The Secret Garden Literary Devices

Explanation and Analysis—Acting Beautifully:

In The Secret Garden, the author creates a strong correlation between people's physical appearance and their psychological state: changing one's mindset and behavior, she argues, can literally change one's body. This is related to the author's Christian Scientist belief in the ability of prayer and positive thinking to change physical attributes and overcome illness. In this book, the state of the body echoes the state of mind. In Chapter 2, the mother of the "clergyman's family" who takes Mary in after the death of her parents remarks:

“Perhaps if her mother had carried her pretty face and her pretty manners oftener into the nursery Mary might have learned some pretty ways too. It is very sad, now the poor beautiful thing is gone, to remember that many people never even knew that she had a child at all.”

Mary's childhood ugliness, in this narrative, is due to the fact that she had never been "around" prettiness enough to "learn" it. Mary's "pretty, pretty" mother behaves in a way that pleases the shallow, unpleasant people in her environment, so they all refer to her as having been beautiful. Her beauty is only surface-level, as are all her interactions with her contemporaries in India and with her daughter. Her "pretty face and pretty ways" apparently did not transfer over to her daughter because she didn't "carry them into the nursery" and "teach" Mary the important skill of "prettiness."

People say they cannot believe Mary is her mother's child because of how "ugly" she is. Even though Mrs. Lennox "scarcely ever looked" at her daughter, people still feel affection for her and remember her fondly. This is a reversal of how Mary is later treated. Because Mary's mother is a beauty, people respond to her kindly and her actions seem to matter less than Mary's. Because Mary is a plain girl, her mistakes and transgressions are given far less sympathy.

It is only when Mary herself learns how to behave like a good person and to get along with others that she herself begins to be called "attractive" and "pretty." Not behaving in a way that allows one to be welcomed in one's own environment is correlated with physical ugliness, especially when Mary is compared with her mother.

Explanation and Analysis—Mistress Mary:

The novel often alludes to the nursery rhyme "Mistress Mary Quite Contrary," using it to underscore the changes in character that Mary Lennox undergoes. These allusions create a running motif that functions as a shorthand for whenever the narrator wants to indicate that Mary is misbehaving. This first comes up in Chapter 2, when one of the Crawford children becomes annoyed with Mary's bad attitude and starts to tease her. It unfortunately sticks so much that even their parents take it up:

“She is such a plain child,” Mrs. Crawford said pityingly, afterward. “And her mother was such a pretty creature. She had a very pretty manner, too, and Mary has the most unattractive ways I ever saw in a child. The children call her ‘Mistress Mary Quite Contrary,’ and though it’s naughty of them, one can’t help understanding it.”

Mrs. Crawford equates Mary's behavior to her physical appearance in this segment. She is a "plain child," while her mother was a "pretty creature," and so it stands to reason—given the logic of the novel—that Mary would have "unattractive ways." The rhyme itself goes as follows:

Mistress Mary, quite contrary

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells, and cockle shells,

And marigolds all in a row.

"Contrary" in this context means "disagreeable," and Mary Lennox is "the most disagreeable child" anyone has ever met. The phrase "Mistress Mary" becomes a reference to her intractability wherever it occurs in the book. When the narrator calls this character "Mistress Mary," as they often do, it is an indicator for the reader that Mary is behaving in a particularly unpleasant, spoiled or high-handed way.

When the phrase occurs later in the book, it functions as a reminder for the reader of how Mary used to behave and approach things. By that point, it has become shorthand for the previously spoiled and bad-tempered version of the little girl. When the narrator calls her "Mistress Mary" in the second half of the novel, it feels like a fond joke rather than a criticism.

The nursery rhyme would have been well-known to any British child of the era, and would have added the connotation of gardening to any reference to the protagonist whenever it came up. Because it first occurs so early in the novel, and is actually the title of the second chapter, it indicates to the reader that Mary's storyline will have something to do with both contrariness and gardening.

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Explanation and Analysis—The Bare Moors:

The moors, which seems bare and unforgiving to the untrained eye (but are actually a location of life and vitality) serve as a motif denoting experiential knowledge in many places in the novel. For example, in Chapter 4, when Mary is first asking the housemaid Martha about the vast landscape that she can see from her bedroom window, she comments that it seems barren and lifeless. Martha, affronted, contradicts her:

“That’s because tha’rt not used to it,” Martha said, going back to her hearth. “Tha’ thinks it’s too big an’ bare now. But tha’ will like it.” “Do you?” inquired Mary. “Aye, that I do,” answered Martha, cheerfully polishing away at the grate. “I just love it. It’s none bare. It’s covered wi’ growin’ things as smells sweet."

When Mary can only see the bad in her situation and refuses to learn, the moor is like an ocean separating her from her former life and all that she had previously known. She cannot imagine that the moor could "smell sweet," and Martha can understand why she would see it as "too big an' bare." However, as Mary grows to know the manor and the people who live in and around it, she begins to share Martha's knowledge, seeing that the moor, like everything else in life, is only desolate when one is not looking closely enough.

Mary later passes this knowledge on to Colin in Chapter 14, demonstrating her own growth in understanding, in an interaction that mirrors this one with Martha:

“Does he like the moor?” said Colin. “How can he when it’s such a great, bare, dreary place?” “It’s the most beautiful place,” protested Mary. “Thousands of lovely things grow on it and there are thousands of little creatures all busy building nests and making holes and burrows and chippering or singing or squeaking to each other. They are so busy and having such fun under the earth or in the trees or heather. It’s their world.”

Rather than being dull and lifeless, the moor is brimming and "busy" with life—this just isn't visible from inside Misselthwaite Manor, a fact that Colin and Mary only learn when they begin to reach beyond the boundaries of their upbringings. The fact that Mary passes on this knowledge to Colin, having learned it both from Martha and from her own experience, is an expression of her own growing maturity and independence.

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Explanation and Analysis—Silenced Servants :

Silent and silenced Indian characters appear as a motif throughout The Secret Garden. In Burnett's novel, although phrases from British Colonial India often occur, they are never presented as "speech" or dialogue by an actual Indian person. Rather, because of the oppressive nature of British rule in India, Mary Lennox remembers her Indian companions as being impenetrably silent and implacable. For example, in contrast to the cheeky and chatty Martha in Chapter 4, Mary thinks back to the attendants she had been used to:

The native servants she had been used to in India were not in the least like this. They were obsequious and servile and did not presume to talk to their masters as if they were their equals. They made salaams and called them “protector of the poor” and names of that sort. Indian servants were commanded to do things, not asked. It was not the custom to say “please” and “thank you” and Mary had always slapped her Ayah in the face when she was angry.

The violence with which Indian characters are treated is explained quite casually here by Burnett's narrator. The insulting terms "obsequious and servile" are used to note the apparent difference between these people and the "stoutly" talkative Misselthwaite staff. Mary tells Martha that "native" Indians are "not people," and Indian servants, in Mary's memory, have no voices of their own. The only things she can remember them "saying" are hazy recollections of honorifics they called their "masters," who "command" them to do things instead of treating them with humanity.

While Yorkshire dialect abounds, Indian English and other Indian languages are glaringly absent. When Mary describes why she's "learning Yorkshire" to Dr. Craven in Chapter 19, she actually compares the two directly:

“I’m learning it as if it was French,” said Mary rather coldly. “It’s like a native dialect in India. Very clever people try to learn them. I like it and so does Colin.”

Representing the people of a colonized country as a homogenous, submissive mass with no individual voices is a common tactic of writing from the British Empire. It dehumanizes and reduces the colonized people, removing all their individuality. Notice here that Mary doesn't say that the Indian people who speak these dialects are clever: she says that people who can "learn" them are clever. The experience of the Indians she refers to is totally erased.

Mary, the book tells us, spent much of her childhood in the company of her nanny, or "Ayah," but the reader never encounters anything this person actually says. The closest they get are "stories" Mary was told by this character and a lullaby Mary remembers being sung in "Hindustani," which she reproduces for Colin. This song is not actually recorded on the paper, however; even Indian music is silenced in The Secret Garden.

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Explanation and Analysis—Thinking New Things:

The phrase "new things" is repeated many times in The Secret Garden, and occurs always when Mary Lennox encounters someone else's behavior that makes her stop and reflect on her own. Burnett's novel employs a few phrases that work like this, forming a shorthand for a much larger concept that would belabor the point if explained to the reader every time. An example of this idiomatic motif happens when Martha scolds Mary for being unable to dress herself properly in Chapter 6:

“Hasn’t tha’ got good sense?” she said once, when Mary had stood waiting for her to put on her gloves for her. “Our Susan Ann is twice as sharp as thee an’ she’s only four year’ old. Sometimes tha’ looks fair soft in th’ head.” Mary had worn her contrary scowl for an hour after that, but it made her think several entirely new things.

When Martha compares Mary to her much younger sister, who is "only four year' old" to Mary's 10, she makes her feel ashamed. The idiomatic phrase Martha uses here, "Hasn't tha' got good sense?" refers to the idea that, because she hasn't been taught how to take care of herself, Mary is missing fundamental qualities of common sense that even a toddler would have. This provokes Mary's "contrary scowl," but instead of just making her cross, it makes her change.

Burnett implies much later in the book that Mary's "disagreeable" thoughts were taking up too much "space" in her head to allow for good thoughts and common sense. In Chapter 27, she writes:

So long as Mistress Mary’s mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determination not to be pleased by or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored, and wretched child.

The fact that trying to "think new things" improves both Mary's mind and her body, "correcting" her "yellow face" and "sickliness," is another reference to Burnett's interest in Christian Science. Rather than having to be told that she is spoiled or that she should change, when Mary "thinks new things" in The Secret Garden, the author is implying that her mind and her worldview are expanding. When she stops focusing on her "dislikes and sour opinions of people," she is quite literally changing her own mind for the better. This happens most explicitly in the beginning of Chapter 27, when Burnett outlines the book's central idea of the "power of thoughts," explicitly discussing that central theme in the novel:

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body.

Bad thoughts here are themselves approached using similes in medical and technical language, equating them to dangerous childhood illnesses like "scarlet fever." Thoughts have "power" like batteries, risks like "poison," and benefits like "sunlight" does.

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Explanation and Analysis—The Bare Moors:

The moors, which seems bare and unforgiving to the untrained eye (but are actually a location of life and vitality) serve as a motif denoting experiential knowledge in many places in the novel. For example, in Chapter 4, when Mary is first asking the housemaid Martha about the vast landscape that she can see from her bedroom window, she comments that it seems barren and lifeless. Martha, affronted, contradicts her:

“That’s because tha’rt not used to it,” Martha said, going back to her hearth. “Tha’ thinks it’s too big an’ bare now. But tha’ will like it.” “Do you?” inquired Mary. “Aye, that I do,” answered Martha, cheerfully polishing away at the grate. “I just love it. It’s none bare. It’s covered wi’ growin’ things as smells sweet."

When Mary can only see the bad in her situation and refuses to learn, the moor is like an ocean separating her from her former life and all that she had previously known. She cannot imagine that the moor could "smell sweet," and Martha can understand why she would see it as "too big an' bare." However, as Mary grows to know the manor and the people who live in and around it, she begins to share Martha's knowledge, seeing that the moor, like everything else in life, is only desolate when one is not looking closely enough.

Mary later passes this knowledge on to Colin in Chapter 14, demonstrating her own growth in understanding, in an interaction that mirrors this one with Martha:

“Does he like the moor?” said Colin. “How can he when it’s such a great, bare, dreary place?” “It’s the most beautiful place,” protested Mary. “Thousands of lovely things grow on it and there are thousands of little creatures all busy building nests and making holes and burrows and chippering or singing or squeaking to each other. They are so busy and having such fun under the earth or in the trees or heather. It’s their world.”

Rather than being dull and lifeless, the moor is brimming and "busy" with life—this just isn't visible from inside Misselthwaite Manor, a fact that Colin and Mary only learn when they begin to reach beyond the boundaries of their upbringings. The fact that Mary passes on this knowledge to Colin, having learned it both from Martha and from her own experience, is an expression of her own growing maturity and independence.

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Explanation and Analysis—Silenced Servants :

Silent and silenced Indian characters appear as a motif throughout The Secret Garden. In Burnett's novel, although phrases from British Colonial India often occur, they are never presented as "speech" or dialogue by an actual Indian person. Rather, because of the oppressive nature of British rule in India, Mary Lennox remembers her Indian companions as being impenetrably silent and implacable. For example, in contrast to the cheeky and chatty Martha in Chapter 4, Mary thinks back to the attendants she had been used to:

The native servants she had been used to in India were not in the least like this. They were obsequious and servile and did not presume to talk to their masters as if they were their equals. They made salaams and called them “protector of the poor” and names of that sort. Indian servants were commanded to do things, not asked. It was not the custom to say “please” and “thank you” and Mary had always slapped her Ayah in the face when she was angry.

The violence with which Indian characters are treated is explained quite casually here by Burnett's narrator. The insulting terms "obsequious and servile" are used to note the apparent difference between these people and the "stoutly" talkative Misselthwaite staff. Mary tells Martha that "native" Indians are "not people," and Indian servants, in Mary's memory, have no voices of their own. The only things she can remember them "saying" are hazy recollections of honorifics they called their "masters," who "command" them to do things instead of treating them with humanity.

While Yorkshire dialect abounds, Indian English and other Indian languages are glaringly absent. When Mary describes why she's "learning Yorkshire" to Dr. Craven in Chapter 19, she actually compares the two directly:

“I’m learning it as if it was French,” said Mary rather coldly. “It’s like a native dialect in India. Very clever people try to learn them. I like it and so does Colin.”

Representing the people of a colonized country as a homogenous, submissive mass with no individual voices is a common tactic of writing from the British Empire. It dehumanizes and reduces the colonized people, removing all their individuality. Notice here that Mary doesn't say that the Indian people who speak these dialects are clever: she says that people who can "learn" them are clever. The experience of the Indians she refers to is totally erased.

Mary, the book tells us, spent much of her childhood in the company of her nanny, or "Ayah," but the reader never encounters anything this person actually says. The closest they get are "stories" Mary was told by this character and a lullaby Mary remembers being sung in "Hindustani," which she reproduces for Colin. This song is not actually recorded on the paper, however; even Indian music is silenced in The Secret Garden.

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Explanation and Analysis—The Magic:

In the second half of The Secret Garden, Colin, Mary, and Dickon have all become fast friends in the common pursuit of restoring the "secret garden" and healing Colin's infirmity. Mary and Colin are learning from and working with each other to improve their health and the "faults" in their personalities. Through this, they develop an idea about how the world can be made to work better for all people willing to "improve" themselves. They call the force that operates behind this "the Magic," and the phrase remains present as a motif for the rest of the book. In Chapter 23, titled "Magic," the following exchange occurs:

“I shall stop being queer,” he said, “if I go every day to the garden. There is Magic in there—good Magic, you know, Mary. I am sure there is.” “So am I,” said Mary. “Even if it isn’t real Magic,” Colin said, “we can pretend it is. Something is there—something!” “It’s Magic,” said Mary, “but not black. It’s as white as snow.” They always called it Magic and indeed it seemed like it in the months that followed—the wonderful months—the radiant months—the amazing ones.

Here, Burnett uses classic literary imagery to distinguish between "good" and "bad" magic, aligning the "good" with "white" and the "bad" with "black." The "white" magic of the garden only works if the children are themselves willing to "work" for it. It aligns "goodness" with effort and determination, whereas "badness" is associated with the laziness and dissatisfaction that used to characterize both Mary and Colin.

When Colin muses that he will "stop being queer," he means it in the Victorian sense of "bizarre" or "strange," and not the contemporary sense relating to gender and sexual orientation. Being "queer," rather than isolating him, is framed here as being something he has in common with Ben Weatherstaff and Mary Lennox. These people both have characters that could do with improvement, and both also feel that the "Magic" in the garden is changing them, making them "like people" in both senses of the phrase. At this point in the novel, Colin and company have not formed a unified theory of what "the Magic" is or does. They know already, though, that something almost miraculous is working on them in the "wonderful," "radiant" time that precedes and follows this chapter. Mary's remembered stories of "magic" Indian mysticism, lucky coincidences in the book (like finding the garden's key), and the way certain special people affect others are all linked with the motif of "the Magic" in The Secret Garden.

Burnett's narrator also regularly interjects on the subject of "the Magic." This motif—in this passage and in the children's dialogue in general—functions as an easily digestible version of the Christian Scientific belief in divine healing. In this faith, adherents believe that physical illness is curable through belief and prayer, as illness is a sign of false or misguided thoughts; meaning, then, that physical ailments can be remedied through metaphysical means like prayer. The concept of "the Magic" also borrows from the idea of Spiritualism, a practice that was extremely popular from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. In Spiritualist practices, the purported ability to communicate with the dead, and the idea that consciousness persisted beyond the grave, were considered factually true. Like Spiritualists, who employed many pseudoscientific techniques to "prove" their ability to speak and listen beyond the grave, Colin and Mary become focused on "understanding" and "proving" the existence of "the Magic."

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Explanation and Analysis—Physical Disability:

The Secret Garden has been criticized for its motif of incapacitated or disabled bodies as being less worthy of life and less desirable than those of able-bodied people. When the children explain their plan to reveal Colin's new-found strength and movement as a result of "the Magic" to Susan in Chapter 27, Colin tells her delightedly that:

“I felt so joyful,” said Colin, opening his beautiful strange eyes at her. “Suddenly I felt how different I was—how strong my arms and legs were, you know—and how I could dig and stand—and I jumped up and wanted to shout out something to anything that would listen.”

The motif of "correcting" physical disability is a central thread that runs through the entire book. The doctrine of Christian Science (the author's own religion) dictates that infirmities can be healed through prayer. It strongly discourages medical interventions for physical illnesses. Although Burnett doesn't invoke a Christian God specifically in The Secret Garden, she does attribute the power of "the Magic" to an omnipotent "Joy-Maker." This would have been an obvious reference to a Christian God to Burnett's British audience, as the sermons and psalms they would have regularly encountered often use similar "joyful" language when speaking about a creator. When Colin feels "joyful"in this passage, it is implied that the power of positive thinking is working to "correct" his illness. He has gone from being bed-bound to a boy with "strong arms and legs," which the novel strongly implies is possible because of "the Magic."

Colin's illness is treated as a "hysterical condition," a diagnosis now considered defunct and pejorative and which was used to subjugate, control, and sometimes imprison women from the 16th to the late 20th century. Colin's body is also often described as being effeminate and unmanly when he is bed-bound. "Hysteria" was a medical diagnosis that had no real symptoms apart from emotions people found to be inappropriate in the "sufferer." People diagnosed with hysteria underwent horrible medical abuse in attempted "cures" and were often institutionalized or otherwise incarcerated. When Colin emerges from the bedroom in which he has been living, the immediate change in his attitude seems to imply that his disability and his strong emotions were his fault, and that by adjusting his thoughts his body would naturally follow.

When Colin is compared to the physically healthy Dickon (whom everyone loves and finds to be "strong and steady") The Secret Garden engages with another facet of the problematic trope of disability being "curable" by mental effort. When the motif of disability appears, the novel often implies that disabled and ill children are more unpleasant, "mean-tempered," and "crotchety" than their able-bodied peers. Able-bodied children are represented in a positive light in this novel, and less physically mobile or otherwise healthy children negatively. This is compounded by the novel's narrative of healthy thoughts making healthy bodies.

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Explanation and Analysis—Thinking New Things:

The phrase "new things" is repeated many times in The Secret Garden, and occurs always when Mary Lennox encounters someone else's behavior that makes her stop and reflect on her own. Burnett's novel employs a few phrases that work like this, forming a shorthand for a much larger concept that would belabor the point if explained to the reader every time. An example of this idiomatic motif happens when Martha scolds Mary for being unable to dress herself properly in Chapter 6:

“Hasn’t tha’ got good sense?” she said once, when Mary had stood waiting for her to put on her gloves for her. “Our Susan Ann is twice as sharp as thee an’ she’s only four year’ old. Sometimes tha’ looks fair soft in th’ head.” Mary had worn her contrary scowl for an hour after that, but it made her think several entirely new things.

When Martha compares Mary to her much younger sister, who is "only four year' old" to Mary's 10, she makes her feel ashamed. The idiomatic phrase Martha uses here, "Hasn't tha' got good sense?" refers to the idea that, because she hasn't been taught how to take care of herself, Mary is missing fundamental qualities of common sense that even a toddler would have. This provokes Mary's "contrary scowl," but instead of just making her cross, it makes her change.

Burnett implies much later in the book that Mary's "disagreeable" thoughts were taking up too much "space" in her head to allow for good thoughts and common sense. In Chapter 27, she writes:

So long as Mistress Mary’s mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determination not to be pleased by or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored, and wretched child.

The fact that trying to "think new things" improves both Mary's mind and her body, "correcting" her "yellow face" and "sickliness," is another reference to Burnett's interest in Christian Science. Rather than having to be told that she is spoiled or that she should change, when Mary "thinks new things" in The Secret Garden, the author is implying that her mind and her worldview are expanding. When she stops focusing on her "dislikes and sour opinions of people," she is quite literally changing her own mind for the better. This happens most explicitly in the beginning of Chapter 27, when Burnett outlines the book's central idea of the "power of thoughts," explicitly discussing that central theme in the novel:

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body.

Bad thoughts here are themselves approached using similes in medical and technical language, equating them to dangerous childhood illnesses like "scarlet fever." Thoughts have "power" like batteries, risks like "poison," and benefits like "sunlight" does.

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The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Secret Garden: Motifs 7 key examples