Tag Archives: The Secret Garden

Unknown's avatar

The Secret Garden: a place of healing during COVID-19

by

Tiffani Angus, Anglia Ruskin University

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s book The Secret Garden has once again been adapted for the screen. Critics have noted that the film about a healing garden has come just at the right time, with The Telegraph calling it “a sparkling COVID antidote”.

Previous filmed versions appeared in 1919, 1949, and 1993. Since those iterations, however, the world has become more tech-enabled and the lives of children more dominated by screens than ever.

Ofcom in the UK estimates that the average three-to-four-year-old spends around three hours a day in front of a screen. This rises to four hours for ages five to seven, 4.5 hours by ages eight to 11, and 6.5 hours for teenagers. Time spent playing outdoors, as a result, is at an all-time low. It might be a wonder then, why, in 2020, a new film about playing outside is being released to an audience that seems so disconnected from it.

2020 has been, to say the least, an odd year. And, after a nationwide lockdown and restrictions currently being reimposed over large parts of the UK, The Secret Garden, a story about the healing qualities of nature – where magic, joy and, importantly, escape can be found – speaks to children (and adults) more than ever. “It sees a group of traumatised people who don’t get out much find solace in gardening and fresh air,” notes Helen O’Hara in Empire speaking about the similarities between the Edwardian cast of characters and our current reality.

Restorative gardens

The story follows Mary Lennox, a self-centred and neglected child, who is forced to move to her uncle’s estate in Yorkshire after her parents die from cholera in India. Left to her own devices and struggling to adjust, Mary finds distraction in exploring the estate’s vast grounds. It is on one of these jaunts that she discovers a hidden garden. Overgrown and mysterious, the place was locked years before by her uncle after his wife died in it.

The garden is, unsurprisingly, irresistible to Mary and, along with her spoiled cousin Colin who believes he’s disabled, and the good-natured Dickon, a kindly maid’s little brother, she finds that it is more than just a place to play. There nature has the power to heal, create relationships and bring joy; the garden also can help mend the wounds of the past, transforming hopeless grief to possibility.

The importance of nature as a source of healing has become increasingly clear during periods of lockdown as we find ourselves longing for green spaces as an escape from the news and our own four walls. Gardens (those of us who have them) and local parks and green spaces become important spaces where children can run around and adults can take a moment to reset. Like in The Secret Garden, we have discovered nature anew and it has restored us.

Time-travelling spaces

In children’s literature, gardens are a place for dreaming, adventures, and even for time travel. In books such as Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, Lucy M Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe and Andre Norton’s Lavender-Green Magic, the garden takes children back in time. There they meet people from the garden’s history or other historically important individuals. They have run-ins with their ancestors or undertake actions to save other (usually young) characters from the past who were treated badly or in danger.

The garden is a place to “fix” mistakes and learn about the great mystery and circle of life. Gardens, also, represent time itself: they never stop growing and changing. Every seed planted carries within it the hopes we have for the future.

While The Secret Garden is not a time-travel device as such, it does act as a conduit between the past and present. In it the family’s history is exposed and reckoned with, changing the present and setting them on a course to a new, more hopeful future together.

This connection between gardens and time (and time travel) might appeal to 2020 viewers who are looking for a way to connect the past with an uncertain future. In this story that many adults hold dear, they can rediscover their childhood and escape for a moment in nostalgia for a simpler time.

Once we enter the garden, however, who we are affects how we relate to it. Children have a completely different relationship to gardens than adults: adults see the backbreaking work that goes into them, while children benefit from all that hard work and only see a place to run and play. For the children in The Secret Garden, the garden is a place of discovery, fun, and recovery, in that order. And that is possibly the main key to the story’s longevity: it feeds into a faith in nature as healing, something difficult to ignore amid the friction over climate change and the destruction of some ecosystems.

The past seven months of lockdowns have fostered a hunger for personal green spaces. With the newest film version of The Secret Garden, our love affair with gardens is again brought to the big — and small — screen, where those of us who have been stuck inside can unlock the garden gate and, with a childlike innocence we yearn for, enter a magical green wonderland to take advantage of the healing properties and timeless qualities of a garden that has been waiting for us.The Conversation

Tiffani Angus, Senior lecturer in Creative Writing and Publishing, Anglia Ruskin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Unknown's avatar

Guide to the Classics: The Secret Garden and the healing power of nature

by


StudioCanal

Emma Hayes, Deakin University

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden has been described as “the most significant children’s book of the 20th century.”

First published in 1911, after being serialised in The American Magazine, it was dismissed by one critic at the time as simple and lacking “plenty of excitement”. The novel is, in fact, a sensitive and complex story, which explores how a relationship with nature can foster our emotional and physical well-being. It also reveals anxieties about national identity at a time of the British Empire, drawing on ideas of Christian Science.

The Secret Garden has been read by generations, remains a fixture on children’s publishing lists today and has inspired several film versions. A new film, starring Colin Firth, Dixie Egerickx and Amir Wilson, updates the story in some ways for modern audiences.

2020 movie still, a tree covered in pink flowers
A scene from the new movie version of the book.
Studiocanal

The book opens as nine-year-old Mary Lennox is discovered abandoned in an Indian bungalow following her parents’ deaths during a cholera outbreak. Burnett depicts India as a site of permissive behaviour, illness and lassitude:

[Mary’s] hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another.

Mary is “disagreeable”, “contrary”, “selfish” and “cross”. She makes futile attempts at gardening, planting hibiscus blossoms into mounds of earth. The Ayah tasked with caring for Mary and the other “native servants … always obeyed Mary and gave her her own way in everything.”

On the death of her parents, Mary is sent to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven at Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire.

Mary’s arrival in England proves a shock. The “blunt frankness” of the Yorkshire servants – in contrast to those in India – checks her behaviour. Martha Sowerby, an outspoken young housemaid, presents Mary with a skipping rope: Yorkshire good sense triumphing over Mary’s imperial malaise.

Also in the manor is Colin, her 10-year-old cousin. Hidden from Mary, she discovers him after hearing his cries at night.

Colin is unable to walk and believes he will not live to reach adulthood. Sequestered in his bedroom, Colin terrorises his servants with his tantrums: he performs “hysterics” in the model of Gothic femininity.



Read more:
The Yellow Wallpaper: a 19th-century short story of nervous exhaustion and the perils of women’s ‘rest cures’

Transformation

Perhaps the most famous image associated with Burnett’s text is the locked door leading to the eponymous garden.

The first edition of The Secret Garden, published in 1911.
Houghton Library, Harvard University

This walled garden had formerly belonged to Colin’s mother, Lilias Craven. When she died after an accident in the garden, her husband, Archibald, locked the door and buried the key.

After Mary unearths the key, she begins to work in this mysterious, overgrown garden along with Martha’s brother, Dickon. Eventually, she manages to draw Colin out of his room with the help of Dickon, and the garden helps him to recover his strength.

Burnett draws upon the cultural connection between childhood and nature, highlighting Edwardian beliefs about the importance of the garden. Like other Edwardian texts, such as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), The Secret Garden also explores an English turn-of-the-century interest in paganism and the occult, expressed through the book’s fascination with the Greek god Pan.

Dickon, who shares an affinity with animals and the natural world, is first introduced as he sits under a tree “playing on a rough wooden pipe” reminiscent of Pan’s flute.

Dickon and Mary bathe Colin in a stream.
The garden becomes a space of rejuvenation for the children.
IMDB/Studiocanal

Mary and Colin are both physically and psychically transformed through working in the garden. The stifling rooms and constricting passages of Misselthwaite Manor are contrasted to the freedom of the secret garden.

At first it seemed that green things would never cease pushing their way through the earth, in the grass, in the beds, even in the crevices of the walls. Then the green things began to show buds and the buds began to unfurl and show colour, every shade of blue, every shade of purple, every tint and hue of crimson.



Read more:
B&Bs for birds and bees: transform your garden or balcony into a wildlife haven

The children are healed by gardening in the “fresh wind from the moor”. Both gain weight and strength and lose their pallor. Colin’s gardening suggests mastery of the space as he plants a rose – the floral emblem of England.

Mary is subordinated as Colin’s healing becomes the text’s main focus; Colin gains the ability to walk and – importantly – to win a race against her.

Movie still from 1993, children play in the garden
By interacting with nature, the children grow in strength and in heart.
Warner Bros

‘Just mere thoughts’

The Secret Garden emphasises the power of positive thinking: “thoughts – just mere thoughts – are as powerful as electric batteries – as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison”.

This focus on the power of positive thoughts highlights Burnett’s interest in New Thought and Christian Science. New Thought teaches that people can enhance their lives by altering their thought patterns. It was developed by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in the 19th century, and one of Quimby’s students was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. While Burnett did not join either religion, she acknowledged that they influenced her work. Both religions often reject mainstream medicine.



Read more:
Why you should know about the New Thought movement

1949 movie still
The garden, seen here in the 1949 movie, captures the New Thought ideals of the healing power of thoughts.
IMDB/MGM

Belief in the healing power of thoughts is reflected as Colin chants about the “magic” of the garden.

The sun is shining – the sun is shining. That is the Magic. The flowers are growing – the roots are stirring. That is the Magic. Being alive is the Magic – being strong is the Magic. The Magic is in me… It’s in every one of us.

The Secret Garden today

Written in a time of British imperial expansion, The Secret Garden’s anxieties around national identity are evident. It draws implicit (and explicit) distinctions between the sickliness and languor of India, and the health and vitality associated with life on the Yorkshire moors.

Yet The Secret Garden still resonates with contemporary audiences. This new adaptation elaborates upon the “magic” associated with the healing power of thoughts, introducing a fantastic element to the story as Mary, Colin and Dickon enter a secret garden filled with otherworldly plants.

Director Marc Munden’s new adaptation also appears to revisit the colonialist emphasis of Burnett’s text. The adaptation shifts the time period during which the film is set to 1947, the year of the Partition of India.

This temporal change suggests an alteration to the original text’s ideas about national identity. While Burnett’s 1911 text considered Britain’s relationship with India at the height of British imperialism, Munden’s adaptation situates the narrative in the period of India gaining independence from Britain.

This new film suggests a desire to ensure The Secret Garden’s continued relevance to today’s audiences, who may be attuned to the book’s colonialist ideologies.

The Secret Garden opens in select cinemas today.The Conversation

Emma Hayes, Academic, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.