Notably, my own kid also despised The Secret Garden and, like me, couldn’t get past the first few chapters. Then, in the year of our Lord 2020, when my own kid was in Year 6 and refused to study White Fang along with everyone else due to the animal cruelty contained within, their teacher handed them a copy of The Secret Garden instead (because child cruelty is more palatable than animal cruelty…) Hodgson Burnett’s classic has clearly found resonance if you can still find class sets hanging around in Australian schools. I started reading a few times and never finished. My childhood copies and they’re still on the shelf. In fact, I didn’t plan on ever digging deep into this novel because it gave me the absolute creeps when I was a kid myself. Though some child readers absolutely stan this novel, I don’t personally consider it children’s literature. I’m reading an abridged version, which is still plenty long. The Secret Garden is a very clear example of the Gothic in literature. The haunted house and grounds are also straight out of a Gothic horror. The Secret Garden utilises a madwoman in the attic trope, though the prisoner is a boy, not a madwoman. In some ways it’s typical of its time, in other ways ahead of its time. If we’re going to call it children’s literature, The Secret Garden is an example from the First Golden Age of Children’s Literature, which lasted from 1850 until the first World War. Two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way – or always to have it. At times it sounds like a parenting manual: If there’s a moral in this story, it’s aimed at parents. When I think a little harder though, it makes sense that The Secret Garden was aimed at adult readers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |