The Secret Garden — Chapter 13

Narration Prompt

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

Discussion Questions

1. Colin’s first extended self-presentation ends with a flat, indifferent observation about his own approaching death. Burnett notes that he spoke ‘as if he was so accustomed to the idea that it had ceased to matter to him at all.’ As an adult reader, analyze the moral difference between fearing death and having been so thoroughly catechized in one’s mortality that the fear has been replaced by indifference — and argue what Burnett is asking us to recognize about Victorian childhood illness as a formation of character, not only a matter of the body.
2. The doubled question ‘Are you a ghost?’ from Mary and Colin to each other is one of the most delicate first meetings in English fiction. Examine Burnett’s philosophical move of withholding ordinary reality from both children at the instant of encounter, and argue whether the scene is best read as a Romantic allegory of mutual recognition, a realist observation about the effects of prolonged isolation, or a fusion of the two that resists reduction to either mode. What are the adult reading stakes of not collapsing the scene into one register?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide