Our first world: form and meaning in The Secret Garden

Roxburgh, Stephen
Our first world: form and meaning in The
Secret Garden
Roxburgh, Stephen, (1979) "Our first world: form and meaning in The Secret Garden" from Blos, Joan,
Children's literature in education 10 (3) pp.120-130, New York: Agathon Press ©
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Stephen Roxburgh is
Assistant Editor of
children's books at
Farrar, Straus &
Giroux. He has taught
children's literature at
the State University
of New York at Stony
Brook. Roxburgh is a
member of the Executive Board of the Children's Literature
Association and a
Contributing Editor
of the Children's
Literature Association
Quarterly. He has
published a number of
articles on children's
literature.
Stephen D. Roxburgh
"Our first world":
form and meaning
in The Secret Garden
;
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
T. S. Eliot
"Burnt Norton" (Part I)
In the article to which I owe the inspiration for this discussion, Alison White
suggests:
In the "first world" of "Burnt Norton" in Eliot's Four Quartets, an
enclosed rose-garden figures prominently. It is autumn, but the roses
are blooming, the pool is filled with water come out of sunlight, and
behind a "door we never opened ... the leaves were full of children,!
Hidden excitedly, containing laugh ter." The insistence of first:
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Children's literature in education
"Through the first gate," "Into our first world," and again, "into our
first world" thrusts the mind back to the time past which according to
"Burnt Norton's" opening oxymoron contains its precipitated self. In its
backward search for a rose garden of the "first world," the reader's
mind may encounter a symbolic enclosed garden of the "submerged"
literature of childhood-The
Secret Garden, a Yorkshire idyl written by
Frances Hodgson Burnett, earlier the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy.l
White shows remarkable restraint in not insisting on the influence of
Burnett's book on Eliot's poem-I am far more willing to commit myself on
that point-but
the present discussion is not a source study. It is, rather, an
examination of the archetypal mode that "Burnt Norton" and The Secret
Garden represent, and, more specifically, an evaluation of Burnett's bookEliot's poem has many champions-in
the terms of Northrop Frye's theory
of myths.
Like "Burnt Norton," The Secret Garden is an extraordinarily complete
summary of the symbols of the analogy of innocence. The "secret garden"
of the title is Edenic. Set between Misselthwaite Manor-the
Craven's
ancestral home-and the cottage inhabited by the Sowerby clan, the rosegarden provides a meeting ground for the inhabitants of both. The children,
Mary Lennox and Colin Craven, are the prominent characters, although there
are significant adult figures-notably
Mr. Craven. The water symbolism in
The Secret Garden approximates that of the opening lines of Chaucer's
"General Prologue":
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour ...
The world of the Yorkshire moors and the "secret garden" is an animistic,
magical, spirit-inhabited world, in which the Pan-like Dickon roams. Chastity, in the romantic sense of unviolated identity and the traditional sense of
purity, informs the story, and "Magic" -the children's name for the complex
of healing forces they experience-effects
the rejuvenation and recovery of
the earth and characters. These elements combine to form one of what Frye
calls "significant constellations of images,,2 -specifically, the analogy of
Innocence.
"The meaning of a poem, its structure of imagery," according to Frye, "is
a static pattern." The analogy of innocence and of other, similar structures
of meaning "are, to use a musical analogy, the keys in which [works] are
written and finally resolve; but narrative involves movement from one
structure to another." Thus, the analogy of innocence portrays not "the
garden at the final goal of human vision, but the process of ... planting,"
121
'"
Form and meaning in The Secret Garden
the fundamental form of which is cyclical movement. 3 The Secret Garden is,
perhaps, as undisplaced a version of the "process of planting" as one is likely
to find in literature; it approaches the mythic, the archetypal. An examination of the "secret garden" itself, the enclosed rose-garden, as an image, a
metaphor, and a symbol, enables us to appreciate the levels of meaning and
the narrative movement of Burnett's book.
Human activity is an attempt to impose order on the world around it, and
Frye suggests that one "form imposed by human work and desire on the
vegetable world" is the garden.4 Of the "secret garden," we learn that it was
built by an adoring husband for his young wife, who tended it and made it
their retreat. Because of an accident in the garden, which killed his wife,
Archibald Craven locked the door, buried the key, and ordered that no one
ever enter the garden again. By the time Mary Lennox arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, ten years have passed, the door to the garden is hidden
behind a wall of ivy, and the garden has become a "secret," known of but
not known in itself. Long before Mary enters this garden, however, before
she ever sees it, she is associated with gardens.
The first morning we see Mary in India, she is biding her time waiting for her
native maid: "she pretended that she was making a flower bed, and she stuck
big scarlet hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth" (p. 3). Again, after
the death of her parents, while she is staying with a poor English clergyman's
family, we see her "playing by herself under a tree, just as she had been playing the day the cholera broke out. She was making heaps of earth and paths
of a garden" (p. 9). When Basil, the clergyman's son, interrupts her play,
Mary rebukes him, and he teasingly gives her the name that sticks with her
throughout the novel. In fact, the nursery rhyme which gives Mary her name
points to the central concerns of the book: "Mistress Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?" (p. 9). Mary's new home, Misselthwaite Manor,
is described as a place with "gardens enough" (p. 17) to provide the little
girl with entertainment. The morning after her arrival at the Manor, Mary
learns from Martha, her Yorkshire maid, that "One of th' gardens is locked
up. No one has been in it for ten years" (p. 33). As she explores the grounds
of the estate, Mary "could not help thinking about the garden which no one
had been in for ten years. She wondered what it would look like and whether
there were any flowers still alive in it .... How could a garden be shut up?"
(p. 33-4). Mary soon becomes obsessed with the hidden garden, making it
the object of a search which she pursues with an extraordinary tenacity and
single-mindedness until, with the help of the robin, she succeeds in entering
it.
In her eagerness to determine, once she enteres the garden, whether it is
alive or dead, Mary questions the crotchety old gardener, Ben Weatherstaff,
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Children's literature in education
who becomes suspicious and asks her, "Why does tha' care about roses an'
such, all of a sudden?"
Mistress Mary felt her face grow red. She was almost afraid to answer.
"1-1 want to play that-that
I have a garden of my own," she stammered. "I-there is nothing for me to do. I have nothing-and
no one."
(p. 93)
The lonely, friendless child has a terrible need for something she can call her
own, and even the old gardener recognizes the plea in her voice and sympathizes with her plight. Later, when Mary confronts the dilemma of revealing her secret to Dickon, the significance of the "secret garden" is made
clearer in her defense of her right to keep it.
"Could you keep a secret, if I told you one? It's a great secret. I don't
know what I should do if anyone found it out. I believe I should die!
· .. I've stolen a garden .... It isn't mine. It isn't anybody's. Nobody
wants it, nobody cares for it, nobody ever goes into it. Perhaps everything is dead in it already; I don't know .... I don't care, I don't care!
Nobody has any right to take it from me when I care about it and they
don't. They're letting it die, all shut in by itself .... I've nothing to do.
· .. Nothing belongs to me. I found it myself and I got into it myself.
I was only just like the robin, and they wouldn't take it from the robin.
· .. It's this, ... It's a secret garden, and I'm the only one in the world
who wants it to be alive." (p. 99-100)
This long, impassioned plea indicates the extent to which Mary has committed herself to the garden; should her "secret" be found out, she feels that
she would die. To fully appreciate the seriousness of Mary attachment to the
garden and the real meaning of what appears to be a childish hyperbole, the
association of Mary's condition with the rose-garden's must be examined.
The similarities between the "secret garden" and Mary suggest-in fact, they
force-the metaphorical identification of the two. Like the garden, Mary was
hidden away, denied to everyone's sight, by her· parents, a harrassed colonial
administrator and his flighty, irresponsible wife. When Mary is discovered in
the deserted bungalow, she is identified as "the child no one ever saw," who
had "actually been forgotten" (p. 7). Mary's question, "Why was I forgotten?" has implications beyond those suggested by the immediate circumstances. The little girl was uncared for, left in the hands of mindlessly su bservient natives who deserted her. Ignored by her parents while they were alive,
she was orphaned in a hostile world at their death. Her "guardian," the
distracted widower Archibald Craven, hardly fills the role he legally holds.
His first words to her, after she has been in his care for six months, were
"I forgot you. How could I remember you? I intended to send you a governess or a nurse, or someone of that sort, but I forgot." (p. 116). Like the
123
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Form and meaning in The Secret Garden
"secret garden," Mary existed but was uncared for; she was known of, but
not known in herself.
The implied comparison of Mary's condition and the garden's is so strongly
insisted on in the book that the most naive reader-using Frye's definition of
"naive" as having limited previous verbal experience-can
appreciate it. What
is not as readily apparent, however, is the special significance the garden has
assumed for Mary because of its secrecy. Physically, a "secret" garden is not
essentially different from any other garden; that is, the image is the same.
The symbolic implications of Mary's "secret" transcend the metaphorical
level of meaning and suggest, think, the romantic concerns at the core of
Burnett's book.
I
Frye tells us that the romantic heroine's insistence on her virginity presents
"a vision of human integrity imprisoned in a world it is in but not of, often
forced by weakness into all kinds of ruses and stratagems, yet always managing to avoid the one fate which really is worse than death, the annihilation
of one's identity."s I see the "secret garden" as analogous to the virginity
motif that pervades romance. The portrayal of imperilled virginity in explicitly sexual terms is inappropriate to the key of The Secret Garden-to use
Frye's metaphor for the analogy of innocence. However, Mary's insistence
that the garden remain secret, her dread that Colin will have the servants
open it up, and that it will be trampled, violated, implies an analogous
identification of the "secret garden" with Mary's emerging self-awareness,
her embryonic selfhood. Viewed in this way, Mary's story is a quest for
identity, actually it is the growth of an identity, and, thus, it partakes of
the central concerns of the romance tradition.
Mary's action conforms to the structure of romance when she discovers
Colin, the invalid son of Mr. Craven, who in Frye's terms is the demonic
double Mary encounters as she descends into the labyrinthine night world
of the twisting corridors and the "hundred locked rooms" within Misselthwaite Manor. Mary eventually comes to recognize her own faults, her
selfishness and callousness, in Colin, thus emphasizing the doppelganger
or "twin" motif so often seen in romance, in which the doubles are manifestations of two sides of the same individual. Just as Colin is Mary's nightworld counterpart, the dark, tapestried room in which she finds him is a
demonic parody of the garden; it is a womb, like the garden, but in it the
child is not nurtured, he is suffocated. While the garden is open to the sky
and to the fresh air and breezes that sweep the moors, Colin's room is a
black, stifling hole, heated by the fire that continuously burns in the grate,
located in the depths of Misselthwaite Manor. When Mary descends into this
pit, her story takes on a symbolic level of meaning that informs the rest of
the book and places it firmly in the romance tradition.
Children's literature in education
Colin, however, is more than one of the cyphers of the myth. He is anything
but a quietly suffering victim bound to a sacrificial rock. He is, in fact, a
fully developed character whose action, while it partakes of the romantic
structure of the quest for identity in much the same way that Mary's does,
also involves elements that are more accurately described as comedic. Unlike
Mary, Colin's identity crisis is not caused by his being forgotten, nor does it
stem from a lack of identity. Rather, it is the result of an arbitrarily imposed
identity, a negative self-image, or-to be more precise-a self-negating image.
Colin's self-estimation is clearly linked with his father's opinion of him,
which Colin summarizes when he tells Mary, "My mother died when I was
born and it makes him wretched to look at me. He thinks I don't know, but
I've heard people talking. He almost hates me" (p. 126). From conversations
he has overheard, Colin knows that his father fears that he will develop into
a cripple and that he will never live to grow up. These thoughts obsess the
boy; they are the "hysterical night fears" (p. 172) that cause his tantrums;
they are slowly killing him. Thus, when Mary inadvertently refers to the
garden, he seizes on it. First, he threatens to have it opened, but then he
succumbs to Mary's imaginative vision of it as a "secret" place, all their own.
Colin's response to Mary's appeal again suggests the symbolic implications
of the "secret garden:"
He dropped back on his pillow and lay there with an odd expression
on his face.
"I never had a secret," he said, "except that one about not living to
grow up. They don't know I know that, so it is a sort of secret. But
I like this kind better." (p. 131)
Mary gives Colin a secret about the possibility of life which replaces his
secret about the probability of death, and he immediately begins to recover.
H~, too, forges a new identity out of the image of the "secret garden" as
Mary describes it to him. Like Mary, by the time he actually enters his
mother's rose-garden-two
thirds of the way through the book-he is well on
his way to recovery. It is particularly significant that only images of the
"secret garden" sustain him-the vividly colored pictures of gardens in his
books do not-just as later in the story we see that the natural beauties of
Europe are inadequate to soothe the wandering Mr. Craven. Only the "secret
garden" and the association each character brings to it, the meaning each
character invests it with, bring about their recovery.
As the garden "quickens" -a Yorkshire term for coming alive-we see a
similar "quickening" of the children. Dickon points out the change in the
garden to Mary: "Why!" she cried, "the grey wall is changing. It is as if a
green mist were creeping over it. It's almost like a green gauze veil" (p. 161).
This image is repeated and applied to Colin as well as the garden when he
finally enters it; as he was pushed into the garden,
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Form and meaning in The Secret Garden
... he had covered his eyes with his hands and held them there shutting
out everything until they were inside and the chair stopped as if by
magic and the door was closed. Not till then did he take them away and
look round and round as Dickon and Mary haa done. And over walls
and trees and swinging sprays and tendrils the fair green veil of tender
little leaves had crept, ... And the sun fell warm upon his face like a
hand with a lovely touch. And in wonder Mary and Dickon stood and
stared at him. He looked strange and different because a pink glow of
color had actually crept all over him-ivory face and neck and hands
and all.
"I shall get well! I shall get well!" he cried out. "Mary! Dickon! I shall
get well! And I shall live forever and ever and ever!" (pp. 211-2)
From this moment ir Chapter 20 of The Secret Garden until the middle of
the next-to-Iast chapter (26), when Colin realizes that he has recovered his
health and cries out to Mary and Dickon and Ben Weatherstaff, "I'm wellI'm well!" (p. 272), we watch the process of growing in the garden and its
inhabitants.
In terms of the structure of romance, these chapters clearly describe the
children's ascent out of a night world. This movement is reflected in the
transformation
of the labyrinth that contains Colin's room. After Mary's
initial descent into the heart of Misselthwaite Manor, she begins to gain
control over it; it is still a maze, but she learns the way through it as her
visits to Colin became more and more frequent. After her second trip to
the corridor which leads to his room, she never loses her way again. Eventually, the corridors and locked rooms of the Manor become a haven for
the children, which allows them to continue their recovery in the house and
also allows their deception of the household staff and the physician attending Colin. The final stage of this metamorphosis is the transformation
of
Colin's self-imposed tomb into a kind of surrogate garden when Dickon
brings his animals into the house. The curtains are drawn and the windows
are opened, allowing sunshine and fresh air in, and Colin permanently unveils
the portrait of his mother, whose laughing face overlooks the children at
play. Burnett has shown the children returning from a lower world without
leaving the confines of the room. By the end of the next-to-Iast chapter of
The Secret Garden, the children have recovered both physically and mentally, they have established identities, and all that remains to be done is for
their stories to be resolved in a way that confirms their achievement.
Frye tells us that the concerns and structures of comedy and romance are
substantially the same until their actions are resolved. In The Secret Garden,
Burnett suggests the alternatives offered by the romantic and comic visions
in Mary and Colin's final positions in relation to the "secret garden." Without insisting on an absolute distinction between the romantic and comic
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Children's literature in education
aspects of the book, it is worthwhile, I think, to differentiate the final
emphasis of each child's position in the world of the book and to consider
the symbolic implications of the "secret garden" in terms of that emphasis.
When Colin exclaims, "I'm well-I'm well!", Mary Lennox's story has
achieved a climax; and, when moments later she is assured by Mrs. Sowerby,
Dickon's mother, "Tha'lt be like a blush rose when tha' grows up, my little
lass, bless thee" (p. 272), her story can appropriately end. Her commitment
to Colin manifests the complete change in character which Mary has undergone. Although our attention in the final chapters of the book is almost
entirely on Colin, his recovery constitutes Mary's. real achievement.
In the next-to-Iast chapter, Mary, Dickon, Colin, Ben Weatherstaff, the
robin, and Dickon's animals are gathered' in the "secret garden," where the
human inhabitants sing the "Doxology." Meanwhile,
the door in the ivied wall had been pushed gently open and a woman
had entered. She had come in with the last line of their song and had
stood listening and looking at them. With the ivy behind her, the sunlight drifting through the trees and dappling her long blue cloak, and
her nice fresh face smiling across the greenery she was rather like a
softly colored illustration in one of Colin's books. She had wonderful
affectionate eyes which seemed to take everything in-all of them, even
Ben Weatherstaff and the "creatures" and every flower that was in
bloom. Unexpectedly as she had appeared, not one of them felt that
she was an intruder at all. (p. 275)
In the specifically Christian imagery describing Mrs. Sowerby's appearance
in the "secret garden," we see-using the terms of Frye's formulation of the
analogy of innocence-a close approximation of "the symbol of the body of
the Virgin as a hortus conclusus" [Le., enclosed garden].6 In a mythic context, Mary has moved from the isolation and alienation of the Indian wasteland to communion and fulfillment in a fertile paradise. In the context of
romance, this scene exemplifies Frye's statement that "the closer romance
comes to a world of original identity, the more clearly something of the
symbolism of the garden of Eden reappears, with the social setting reduced
to the love of individual men and women within an order of nature which
has been reconciled to humanity."7 Thus, Mary's final place in the world of
The Secret Garden represents the fulfillment of the promise of romance.
The contrast between the wasteland and the garden of Eden apparent in
Mary's story is also symbolically present in the contrast between Mr. Craven
and Mrs. Sowerby, who, although associated specifically with the Virgin,
evokes a considerably older mythic type, the Corn-mother of primitive
ritual who represents fertility incarnate and who guarantees the harvest.
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Form and meaning in The Secret Garden
The mythic qualities of this displaced matriarch of the Yorkshire moors add
symbolic dimension to The Secret Garden. However, the immediate context
of the book is not myth or fertility rite. It is distinctly social, and Mrs.
Sowerby's relations with Mr. Craven are set in a clearly defined social structure; he is a local squire, a landowner, and she is a tenant, a peasant. This
context is crucial in the book because it accounts for the resolution of
Colin's story.
The reconciliation that takes place between Colin and his father in the last
chapter of The Secret Garden is a common comedic convention, as is the
classic anagnorisis or cognitio, the discovery or recognition, which gives the
final sentence of the book its effectiveness. In fact, Colin's entire story,
viewed in terms of Frye's discussion of the structure, conforms to the
"fourth phase of comedy," that is, "the drama of the green world" in
which the plot is "assimilated to the ritual theme of the triumph of life
and love over the waste land." Using Shakespeare's early comedies as his
focus, Frye notes that the symbol of the "green world charges the comedies
with the symbolism of the victory of summer over winter," and that it
frequently incorporates "the folklore motif of the healing of the impotent
king." Moreover, the green world has "analogies, not only to the fertile
world of ritual, but to the dream world that we create out of own desires."s
Romance and comedy share many symbols, and Burnett's use of them in
The Secret Garden is significant because she accommodates the divergent
traditions of the hortus conclusus of romance and the "green world" of
comedy, thus allowing for the alternative resolutions of the children's
actions. The significance of the former is that it is an end in itself, an end
that Mary achieves. The latter is the means to an end, an end that Colin
achieves when he is reconciled with his father.
It has already been suggested that Colin's original condition was the result
of his father's demented fears, which were transferred to the boy and reinforced by the people around him. Thus, the household of Misselthwaite
Manor is a microcosmic society based on an arbitrary principle or law.
With Mary's help, Col in is able to escape from this society into the "secret
garden," where he is able to heal and grow strong enough to return to the
society from which he came and reform it. This is the promise of the comic
vision. Frye tells us that there are "two ways of developing the form of
comedy: one is to throw the main emphasis on the blocking characters;
the other is to throw it forward on the scenes of discovery and reconciliation.,,9 Obviously, The Secret Garden exemplifies the latter.
In the final chapter of the book, the focus of our attention is on Mr. Craven
and Colin. We learn that the moment Colin cries out "I am going to live
forever and ever and ever!" (upon entering the garden), Mr. Craven, then
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Children's literature in education
traveling hundreds of miles away on the Continent, experiences a "singular
calmness" and "slept a new reposeful sleep" (p. 286). At first these quiet
moments are intermittent, but "Slowly-slowly-for
no reason that he knew
of-he was 'coming alive' with the garden" (p. 286). One night Mr. Craven
had a mystical experience: "He did not know when he fell asleep and when
he began to dream; his dream was so real that he did not feel as if he were
dreaming" (p. 287). Here we see the "dream world" /"green world" analogy
that Frye points out. Mr. Craven's dead wife calls to him in a "real voice,"
and when he asks, "Lilias, where are you?" the voice in the dream answers,
"In the garden ... In the garden!" (p. 287). The day Mr. Craven receives
the letter recalling him to England, "he was remembering the dream-the
real-real dream" (p. 288). When he finally returns to Misselthwaite Manor
it is Autumn. He approaches the .garden:
The ivy hung thick over the door, the key was buried deep under the
shrubs, no human being had passed that portal for ten lonely years-and
yet inside the garden there were sounds. They were the sounds of running, scuffing feet seeming to chase round and round under the trees,
they were strange sounds of lowered suppressed voices-exclamations
and smothered joyous cries. It seemed actually like the laughter of
young things, the uncontrollable laughter of children who were trying
not to be heard but who in a moment or so-as their excitement
mounted-would
burst forth. What in heaven's name was he dreaming
of-what in heaven's name did he hear? Was he losing his reason and
thinking he heard things which were not for human ears? Was it that
the far clear voice had meant? (p. 294)
Suddenly a transformed Colin bursts out of the garden into his father's arms.
As the boy leads his father back into the garden, the past is recreated; Mr.
Craven remembers when the roses in the garden were planted. Colin's story
ends with a significant statement about the garden: "Now, it need not be a
secret any more .... I shall walk back with you, Father-to
the house"
(p.296).
respect to the distinction between the comedic and romantic elements
in Burnett's novel, it is noteworthy that Colin and his father are reunited
outside of the garden and that Colin no longer needs-or wants- to keep the
garden a secret. As a secret, it provided a place where he could recover unwatched and unencumbered by the restrictive society around him, a "green
world." However, once he assumes his rightful place, the garden can be
abandoned. Frye tells us that at the end of comedy, a new society is formed
around the hero, and "the moment when this crystallization occurs is the
point of the resolution in the action, the comic discovery."lo This is the
implication, if not the fact, of the last few paragraphs of The Secret Garden,
which are, significantly, narrated from the point of view of the household
servants who are awaiting the outcome of Mr. Craven's search for Colin.
In
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Form and meaning in The Secret Garden
The final paragraph of the book is couched entirely in the language of social
identity:
Across the lawn came the Master of Misselthwaite and he looked as
many of them had never seen him. And by his side with his head up in
the air and his eyes full of laughter walked as strongly and steadily as
any boy in Yorkshire-Master Colin. (p. 298)
Finally, however, the vision of the book is roman tic in its portrayal of a
present where "past and future are gathered," to cite Eliot's poem. I suggest
that a quarter of a century before Eliot wrote the Four Quartets, Frances
Hodgson Burnett not only showed us something very much like the world of
"Burnt Norton," but also anticipated the realization Eliot was to come to
much later in the concluding lines of "Little Gidding":
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
This is, perhaps, what was meant by the "far clear voice" that beckoned the
wanderer to the garden.
Notes
1. Alison White, "Tap-Roots into a Rose Garden," The Great Excluded:
Critical Essays on Children's Literature, Vol. 1, 1972, p. 74.
2. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 151.
3. Ibid., p. 158.
4. Ibid., p. 141.
5. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of
Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 86.
6. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 152.
7. Frye, The Secular Scripture, p. 149.
8. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 182-3.
9. Ibid., p. 166.
10. Ibid., p. 163.
References
Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972.
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