Domesticating Bronte's Moors: Motherhood in The Secret Garden

In The Mother/Daughter Plot, Marianne Hirsch argues that readers must start reframing women’s narratives through their depictions of mother/daughter relationships. Reading novels for the “mother/daughter plot” allows one to examine representations of maternity and femininity within those texts, as well as “narrative patterns which call the more conventional constructions of the love plot into question.” ¹ Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden works well within such a reading, for it is at heart a novel about mothering: motherless Mary and Colin are restored to health, “mothered,” by the nurturant power of a garden. Although the narrative takes place in an enclosed garden, an extension of the Victorian female sphere, Burnett undermines nineteenth-century constructions of gender and maternity throughout the novel. Her conception of maternity is non-gendered; both women and men can mother, and the ideal mother, represented by Mrs. Sowerby, expects the same behavior from boys and girls. Moreover, the activity of mothering is carried on in The Secret Garden in part by the spirit of Colin’s dead mother working through her garden. By situating her novel within the Yorkshire Moors, and by bringing a mother back after death to take care of her child and her niece, Burnett rewrites maternal relations in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Using metaphors of gardening and botany, Burnett replaces Catherine and Cathy’s nominal mother/child relationship with the primacy of the maternal bond.

The heroes of Burnett’s novel about motherhood, Mary and Colin, are both motherless. According to Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble, orphans are such a common motif in Victorian literature “that we could be forgiven for assuming that orphanhood was the typical condition of children in the period” (24). Though parental death was fairly common in Victorian England—Burnett lost her own father when she was four—the presence of so many orphans in nineteenth-century literature does not merely reflect historical circumstance. ² Reynolds and Humble argue that the figure of the orphan was attractive to women writers because “[orphanhood] exaggerated their own dependency and the constraints it imposed . . . it was frequently construed as both necessary and legitimate for the orphan to try to become independent” (27). ³ Hirsch agrees, claiming that in Victorian novels, “dead or absent mothers are the only positive maternal figures we hear about” (47). Burnett, however, writes a different maternal figure. Colin’s mother, though dead, is by no means absent; rather, she works actively in The Secret Garden through a pantheistic spirit of nature called “Magic” (239). ⁴ While the orphan convention allows Burnett to create children who, because of their lack of adult supervision, act independently, she simultaneously conflates Colin’s dead mother with a spiritualistic natural force so that mothering remains the focus of the novel. ⁵

Burnett believed in the presence of the dead among the living, writing that “I am not thinking of your dearests as conventional angels with flapping wings or as spiritualistic creatures lifting tables and cushions about—I am thinking of them as real—real—as themselves” (134; qtd. in Duisberre). In The Secret Garden, Colin’s mother Lilias Craven, who died in the garden, works through Magic, a female generative life force that “is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of Magic” (239). ⁶ Dickon first posits Mrs. Craven’s presence in the garden, claiming that dead mothers “have to come back, tha’ sees. Happen she’s been in the garden an’ happen it was her set us to work, an’ told us to bring him here” (218). More explicitly, Burnett identifies Magic with Mrs. Craven near the end of the novel, when Colin encounters her spirit in his bedroom:

I wakened . . . and felt as if the Magic was filling the room . . . The room was quite light and there was a patch of moonlight on the curtain and somehow that made me go and pull the cord. She looked right down at me as if she were laughing because she was glad I was standing there

(268). ⁷

Just as the Magic...