The object of this study is the children’s novel The Secret Garden, which was written by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) in 1911. The copyrights of the classic have expired and there are various adaptations of it, such as an abridgement by Martha Hailey (2005) and a film published by Warner Bros (1993). As introduced by Kokkonen (2015: 61–74), Frances Hodg-son Burnett was born in 1849 in Manchester, England. She had four siblings, and her father died when she was three years old. Hodgson’s family moved to the United States of America, to Tennessee in 1865 when Hodgson was 15 years old. Two of Hodgson’s stories where pub-lished in the magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book when she was 18 years old, and after that she wrote stories to several publications. Hodgson travelled to England and stayed there for a year, and when she returned to Tennessee in 1873, she married Swan Burnett and later had a son Lionel.
The family lived two years in Paris, and Hodgson Burnett had a second child, son Vivian.
Hodgson Burnett had continued to write, and while in Paris, she had started to write her first novel, That Lass O’Lowrie’s. The book, which was targeted at adults, was published in 1877 (Kokkonen 2015:61).
Hodgson Burnett started to write children’s fiction, and several of her stories were published in the magazine St. Nicholas. Her successful book Little Lord Fauntleroy was origi-nally published as a serial and as a book in 1886. Hodgson Burnett’s son Lionel died in 1890, and Hodgson Burnett divorced from Swan Burnett in 1898 and married Stephen Townsend in 1900. Hodgson Burnett had written a serial Sara Crewe or What happened at Miss Minchin’s to St. Nichols in 1888, and in 1905 the story was published as the book A Little Princess: Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe Now Being Told for the First Time (Kokkonen 2015). The story has similarities with The Secret Garden, as the main character, Sara Crew, lives in India.
Frances Hodgson Burnett died in 1924. Another famous book by Burnett is The Lost Prince (1915).
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Originally, The Secret Garden was published as a serial in The American Maga-zine, which was an American periodical for adults (Smith 2018: 69). The texts were published under the title Mistress Mary, and the book The Secret Garden was later published in 1911 (Kokkonen 2015:71). The Secret Garden is a children’s book, but more specifically it represents fiction for girls. This is indicated by the fact that that Kokkonen (2015) has presented the author Frances Hodgson Burnett as well as her literary work in a book called Kapina ja kaipuu. Kul-taiset tyttökirjaklassikot which introduces classics written for girls. In Finland, a genre of liter-ature specifically aimed at girls is called ‘tyttökirja’ (a girls’ book). Kokkonen refers to Wes-tin’s (1994) definition, according to which fiction for girls is mainly written by women and the protagonist of the stories is a girl or a young woman.
According to Kokkonen (2015:11), juvenile fiction formed into separate fiction for boys and girls in Anglo-American countries such as England and the United States after the mid-19th century. The trend later spread to other countries, such as Finland. Both Kokkonen (2015:11) and Kutzer (2000: 47) point out that while books targeted at boys focused on adven-tures and mirrored the masculine ideals of its time, the main themes in fiction for girls were home, family and school.
As Kutzer (2000:47) explains, in the British juvenile fiction of the 19th century and early 20th century the emotional and psychological development of the character takes place in the sphere of the home. This also the background and the context of The Secret Garden, in which one of the fundamental themes is the protagonist Mary’s growth into ideal womanhood (Kutzer 2000:47). Kokkonen (2015: 12) further points out that before fiction for girls existed, literature that was targeted specifically at girls consisted of guidebooks. These guidebooks pro-vided girls with information about good manners and obedience, which prepared them for their future roles as mothers and wives. The ideals and expectations presented in guidebooks were later incorporated into fiction, but, as Kokkonen (2015) argues, they were also questioned. In addition, Kutzer (2000:47) explains that the British juvenile fiction was initially based on evan-gelical writings that underlined moral and spiritual growth. As time passed by, juvenile fiction lost its evangelical and didactic undertones, and the lesson that stories contained were less the-ological and more moral (Kutzer 2000: 47). This development has similarities with the history of Finnish children’s literature, which was discussed in section 3.1.
48 4.2 The outline of the novel
The main characters of the story are ten-year-old children Mary Lennox and Colin Craven. In this respect, The Secret Garden represents as typical children’s book (Lathey 2016:2). The story begins in India, where Mary Lennox lives with her father, “who had held a position under the English Government (Burnett 1911:7)” and mother, who “had been a great beauty and who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people” (Burnett 1911:7).
Mary’s family as well as their servants in India die of cholera, and Mary is the only one who survives. She is then sent to live with her uncle Archibald Craven to Mis-selthwaite Manor, which is in Yorkshire. Although Mr. Craven lives in England, he spends most of his time travelling and is rarely in the manor. When Mary arrives in England, she is taken to Yorkshire by the head maid, Mrs. Medlock, whose duty is to look after Mary.
Mary later meets a local Yorkshire maid, Martha, who has a thick accent and several siblings. One of those siblings is Dickon, the third central character of the story. Dickon is twelve, two years older than Mary, and he can communicate with animals. Mary spends most of her time outside alone. When Mary asks a gardener Ben Weatherstaff about gardening and plants, she learns that there is a garden that no one is allowed to enter. The garden is locked, and the key has been thrown away. Later Mary discovers the key on the ground and uses it to open the door to the secret garden. Mary later tells Dickon about the garden, and the two chil-dren go there and gradually start to restore it. As she exercises outside, Mary starts to find her appetite and gains weight.
Mary has not been told that Archibald Craven has a son Colin. Mary, however, has occasionally been hearing crying, and finally, when she is woken up in the middle of the night by the noise, she follows the sounds and discover Colin. Colin is a sick boy, who has rarely left his room. He is pale, he does not eat much, and he cannot move. Colin thinks that he is so sick that he is going to die. Despite the fact that Colin is young, he is allowed to command the staff as he is the son of the master. Therefore, when Colin is having his frequent tantrums, the staff are afraid of him. Mary, however, is the only individual who has the courage to express anger at Colin. Mary also feels pity for Colin, and their gradually evolving relationship helps her become empathetic.
Mary and Colin start a friendship and Mary tells Colin about the garden. The three children, Mary, Dickon and Colin, later make plans to get Colin, who still is unable to move,
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to the secret garden so that the staff will not find out that they are going to a forbidden place.
The children play and work in the garden, and as time goes by, Colin starts to gain weight and becomes healthier in a similar manner as Mary does.
4.3.1 Representations of womanhood
According to Kutzer (2000: 56) The Secret Garden has elements of several genres. It is a ro-mance, pastoral story, a story of the psychological development of its protagonists and a com-ment of Gothic conventions. The novel has been interpreted from different perspectives. Kutzer (2000) examines the colonial and imperialistic elements and undertones of the book as well as pays attention the social ideals and gender roles represented in the novel. Smith (2018) dis-cusses how the book reflects the gendered ideal of beauty of its time, mostly the way appearance is interconnected with health and traits of personality. Nikolajeva (2005) addresses topics such as class and personal growth.
On the surface, the novel has two parallel growth stories of neglected, bad-tpered children. Mary transforms from a mean, unhealthy, ugly, self-centered child into an em-pathetic, healthy-looking, beautiful, nice girl and Colin transforms from a sick, afraid, hypo-chondriac child into a healthy boy, whom his father is finally able to look at and to embrace.
According to Smith (2018: 68), Mary’s transformation reflects the ideal femininity of its time in which health, beauty and a pleasing character are interconnected. Mary, who at the beginning looks sick and ugly and has a bad hair, becomes nice and pretty, gains weight and grows a thick hair. Feminine ideals are also reflected in the way women are portrayed in the text. Mary’s mother is beautiful, but self-centered (Kutzer 2000, Smith 2018:74), and it is her vanity that caused the death of herself and her husband as well as the servants. Despite the warnings, she refused to leave the area where cholera is spreading because she wants to stay for a party. In addition, Smith (2018: 74) argues that Mary’s mother fails in her duty as a mother. She is beau-tiful, but she focuses on entertainment rather than raising her child and lets the servants to look after Mary. Mrs. Lennox’s appearance is not enough to make her attractive, since she lacks internal beauty.
As opposed to Colin’s distant father and Mary’s indifferent mother, Dickon’s and Martha’s mother Susan Sowerby embodies dedicated and loving parenthood. Susan Sowerby sends food to Colin and Mary while they spend time in the garden, and when she visits the children, it is describe that “each of them kept looking at her comfortable, rosy face, secretly
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curious about the delightful feeling she gave them – a sort of warm, supported feeling… when they told her about the robin and the first flight of the young ones, she laughed a motherly little mellow laugh in her throat” (Burnett 1911:207). In addition, it is Susan Sowerby who convinces Archibald Craven to reunite with his son Colin as she sends him a letter to Switzerland and asks him to return home.
However, as Kutzer (2000: 56) points out, it has been debated whether Mary, who at the beginning is the main character of the book, gives her place to Colin, and takes the role of the helper and nurturer in Colin’s recovery and growth. The power dynamic is also visible in the children’s relation to the garden. While it is Mary who discovers the secret garden and starts to look after it with Dickon, it is ultimately Colin who is in charge as the son of Archibald Craven. In addition, as the gardener Ben Weatherstaff loses his temper after noticing that Mary is in the garden which she has been forbidden to enter, he calms down the moment he sees Colin and is confronted by him. As Kutzer (2000: 62) argues, metaphorically, this can be interpreted so that Mary as a female has to give her position as the ruler of the colonized empire, the garden, to Colin who is male. Moreover, as Smith (2018:76) points out, the change in the children is described differently. As Colin’s health improves, he becomes more active while the positive change in Mary boils down to good looks and nice behavior. As Kutzer (2000: 62) points out, when Mary meets Colin, the empire, gender, and class intersect, and Mary’s role diminishes.
In addition, and as a part of her transformation into an ideal girl, Mary starts to nurture Colin, or in today’s terms does emotional labor on his behalf.
Smith (2018:75) claims that the physical exercise that the children discover func-tions as a catalyst of chance. As Mary skips rope outside and works in the garden, she finds her appetite, becomes stronger, healthier and more beautiful, and her thoughts become clearer and behavior more agreeable. Colin also becomes healthier and stronger as he exercises, plays and works in the garden with Mary and Dickon.
4.3.2 The empire and the Other
Kutzer (2000:48) argues that The Secret Garden reflects the omnipresence of the Empire and especially India in England. In many cases India and Indian people represent the Other in the book. Other is a concept which refers to the socially constructed representations of cultures and people that are different from the white, western norm. Other is something deviant and it is a part of constructing the idea of “us”, or in this case the west, as its opposite. Representation as
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a concept refers to the definition of a phenomenon as well as the meanings, or judgements, connected to it. This means that representation is a not a neutral description, as it partly creates the object it describes (Gordon 2002, 39–40). The Other is often exoticized and racialized. Ra-cialization means that a people who differ from the white norm are considered to represent a
“race”. Race in its turn is a social construct with which stereotypical features, habits and traits are associated (Hall 1999, 139–140).
Mary was born in India and lived there until she was ten, and she constantly com-pares England to India. When Mary first arrives in England, the surroundings and habits are unfamiliar to her as she does not understand, for instance, what a moor is and she does not know the local birds. Eckford-Prossor (2000:242) describes The Secret Garden as travel literature in reverse. This means that Mary, a child of English parents, is a traveler who moves to England, to “home”, which is at the beginning strange place to her.
In addition, the empire is present in the way artifacts from India are presented in the manor, particularly in a room that Mary visits: “Mary had seen carved ivory in India and she knew all about the elephants. She opened the door of the cabinet and stood on a footstool and played with these for quite a long time. When she got tired she set the elephants in order and shut the door of the cabinet.” (Burnett 1911:46).
Kutzer refers to Phillips (1993), who describes the room as a place where Other-ness is displayed, framed and controlled (Kutzer 2000: 60). In this case, India and Indian people represent the Other. Moreover, Kutzer (2000:59) interprets that Mary’s work in the garden mir-rors the actions of colonial explorers: Mary has found the garden and starts to modify and col-onize it. Kutzer further suggests (2010:59) that while the ideas of the unknown and representa-tions of mysticism characterize the image of the new, colonized lands, such as India, they also characterize the secret garden. However, according to Nikolajeva (2005:88), Mary’s explora-tion of the mansion and the garden is also possible to interpret as a self-discovery which leads to a moral and spiritual improvement. As Nikolajeva (2005: 135) describes, from this perspec-tive the discovery and looking after the garden reflect Mary’s psychological development and maturation. Similarly, the blooming of the garden reflects the blooming of Mary’s personality.
Thus, as the texts by Nikolajeva (2005) and Kutzer (2000) illustrate, the book can be studied and interpreted from multiple perspectives.
52 4.3.3 Class differences
Differences in social status and class are evident in the book. The high status and wealth of Mary’s family is implied, as it is told that the father, Mr. Lennox, holds a position in the British Government and has local people as servants. In addition, Mary’s mother, Mrs. Lennox, can enjoy social life and attends parties. In Yorkshire, Archibald Craven lives in the manor and has staff that includes, for instance, maids, a housekeeper, and gardeners. Mary has the luxury of food, weekly money, new clothes and space indoors and outdoors and she has been taught to read and to write. The maid, Martha and his brother Dickon Sowerby come from a poor, rural family. The large family lives in a small cottage, and the children do not always have enough food to eat. As Nikolajeva (2005: 80) points out, Mary becomes aware that she has more money than Martha and her family. This becomes apparent as she realizes that Martha has used her money to buy her a skipping rope: “Mary put on her coat and hat and took her skipping-rope over her arm. She opened the door to go out, and then suddenly thought of something and turned back rather slowly. ‘Martha,’ she said. ‘they were your wages. It was your twopence really.
Thank you.’” (Burnett 1911: 58). In addition, when Martha’s and Dickon’s mother helps the children smuggle food to the garden, Colin and Mary understand that they should give money in return: “They actually awoke to the fact that as Mrs Sowerby had fourteen people to provide food for she might not have enough to satisfy extra appetites every day. So they asked her to let them send some of their shillings to buy things.” (Burnett 1911: 191).
In addition, it is described that Dickon cannot write well, whereas Colin has many books to read. The social status is also shown in the way different characters speak. The back-ground of the gardener Bean Weatherstaff as well as Martha and Dickon is indicated by their Yorkshire dialect. Martha’s speech is even ridiculed by other members of the staff: “she found it dull in the great servants’ hall downstairs, where the footman and upper-housemaids made fun of her Yorkshire speech and looked upon her as a common little thing and sat and whispered among themselves” (Burnett 1911:40). Moreover, when Colin gets jealous of Dickon, he re-minds Mary that ‘[h]e’s a common cottage boy off the moor!’ (Burnett 1911:130).
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4.4 The Finnish (re)translations of The Secret Garden
The version of source text that I used in the study is published in 1986 by Michael Joseph Ltd and it is illustrated by Graham Rust. Other works by Rust include illustration to books such as A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy by Burnett (Illustrated by Graham Rust 2018).
The initial Finnish translation Salainen puutarha by Toini Swan was first pub-lished in 1920 by WSOY. A search from Fennica, the National Bibliography of Finland, shows that the latest, 13th edition of Toini Swan’s translation is from 2007. According to the search, editions have been taken in 1947 (2nd), 1951 (3rd), 1961(4th), 1965 (5th), 1971 (6th), 1982 (7th), 1985 (8th), 1990 (9th), 1994 (10th), 1995 (11th), 2000 (12th), 2007 (13th). In addition, the text has been published in 1977 as a of publications of the book sales club Suuri nuorten kirjakerho.
In this study, I have used the 10th edition from 1994 published by WSOY. What is particular about this book is that the pictures on the cover and the back cover are from the film adaptation of The Secret Garden from 19931. In addition, the book has an attachment which contains 16 pages of images from the film. These images function as an illustration for the story.
Interestingly, Salomaa (2013) used the first edition of the initial translation from
Interestingly, Salomaa (2013) used the first edition of the initial translation from