The Secret Garden Essay

From India to Yorkshire, The Secret Garden presents contradicting settings and reflects each place’s problems. The main setting in the novel is Yorkshire England. However, despite the small space given for the setting in India, it plays an important role in revealing the development in Mary’s character. Mary’s adaptation to India seems to be impossible with the lack of people who can motivate her to do so. The servants usually bear her insults and do what she orders while the English governances run away from her bad temper. The weather metaphorically reflects the people and drives them to behave badly. It is interesting to see Mary trying to adapt to this atmosphere. When she wakes up the day her Ayah died, she heads out trying to make her

Everywhere in The Secret Garden there is evidence of this moral imperative. Occasionally, it seems over-didactic, as in the last chapter “In The Garden”, where the narrator tends to “lecture” the reader on the importance of the garden and outdoor life to the moral development of Mary and Colin, but in general the message is embodied in the “showing” rather than the “telling.” There are frequent references in the text to the physical benefits of the fresh (usually cold) air of Yorkshire and the outdoor exercise that turns Mary into a new person with a healthy appetite and a joy in living (216). When she is walking and running in the gardens of Misselthwaite Manor in winter, readers are told that “she was stirring her slow blood and making herself stronger by fighting with the wind which swept down from the moor” (46). The benefits of the wind are also mental; it has “begun to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain and to waken her up a little” (50). the idea of intellectual sharpness resulting from physical and spiritual health is more fully developed in Colin, who declares once he is getting well that he is going to be a scientist and discover the source of the “Magic” that he believes has been worked on him. He will, he says, “find out thousands and thousands of things” (294). Burnett implies that the wonders of nature and