).
19. "Personne comme elle ne tranchait la tête d'une oie d'un seul coup de hachette, ou n'ouvrait le gosier d'une poule
avec une paire de cieaux. Son amour des bêtes acceptait très gaillardement ce massacre. C'était nécessaire, disaitelle; ça faisait de la place aux petits qui poussaient. Et elle était très gaie" (399).
20. "Quelque chose d'elle se contentait dans la ponte des poules; elle portait ses lapines au mâle, avec des rires de
belle fille calmée; elle éprouvait des bonheurs de femme grosse à traire sa chèvre. Rien n'était plus sain. ... Elle
gardait sa tranquillité de belle bête, son regard clair, vide de pensées, heureuse de voir son petit monde se multiplier,
ressentent un agrandissement de son propre corps, fécondée, identifiée à ce point avec toutes ces mères, qu'elle était
comme la mère commune, la mère naturelle, laissant tomber de ses doigts, sans un frisson, une sueur
d'engendrement" (75).
21. Or as Zola's apt phrase has it, "à la vie végétative d'un pauvre être né de la veille" (160).
Works Cited
Ambjörnsson, Ronny. Samhällsmodern: Ellen Keyskvinnouppfattning till och med 1896. Göteborg: Göteborgs
Universitet, 1974.
Beretta, Ilva. "The World's a Garden": Garden Poetry of the English Renaissance. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet,
1993.
Bixler, Phyllis. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
------. "Gardens, Houses, and Nurturant Power in The Secret Garden." Romanticism and Children's Literature in
Nineteenth-Century England. Ed. James Holt McGavran. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991. 208-24.
------. The Secret Garden: Nature's Magic. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden. 1911. Ed. Dennis Butts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Griswold, Jerry. Audacious Kids: Coming of Age in America's Classic Children's Books. New York: Oxford UP,
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Gunther, Adrian. "The Secret Garden Revisited." Children's Literature in Education 25.3 (1994): 159-68.
Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. "'Quite Contrary': Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden." Children's Literature
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Nelson, Claudia. Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children's Fiction, 1857-1917. New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991.
------. "'Under the Guidance of a Wise Mother': British Sex Education at the Fin de Siècle." Maternal Instincts:
Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875-1925. Ed. Claudia Nelson and Ann Summer Holmes.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. 98-121.
Plotz, Judith. "Secret Garden II; or Lady Chatterley's Lover as Palimpsest." Children's Literature Association
Quarterly 19.1 (1994): 15-19.
Silver, Anna Krugovoy. "Domesticating Brontë's Moors: Motherhood in The Secret Garden." The Lion and the
Unicorn 21.2 (1997): 193-203.
Thwaite, Ann. Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1849-1924. London: Secker &
Warburg, 1974.
Verduin, Kathleen. "Lady Chatterley and The Secret Garden: Lawrence's Homage to Mrs. Hodgson Burnett." D. H.
Lawrence Review 17 (Spring 1984): 61-66.
Zola, Émile. La faute de l'abbé Mouret. 1875. Notes et commentaires de Maurice Le Blond. Texte de l'édition
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Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Boëthius, Ulf. "'Us is near bein' wild things ourselves': Procreation and Sexuality in The Secret Garden." Children's
Literature Association Quarterly 22.4 (Winter 1997): 188-195. 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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