The Secret Garden — Chapter 13

About This Passage

Burnett’s first portrait of Colin — a painterly arrangement of ivory, shadow, and disordered hair. Note the final clause, which quietly reclassifies what the reader has assumed: this is not a sick child, it is an exhausted and angry one. The diagnostic correction is the real work of the passage.

Narration Prompt

In two analytical paragraphs, retell Chapter 13 with attention to its architecture of mirroring: the storm without and the crying within; Mary’s earlier tantrums in India and Colin’s indifferent commands at Misselthwaite; the portrait concealed behind silk and the garden concealed behind ivy. Argue which of these mirrorings Burnett treats as most structurally load-bearing for the chapter.

Discussion Questions

1. Burnett introduces Colin’s first lengthy self-presentation with a string of declaratives — ‘I am Colin,’ ‘I am Colin Craven,’ ‘He is my father,’ ‘If I live I may be a hunchback, but I shan’t live’ — and concludes the sequence with an indifferent observation about his own approaching death. Analyze the rhetorical sequence by which Burnett dissolves the reader’s expectation of a Victorian sickroom pathos into something more disturbing: a child who has been so thoroughly catechized in his own mortality that he speaks it flatly. What is Burnett asking the reader to recognize in this tonal flattening?
2. The near-simultaneous question ‘Are you a ghost?’ from each child to the other constitutes one of the most delicate first meetings in the English novel. Examine the philosophical implications of Burnett’s decision to withhold ordinary reality from both children at the moment of encounter — and argue whether the scene is better understood as a Romantic allegory of mutual recognition, a realist observation about the effects of prolonged isolation on children, or a deliberate fusion of the two that resists reduction to either mode.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide