Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Sowerby. It was Lilias Craven who originally cultivated the secret garden, filling it with the roses and other flowers she loved. Her death in childbirth following a fall in the garden caused her distraught husband to lock up the place and bury the key. Yet, as Susan Sowerby assures Colin, the spirit of Lilias Craven continues to reside in the garden, overseeing her son’s cure: “Thy own mother’s in this ’ere very garden, I do believe. She couldna’ keep out of it” (p. 213). Sowerby herself does not appear in the novel until very near the end, but she is constantly helping the children from behind the scenes. In a letter to the English publisher of The Secret Garden, William Heinemann, Burnett describes Susan Sowerby as “a moorland cottage woman who is a sort of Madonna” and the novel’s “chief figure” (Gerzina, p. 262). It is Sowerby who gives voice, in Yorkshire dialect, to Burnett’s view of God:
    I warrant they call it a different name i’ France and a different one i’ Germany. Th’ same thing as set th’ seeds swellin’ an’ th’ sun shinin’ made thee a well lad an’ it’s th’ Good Thing. It isn’t like us poor fools as think it matters if us is called out of our names. Th’ Big Good Thing doesn’t stop to worrit, bless thee. It goes on makin’ worlds by th’ million—worlds like us (p. 212).
    Burnett uses the uneducated but wise Susan Sowerby as a mouthpiece not only for her religious vision of a God who transcends creeds and sects, but also for her ideas about child-rearing. It is Sowerby who sends Mary Lennox a skipping rope and persuades the girl’s uncle, the misanthropic Archibald Craven, not to hire a governess but to allow his niece “fresh air and freedom and running about” (p. 95). As the mother of twelve children, she recognizes the importance of physical exercise and the role of unstructured play in developing body and mind. Although her opinions are represented as timeless country wisdom, Susan Sowerby is actually expressing ideas that were progressive and still quite controversial when The Secret Garden was first published.
    During the Victorian age, upper-class children had been expected to behave like miniature adults. Little girls were dressed in tight and confining clothes and trained in domestic virtues and such accomplishments as sewing and playing the piano. Outdoor exercise was viewed as tomboyish and undignified, likely to build unfeminine muscles and bring an unwelcome tan to fashionably pale complexions. It was not until the late nineteenth-century that the kindergarten movement, based on the writings of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), began to challenge these restrictive child-rearing practices. Froebel’s organic theory of child development employed horticultural metaphors to argue that both boys and girls, like gardens, require space, clean air, and brightness in order to flourish; and that young children learn best in an environment in which nature is celebrated but controlled.
    Froebel was inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy of childhood, expressed in Émile (1762), and like Rousseau he looked back nostalgically to an idealized agrarian past when people lived in harmony with nature. Burnett, an admirer of Froebel and a supporter of charities that tried to bring his educational methods to inner-city children, also had a romanticized view of the old-fashioned rural poor that finds expression in her creation of the Sowerby family in The Secret Garden. Though the Sowerbys are poor, they are presented as invariably cheerful, healthy, and content with their lot. They appear to accept their lower-class position and yet, unlike the downtrodden and obsequious colonial servants of Mary’s early experience, they have no hesitation in speaking their minds to those of higher rank. Susan Sowerby’s simple country life gives her an instinctive understanding of the needs of children. Her son Dickon, who spends his days outside on the Yorkshire moors,