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• W2022437949 abstract "Quite Contrary:Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden Elizabeth Lennox Keyser (bio) [Correction] When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.1 Thus begins Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. Ann Thwaite, Burnett's biographer, remarks that the most original thing about [The Secret Garden]; was that its heroine and one of its heroes were both thoroughly unattractive children.2 And Marghanita Laski has written, I do not know of any children's book other than The Secret Garden that frankly poses this problem of the introspective unlikeable child in terms that children can understand.3 Burnett herself describes Mary Lennox as wondering why she had never seemed to belong to anyone even when her father and mother had been alive. Other children seemed to belong to their fathers and mothers, but she had never seemed to really be anyone's little girl. . . . She did not know that this was because she was a disagreeable child; but then, of course, she did not know she was disagreeable. She often thought that others were, but she did not know that she was so herself (p. 12). Unattractive, unlikeable, disagreeable—these are the ways in which the critics and the author herself characterize Mary Lennox and the way in which the critics at least characterize Colin Craven. But I want to examine closely what the term disagreeable really means in connection with the heroine, Mary, and to distinguish between the ways in which the two children are unattractive or unlikeable. Mary initially disagrees with the adult characters in the story not only because her looks and manners fail to please them but also because she refuses to accept their authority. From the outset, however, she is by no means thoroughly unattractive to the narrator, who, in the passage quoted above, conveys sympathy as well as antipathy for Mary by mingling the child's point of view with the omniscient. Nor is Mary thoroughly unattractive even to [End Page 1] the critic who so labels her, for that critic obviously finds a powerful attraction in that very unattractiveness. As the book proceeds, Mary becomes at least moderately agreeable, both to others in the novel and to the narrator, who grants her a grudging approval. But as Mary ostensibly improves, her role in the book diminishes, and she loses for the reader her main appeal. Instead the other thoroughly unattractive child, Master Colin, increasingly gains the center of the stage. Colin, I would argue, is never as unattractive to the narrator as Mary, nor is he ever as attractive to the reader. Unlike Mary, who is never described as more than almost pretty even when she gains flesh and color, Colin, though far more fretful and selfish, is described from the beginning as having a sharp, delicate face the color of ivory and great black-fringed eyes like those of his dead mother (p. 124). The narrator tells us that Colin, having had the advantage of wonderful books and pictures, is more imaginative than Mary, and as he recovers his health he acquires both extraordinary physical beauty and a charismatic power. At the end of The Secret Garden we see Colin besting Mary in a footrace, and, indeed, he has already run away with, or been allowed to dominate, the final third of the book. The race is not always to the swift, however. Ask an adult what he or she remembers from a childhood reading of The Secret Garden.4 Memories will differ, of course. But what I remembered before I re-read it recently was Mary's first finding and awakening the garden and then, in a reversal of the Sleeping Beauty story, her finding and awakening Colin. I remembered Mary exploring the winding paths and gardens within gardens, and indoors the winding corridors with their many locked rooms. And I remembered Mary as stubborn and defiant in her attitude toward adult authority and even toward Colin, but also tender and nurturing. I remembered Colin, too, but always as lying in his room being comforted by Mary or being wheeled by her into the..." @default.
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• W2022437949 date "1983-01-01" @default.
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• W2022437949 title "Quite Contrary: Frances Hodgson Burnett's <i>The Secret Garden</i>" @default.
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• W2022437949 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.0.0636" @default.
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