The Secret Garden (1911) di Frances Hodgson Burnett : “a wilderness of growing things”

My paper focuses on the ‘actual’ and metaphorical garden in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, employing gender studies and postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives, while placing The Secret Garden in the context of late Victorian children’s literature. With its roots in the end of the nineteenth century gardening ‘craze’, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel develops the image of the garden to frame questions about parent-child and master-servant relationships as well as to criticize British imperialism, but also to explore the issues of physical and moral growth and the ecological value of nature. Burnett’s novel begins as a story of disease, death and abandonment and gradually moves to images of nurturance, maternal care and creativity. In her portrait of a wild garden, Burnett encompasses the Rousseauian creed about a free and healthy childhood, the Romantic notion of unspoilt nature, and the ideal of motherly care and charity. Indeed, the writer emphasizes that instead of inhabiting a controlled and ‘servile’ space, Mary and her two friends, Dickon and Colin, create an ‘egalitarian’ garden, so that “the lovely wild place […] would be a wilderness of growing things”.