“Wheel Me Over There!”: Disability and Colin’s Wheelchair in The Secret Garden

This article approaches Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden from a disability studies perspective, with particular attention to how gender and class interact with (dis)ability, to reveal how traditional notions of class and gender underpin Colin Craven’s narrative of recovery. To become the able-bodied, masculine, upper-class “Master Colin” by the novel’s conclusion, Colin must both marginalize and differentiate himself from his female cousin, Mary Lennox, and the working-class Dickon Sowerby. Colin’s wheelchair is the primary locus for the text’s negotiations of gender, class, and (dis)ability. Ultimately, although much in its representation of disability is stereotypical, the novel usefully shows the ways in which disability is socially constructed.