Imagination and Reality in Burnett
I came to Sarah Lawrence as a confident young student of world literature, languages and literary criticism. I was eager to discover the array of infinitely talented professors of Russian, American, French and English literature from Ilja Wachs and Nicolaus Mills to Melissa Frazier and Paula Losccoco. In college, my future as a fervent and lifelong student of literature was solidified by my professor’s ceaseless enthusiasm and dedication to their body of study, and my past as a faulty, weak reader could not have been farther away.
I cannot remember any time during my childhood when I enjoyed reading. Reading was always a task. I only read books required for classes. Books were even assigned for classes that I never read, because I struggled through them. I was continually troubled by my inability to picture in my mind what was happening in the book. Noticing my lack of interest in school and reading, my parents saw to it that I saw a multitude of learning specialists and reading tutors. At the time, I was confused and frustrated as to why I was seeing all these tutors on top of my regular classes.
During infancy and until my preteen years, I was raised by a Peruvian nanny who spoke only Spanish to me. I believe hearing and speaking another language as a child created problems when it was time to learn to read in English. I have no memory of being able to read comfortably or coherently before third grade. My frustration and inability to read anything for pleasure followed me until my sophomore year of high school when I began to enjoy the fiction of Sarah Dessen. Shortly after, I was given The Handmaid’s Tale as a gift. I dived into Margaret Atwood’s dreadful dystopian world of conspiracy and systematic abuse. After these indelible experiences with books, I became a voracious reader. I frequented Barnes and Noble, often buying a new book every week from Tracy Chevalier to Janet Fitch. I was encouraged by a teacher to take AP English in my junior and senior years in high school. Under the command of two particularly exquisite female English teachers, I discovered my love of nineteenth century English and American literature.
I took The Psychology of Children’s Literature as part of my senior curriculum because I want to be a teacher. Before enrolling in the course, I had accepted a position as a 5th grade humanities teacher at an all boys elementary and middle school in San Francisco. I thought it important for me to take the course and intensively study chapter books appropriate for my grade level. During the spring, however, I decided to take another teaching position in the south of France as an English as a second language teacher in a primary school for children ranging in age from 8 to 11 years old. I discovered that the importance of the class was twofold. Not only was the course a superb intensive study of children’s literature preparing me for my future position as an educator, but I discovered a whole body of literature I had missed when I was a child.
For my conference work, I studied the bodies of work by three different female young adult writers, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L.N Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilder who wrote during roughly the same time period (1900-1930). The connection between the writers is that they wrote during the same time and their subject matter was similar. In addition, the writers represent three different young adult literary canons, namely American, English and Canadian.
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Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox have experienced a trauma by the real and symbolic death of parents. In the wake of this unnatural break in the order of their lives, both girls possess a tremendous power to transform the world around them. In The Secret Garden, Mary’s family is killed in an earthquake in India, and she is sent to stay at Misselthwaite Manor, her uncle’s dreary mansion isolated in the Yorkshire moors. Mary is meant to think that she is the only child staying in a house of over one hundred empty and locked rooms with only maids, cooks, gardeners and animals for friends, “It sounded like something in a book and it did not make Mary feel cheerful. A house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up with their doors locked a house on the edge of a moor— whatsoever a moor was—sounded dreary.” (16)
Misselthwaite Manor possesses a tremendous web of mystery that Mary unlocks throughout the course of the novel however the house is oppressive at her arrival. A multitude of dank rooms lead to more rooms and staircases. Mary is told not to leave her room, but she wanders around anyway finding friends in her uncle’s paintings, “She opened the door of the room and went into the corridor, and then she began her wanderings. It was a long corridor and it branched into other corridors and it led her up to short flights of steps which mounted to others agains,” (48) writes Burnett. Burnett describes the house as if the house itself does not want to be discovered by Mary. It leads her through a labyrinth of ever-changing rooms and corridors.
Mary stumbles into a long gallery with eery portraits. She has no other children to play with, so she begins to imagine that the people in the portrait are her friends and wonder about who she is and what she is doing in the house, “She stared at the faces which also seemed to stare at her. She felt as if they were wondering what a little girl from India was doing in their house. She always stopped to look at the children, and wonder what their names were, and where they had gone.” (48) Mary stumbles upon a portrait of, “stiff, plain, little girl rather like herself.” She is wearing a green brocade dress and held a green parrot on her finger. Her eyes have a sharp, curious look. The girl is a mirror of a future Mary when she will awaken the delights of the garden. The girl is wearing green and has a green bird on her finger. The parrot mirrors the use of birds in the novel, namely the birds that are always surrounding Dickon and the robin who shows Mary the door to the garden. If birds can be taken as a symbol of flight and the children’s magic in the garden, it would follow that Mary envisions the changes that will occur within her through this portrait. Mary speaks to the portrait, saying, “Where do you live now? I wish you were here,” as if directly speaking to herself.
In A Little Princess, Sarais sent to an elite girls boarding school in London peppered with a plethora of over-indulged young ladies, an array of cooks and maids and the school’s sadistic headmaster, Ms. Minchin. Sara’s mother has died, “It seemed to her many years since he had begun to prepare her mind for “the place,” as she had always called it. Her mother had died when she was born, so she had never known or missed her.” (4) The place she refers to is the boarding school which is the same boarding school her mother attended. It is at the boarding school that she learns of the death of her father from “brain fever” which is now identified as Meningitis while mining for diamonds in India.
Sara ruminates on the fact that she is not fond of other girls, but she is very interested in books, “…if she had plenty of books she could console herself. She liked books more than anything else and was, in fact always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.” (6) The quote illustrates the fact that books and methods of oral storytelling will be Sara’s refuge and support system in the novel. Sara sees Ms. Minchin for the first time, and her reaction demonstrates Sara’s exquisite sense perception and ability to analyze people and their moral character. Ms. Minchin greets Sara and Captain Crewe, “She was very like her house, Sara felt: tall and dull, and respectable and ugly. She had a large, cold, fishy smile.” (7) Sara’s thought that Minchin reflects her house is analogous to the fact that Mary’s uncle, Mr. Craven resembles his dreary house full of empty and locked up cold rooms.
Sara and Mary are similarly orphaned and exist in worlds where the adults do not fulfill their needs. They transform their reality through magic and their imagination to create another possibility of being which is more tolerable. Sara is a bookish young reader who puts stock in the stories she reads about remote lands, princes and princesses. She produces magic by way of her imagination and her ability to transform reality by telling stories, “Of course the greatest power Sara possessed was her power of telling stories and making everything she talked about seem like a story, whether it was one or not.” (42)
A student at the boarding school, named Lottie is having a tantrum on the stairs about the fact that she has no mother. Sara is able to console her by imagining what heaven is like and telling Lottie that both their deceased mothers reside there. In a way, Sara tells Lottie a story about how she imagines heaven to be and makes both their losses more tolerable, “Sara seemed to be telling a real story about a lovely country where real people were. “There are fields and field of flowers,” she said forgetting herself, as usual as if she were in a dream.” (40) What follows is a delightful description of a utopic world created by Sara, “…little children run about in lily fields and gather armfuls of them, and laugh and make wreaths. They can float anywhere they like. And there are walls made of pearl and gold all around the city, but they are low enough for the people to go and lean on them, and look down on earth.” The story is so lovely that Lottie stops crying and claims she wants to go to this place. The interaction culminates in Lottie and Sara’s decision that Sara will be her surrogate mother. In doing so, the girls imagine a pretend situation to deal with grief at having lost their mothers.
Sara is able to make herself feel warmer when she is cold and hungry living in the attic and made to work as an errand girl for Ms. Minchin after her father’s death. Sara tells Becky a story about a tropical forest where an Indian’s monkey lives and who swings from the coconut trees, “ “That is warmer, miss,” said Becky. “That is because it makes you think of something else” said Sara. “I’ve noticed this. What you have to do with your mind, when your body is miserable is to make it think of something else.” ” (151) By telling a story, Sara transforms her reality in the cold, damp attic and transports her and Becky to a remote tropical rainforest. In doing so, the two girls actually get warmer by merely thinking their troubles away.
Mary’s magic does not necessarily come from her imagination and ability to tell stories so much as magic is produced from her ability to think positively, through the vehicle of the garden and her independent and spirited nature. Mary is described as determined, and as a someone who focuses on the concrete, work and the transformative power of being immersed in nature, “She worked and dug and pulled up weeds steadily, only becoming more pleased with her work every hour instead of tiring of it. It seemed like a fascinating sort of play.” (78) Unlike Sara, Mary is suspicious of the transformative power of storytelling and rather favors experience, “The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books…Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.” (77)
Mary does not believe in romantic stories however she does tell stories, but they are more grounded in reality and less fantastic than Sara’s stories. She tells Collin stories about her past in India and about the Rajahs. Mary does, however, possess an imagination, however latent or less pronounced:
Living as it were, all by herself in a house with a hundred mysteriously closed rooms having nothing whatever to do to amuse herself, had set her inactive brain to working and was actually awakening her imagination. There is no doubt that the fresh, strong, pure air from the moor had a great deal to do with it. Just as it had given her an appetite, and fighting with the wind had stirred her blood, so the same things had stirred her mind. (59)
The atmosphere produced by the moors at Misselthwaite invigorates her and stimulates her imagination while the hot, stuffy air in India suffocated her.
A Little Princess represents magic more concretely than The Secret Garden insofar as Sara, Becky and Ermengarde are aware that the dinner party they imagine the night before Ram Dass’s banquet is pretend. The girls imagine the party to transform their reality at present and create another world in their attic. The magic that Sara’s imagination creates is a coping mechanism. She is, however, aware that the magic is not real. Sara claims that the plates for their pretend party are golden and the napkins are richly embroidered by nuns in convents in Spain. Sara explains the importance of imagining in order to see things more clearly to Becky, “ “You must pretend it,” said Sara. “If you pretend enough, you will see them.” ” (183) Sara transforms an old trunk that has been put in her attic because there was no use for it anywhere else into a magic box of wonders. Nothing had been left in it but garbage, but Sara is able to pull out a beautiful old summer hat with a garland of flowers. A soap dish is transformed into a carven flagon, tissue paper from the trunk is twisted into the form of little bonbon dishes, “Only the magic could have made it more than an old table covered with a red shawl and set with rubbish from a long-unopened trunk.” (185) Sara imagines the extravagant dinner party, and in doing so it becomes real. Part of Sara, however, is aware that it is pretend, “She struck a match and lighted it up with a great specious glow which illuminated the room. “By the time it stops blazing,” Sara said, “we shall forget about its not being real.” (186)
Even when Ms. Minchin disrupts their pretend party, the power of Sara’s imagination remains. She talks to Emily, her doll, and she says that “there is nothing left but prisoners in the Bastille.” (190) When Sara cannot pretend anymore, she equates herself with a prisoner in revolution era France, locked up in the famous jail. Remembering her book about the prisoners, “with gray hair and beards who hid their faces had forgotten that an outside world existed at all,” she creates a reality that is more romantic and hyperbolic in order to cope with her reality. Being imprisoned in the Bastille during the French Revolution would have been much worse than living in the attic of a girls boarding school in London.
Sara’s magic is concretely represented because Burnett uses Ram Dass to explain logically who is producing the magic in her room. When Sara wakes up in the morning after her pretend dinner party, she sees that “there was a glowing and blazing fire; on the hob was a little brass kettle hissing and boiling; spread upon the floor was a thick, warm crimson rug; before the fire a folding-table, unfolded, covered with a white cloth, and upon it spread small covered dishes, a cup, a saucer, a teapot; on the bed were new warm coverings and a satin-covered down quilt; at the foot a curious wadded silk robe, a pair of quilted slippers, and some books.” (193) She opens one of the books that Ram Dass has left her and written on the fly leaf is note that reads, “To the little girl in the attic. From a friend.” While it is logical that Ram Dass leaves the presents for Sara and Becky, a benefactor eliminates abstract, undefined magic. The power of Sara’s imagination created the magic necessary to transform her room and bring her beautiful things. The fact that Sara is aware she is pretending, and Ram Dass brings her all the delightful wonders indicates that magic is more definite than Mary’s magic.
Mary too resides in a world where the cooks, maids and doctors at her uncle’s estate do not take any interest in her. Out of boredom, she explores the grounds and discovers a garden, Locked up for over ten years, it is abandoned and in ruins. Mary is skipping rope all around the gardens and the orchard. The robin follows her while she is skipping rope and lands on a branch of ivy. Mary tells the robin, “You showed me where the key was yesterday. You ought to show me the door to-day.” (65) The robin sings a little song for Mary, and Mary remembers hearing about Magic in her Ayah’s stories. Mary thinks that the robin’s song at that moment was magic, alluding to the fact that birds in the novel are deeply connected to mystical faith. A gust of wind comes and sways everything around her, almost as if magic is contained in the wind, “It was stronger than the rest. It was strong enough to wave the branches of the trees, and it was more than strong enough to sway the trailing sprays of untrimmed ivy hanging from the wall.” (64) Mary catches an ivy branch in her hand and discovers a knob to a door to the secret garden. The entirety of the scene portrays a mystical moment in nature that is evoked by the robin’s song and that conjures the wind.
Mary meets Dickon for the first time and hardly believes he is real. Dickon is a gamekeeper of sorts at Misselthwaite Manor. He is described as being part of nature. Mary recalls that he smells of the clean fresh scent of heather, grass and leaves, “almost as if he were made of them.” (84) Mary describes him as a wood fairy who has a fleeting quality, and Mary claims that he is “too good to be true.” Dickon’s delightful complexity continues when Mary learns he can speak to animals and play tunes on a pipe, and she compares him to the Rajahs who charm animals in India.
Mary meets with her uncle, Mr. Craven to discuss whether she will have a governess or be sent to a boarding school. Mary tells Mr. Craven that she wishes simply to run and play outside and would like a bit of earth. The fact that Mary will not let herself be bound by convention is crucial. Mary is a spirited and determined girl who wants to roam free on the moors and take care of her garden. Mary’s nature mirrors her desire to make the garden untamed with foliage growing wild. She does not want her garden to be a “gardener’s garden” but rather free and unconstrained.
Having left Dickon in the garden to discuss her future with her uncle, she runs quickly back to him, fearing that he may have left to start his five-mile walk back to his house. Mary arrives in the garden where she previously left Dickon however he is nowhere to be found. Mary observes that his gardening tools are laid by a tree, but she is alone. Only the robin watches her from an ivy branch. “ “He’s gone,” she said woefully. “Oh! was he—was he—was he only a wood fairy?” (104) Mary believes that Dickon may not be a real boy but merely a fairy who frequents the gardens. The idea that Dickon is fairy alludes to childishness and innocence, playfulness, magic and mystery. For Mary, Dickon potentially symbolizes the magic that exists in the garden however Dickon also naturalistically reflects reality. Burnett attributes Dickon’s oscillation between fantasy and reality to indicate that magic can exist in everyone. In addition to being a symbol of the world of reality and the world of the fantasy, Dickon is a vehicle through which magic is possible for Mary. He helps Mary discover the magic within herself and in the garden insofar as he understands the importance of magic and teaches her how to garden and speak to animals.
Mary produces magic by making the walled garden come alive, and as a result she feels vigorous. Mary notices the changes that the garden brings to her. She remarks that she looks like, “quite a different creature” from when she had first arrived from India. Reflecting Mary’s spirited nature and refusal to be bound by convention, she wants the garden to be wild. “The lovely wild place was not likely to become a “gardener’s garden” it would be a wilderness of growing things before springtime was over.” (143) Her awakening of life in the garden allows the garden to bring life Misselthwaite Manor whose empty rooms are dank and deserted, to her cousin Collin who is ill and cannot walk because he has been left in bed since infancy. The flourishing garden similarly brings life to her uncle Archibald Craven who is overcome with grief at his wife’s unexpected death ten years prior.
In The Secret Garden, Magic is abstract. Magic resides in Dickon, Mary and Collin separately and manifests its form differently to each of them. Magic remains largely undefined, but it is certain the garden is producing magic and its magic transfers to each of the children. Collin occasionally doubts the validity of the magic, but his suspicions are quickly resolved. Collin tells Mary that even if the magic in the garden isn’t real magic, they can pretend it is. Collin says, “ “Something is there.” “It’s Magic,” said Mary, “but not black. It’s as white as snow.” ” (202) Collin asks Dickon’s mother, Mrs. Sowerby if she believes in magic, “That I do lad, I never knowed it by that name but what does th’ name matter? I warrant they call it a different name i’ France. Th’ same thing as set th’ seeds swellin’ an’ th’ sun shinin made thee a well lad an’ it’s the’ Good Thing.” (238)
Mrs. Sowerby is introduced to the children’s world of magic because she lives in a far off moorland cottage. She does not exist in the manor with all the helpers who oppress Collin and keep him ill. She is separate from the society and can see their world more clearly. The fact that she is poor is equated with her ability to see the truth about magic and Collin’s illness. Mrs. Sowerby observes the magic in the garden and understands that it is healing Collin. Ben Weatherstaff is similarly allowed access to the children’s world. He attends their magic ceremonies and helps them in the garden. In one of Collin’s incantations he says, “It’s in Ben Weatherstaff’s back. Magic! Magic!” Later, it is disclosed, that Weatherstaff’s ailment is rheumatics in his back. Ram Dass in A Little Princess is the only adult who accesses Sara and Becky’s imaginary world in the attic. He is able to partake because he is creating their magic, but also because he believes in the power of their imaginations.
Magic possesses a transformative power in The Secret Garden, insofar as it makes things come alive and heals illnesses and ailments. The magic helps Collin realize his power and ability to learn to walk. Likewise, Mary’s magic in the garden allows Misselthwaite Manor come alive while she simultaneously becomes full of vitality. Collin claims:
When Mary found this garden it looked quite dead. Then something began pushing things up out of the soil and making things out of nothing. It’s something. It can’t be nothing! I don’t know its name so I call it Magic…I have had the strange feeling of being happy as if something were pushing and drawing my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of Magic, leaves, trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden—in all places. The Magic in the garden has made me stand. (206)
The quote exemplifies the ambiguous nature of Magic in the novel. Being outside in the garden has a tremendous effect on the children. Collin says, “it makes things out of nothing” alluding to the plants that grow, but Collin is referring to the fact that the garden made him walk with otherwise useless appendages.
Collin asks Dickon if he is making the magic in the garden to which Dickon replies, “ “Tha’s doin’ Magic theysel’, ” he said. It’s the same magic as made these ‘ere work out o’ the’ earth…” ” (194) Collin relates to magic differently than Mary or Dickon. While Mary and Dickon’s magic relates to nature, the garden and the animals, Collin’s produces magic through various scientific experiments. Collin’s experiments do not seem to relate to science in anyway. They are incantations to make him better, “Then I will chant. 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…” (208) After the prayer-meeting, Collin asserts that he will walk around the garden. After he succeeds, he states that this was his first scientific discovery. The fact that the boundaries between magic and science are blurred further indicates that magic is an abstraction.
Sara’s world in the attic with her family of friends which includes Becky, Ermengarde and Ram Dass transcends the limits of class distinction where errand girls befriend aristocratic girls. Mary’s world in the garden with Dickon, Collin, Ben Weatherstaff and Mrs. Sowerby is a microcosm that represents a possibility of being where spoiled children are able to befriend gardeners and peasants. This fact further indicates that the two girls exist in a self-created worlds that do not abide by the traditional rules of society. It it through their world that the children are able to experience the transformative power of magic and imagination which is not always available to adults.
Happy Reading!
Very fondly,
Jessica
