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© Connotations 12.1 (2002/2003): 61-66
N.B. For purposes of citation, page numbers of the printed version are inserted in square brackets.
N.B. For purposes of citation, page numbers of the printed version are inserted in square brackets.
Brontë and
Burnett: A Response to Susan E. James
LISA TYLER
Reference:
The Romantic influences on Frances
Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s novel The Secret Garden are evident
and have been well documented. These influences include the attention and
prominence given to child characters, 1 Burnett’s use of the
Western tradition of the literary pastoral, 2 and what Burnett critics
identify as the Wordsworthian notion that children are closer to nature, 3 —a notion perhaps more
accurately attributed to Rousseau and Goethe. In her 1974 biography of Frances
Hodgson Burnett, Ann Thwaite devotes a paragraph to the parallels between The
Secret Garden and Jane Eyre (220-21), which she describes as too
close to be coincidental, and in a 1975 bibliographical survey of Burnett’s
work, Francis J. Molson called for critics to establish the “extent of
Burnett’s debt to Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë” (41). Phyllis Bixler, the
best authority on Burnett’s writings, has devoted several paragraphs to spelling
out that debt and its significance (Frances 99), as well as briefly
alluding to the possible influence of Jane Eyre on Burnett’s other
writings (Frances 125).
“More than one scholar has
identified and described ‘the echoes of Jane Eyre in The Secret
Garden’ but the contribution of Wuthering Heights has been less
recognized,” Susan E. James accurately observes in explaining her own project.
Typical is Humphrey Carpenter’s mention, in passing, that “there is a good deal
of allusion to the wind ‘wuthering’ round the manor; the country lad Dickon,
who becomes Mary’s friend and helper, is a kind of Heathcliff-gone-right”
(188-89). Elizabeth Lennox Keyser went a bit farther, albeit in a footnote,
mentioning [page 62] first similarities of setting, and then adding,
“Mary has elements of Jane Eyre and both Catherines, Dickon resembles a more
benign little Heathcliff, and Colin seems a blend of Rochester, Linton
Heathcliff, and Hareton Earnshaw” (13n10). The comparison between Dickon and
Heathcliff may admittedly seem a bit farfetched, but Mary certainly is an
orphan, like Jane Eyre, and shares that character’s courage and
inquisitiveness. Like the first Catherine, she loves the freedom of being
outdoors, and like the second, she willingly socializes the young man who needs
her help because of parental neglect. Colin has Rochester’s temper, Linton
Heathcliff’s sickliness, and Hareton Earnshaw’s willingness to be tutored.
While the characters and plot developments differ dramatically, certain themes
from the Brontës’ novels do seem to recur in Burnett’s. Anna Krugovoy Silver
has done the most extensive work comparing Wuthering Heights and The
Secret Garden, suggesting that Burnett replaces the purely nominal
mother-and-child relationship of Catherine and her daughter with “the primacy
of the maternal bond” (193). Noting the parallels to Lady Chatterley’s Lover
developed by earlier critics (e.g. Verduin and Plotz), Bixler comments on
the sexual undercurrents of Burnett’s novel in The Secret Garden: Nature’s
Magic:
A heroine who divides her attention
between an eroticized lower-class male and an attenuated upper-class male has
occurred elsewhere in British fiction. An earlier example of this
character triad had been provided by Catherine, Heathcliff, and Edgar, who,
along with their Yorkshire moors in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
(1847), doubtless influenced Burnett consciously or unconsciously in writing The
Secret Garden. (56)
In her delightful essay, James
develops our understanding of this influence. The most surprising and
convincing element of her argument lies in her persuasive comparisons of
characters in both novels: the hot-tempered orphans Mary Lennox and
Heathcliff, the brooding adult Heathcliff and the grief-tormented Archibald
Craven, and the sickly and effete aristocratic children, Linton Heathcliff and
Colin Craven. [page 63]
Perhaps the
least compelling elements of James’s essay are her textual comparisons, in
which passages from both works are placed side by side. While the language is
at times similar, the parallels she develops between the characters and
situations in the two novels are ultimately more effective. Also troubling is
her dismissal of the moors as a setting in the later writer’s work. “For Burnett
in The Secret Garden, the moors are a place described but never
experienced first-hand,” writes James (61). But elsewhere Burnett did
show a heroine with personal experience of the moors, albeit Scottish ones—in The
White People, her 1917 novella of the supernatural at least partly inspired
by her sense that her beloved son Lionel, dead of tuberculosis at 15, was still
with her in spirit. In that work as well, however, “Burnett sentimentalizes the
otherworldly,” as James observes of The Secret Garden (69).
As is
typical of the best literary criticism, James’s article stimulates thought and
suggests further parallels to develop. It would be interesting to compare both
novels as what Barbara and Richard Almond term “therapeutic narratives.”
Claudia Marquis, who offers a psychoanalytic reading of Burnett’s novel, has
suggested that Mary acts “as analyst to Colin’s analysand” (178). The Almonds
have demonstrated that The Secret Garden is an insightful portrayal of
psychological healing, Gillian Adams has looked at the healing power of
secrets, and Madelon S. Gohlke has written movingly of the novel’s contribution
to her own recovery from grief after her father’s sudden accidental death.
Similarly, William A. Madden has offered an analysis of Wuthering Heights
in terms of Freudian trauma theory, contending “the double drama of Wuthering
Heights has provided the powerful experience of living through the same
potentially traumatic circumstances, once ending in tragedy, but the second
time with the energy bound and channeled into human wholeness and love through
the transforming power of a love that both understands and forgives” (154).
Trysh Travis
has noted (with some dismay) her students’ uncritical adoption of the
pop-psychology terminology of what Travis calls the [page 64] “recovery
movement” to understand Wuthering Heights; the title of her article is
“Heathcliff and Cathy, the Dysfunctional Couple.” More persuasively than
Travis’s students, Eric P. Levy suggests that the characters of Brontë’s novel
were all either neglected or spoiled, and that their adult behaviors reflect
their childhood experiences of being either starved for love or lavished with
excessive attention: “In one family, the implied message transmitted to the
child might be rendered as ‘You don’t belong here’; in the other, ‘You’re too
weak ever to leave’” (159). In The Secret Garden, Mary has
received the first message, Colin the second.
The disturbing eclipse of Mary in
favor of Colin in The Secret Garden, a switch that bothers many of the novel’s
women readers, 4 bears certain parallels to
Catherine’s death and Heathcliff’s domination of the remaining family members
in Wuthering Heights. Consider Danielle E. Price’s observation: “Mary is
forgotten in what becomes a story of father and son, and we remember, if we had
ever forgotten, who owns and who will own all the gardens on the estate” (11).
The class dynamics of both works might also merit comparison. Both works
contrast the emotional honesty, passionate warmth, and powerful personalities
of characters associated with Yorkshire and the chilly, unhealthy characters
who circulate in the society beyond—although in Brontë’s novel, only the
Yorkshire gentry are attractive; the servants, unlike the idealized
Sowerbys of The Secret Garden, can be frightening in their malevolence.
It would be interesting to analyze Wuthering Heights in light of Jerry
Phillips’s essay on the class politics of The Secret Garden.
It has been suggested that in her
novel Brontë draws on the “primitive energies of childhood” (Oates 65), and
thus that our own perhaps subconscious memories of childhood rage and the other
primal emotions of the nursery account for at least part of the intensity and
impact of Wuthering Heights. Yet, although appropriately drawing on
those same intense emotions in a work of children’s literature, Burnett mutes
their impact, showing the children in rages and tantrums that are comic rather
than frightening. Unlike Brontë, Burnett was ultimately [page 65] less
interested in ugly emotions than in socially acceptable and aesthetically
pleasing ones. One senses that she wished to evade the feelings invoked by the
more painful experiences in her own life—her two unhappy marriages, and the
loss of her son Lionel to tuberculosis, diagnosed just nine months before his
death. Perhaps because of such deeply painful experiences, she seems primarily
interested in people who were successfully able to achieve self-control. As she
once told her son, “with the best that was in me, I have tried to write more
happiness into the world” (Bixler, Frances 71).
Sinclair Community College
Dayton, Ohio
Dayton, Ohio
NOTES
WORKS CITED
Adams, Gillian. “Secrets and Healing
Magic in The Secret Garden.” Triumphs of the Spirit in Children’s
Literature. Eds. Francelia Butler and Richard Rotert. Hamden,
Connecticut: Shoe String Press, 1986. 42-54.
Almond, Barbara and Richard Almond. The
Therapeutic Narrative: Fictional Relationships and the Process of Psychological
Change. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1996.
Bixler, Phyllis. Frances Hodgson
Burnett. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.
——. “The Secret Garden ‘Misread’: The Broadway Musical as
Creative Adaptation.” Children’s Literature 22 (1994): 101-21.
——. The Secret Garden: Nature’s Magic. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Carpenter, Humphrey. Secret
Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1985. [page 66]
Evans, Gwyneth. “The Girl in the
Garden: Variations on a Feminine Pastoral.” Children’s Literature
Association Quarterly 19 (1994): 20-24.
Gohlke, Madelon S. “Re-reading The
Secret Garden.” College English 41 (1980): 894-902.
Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. “‘Quite
Contrary’: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.” Children’s
Literature 11 (1983): 1-13.
Knoepflmacher, U. C. “Little Girls
without their Curls: Female Aggression in Victorian Children’s Literature.” Children’s
Literature 11 (1983): 14-31.
Levy, Eric P. “The Psychology of
Loneliness in Wuthering Heights.” Studies in the Novel 28.2
(1996): 158-77.
Madden, William A. “Wuthering
Heights: The Binding of Passion.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 27
(1972): 127-54.
Marquis, Claudia. “The Power of
Speech: Life in The Secret Garden.”AUMLA 67 (May 1987): 163-87.
Molson, Francis J. “Frances Hodgson
Burnett (1848-1924).” American Literary Realism 8 (1974): 35-42.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Magnanimity
of Wuthering Heights.” The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews. New
York: Persea Books, 1983. 63-81.
Phillips, Jerry. “The Mem Sahib, the
Worthy, the Rajah and His Minions: Some Reflections on the Class Politics of The
Secret Garden.” The Lion and the Unicorn 17 (1993): 168-94.
Plotz, Judith. “Secret Garden II: Lady
Chatterley’s Lover as Palimpsest.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
19 (1994): 15-19.
Price, Danielle E. “Cultivating
Mary: The Victorian Secret Garden.” Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly 26 (2001): 4-14.
Silver, Anna Krugovoy.
“Domesticating Brontë’s Moors: Motherhood in The Secret Garden.” The
Lion and the Unicorn 21 (1997): 193-203.
Thwaite, Ann. Waiting for the
Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Boston: David R. Godine, 1991.
Travis, Trysh. “Heathcliff and
Cathy, the Dysfunctional Couple.” Chronicle of Higher Education 11 May
2001: B13-14.
Verduin, Kathleen. “Lady Chatterley
and the Secret Garden: Lawrence’s Homage to Mrs. Hodgson Burnett.” D. H.
Lawrence Review 17 (1984): 61-66.
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