The Secret Garden — Chapter 14

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 14 in your own words, attending not only to plot but to Burnett’s method. Begin with Martha’s terror in the nursery, move through Colin’s imperial command, Mary’s doubled tales of the Rajah and of Dickon, and end with the evidentiary reversal of the physician’s authority when Dr. Craven finds the children laughing.

Discussion Questions

1. Martha’s word ‘bewitched’ is the only vocabulary her household has for what Mary has actually done — sat and talked. What is Burnett diagnosing about a community whose moral imagination has so impoverished that the return of ordinary attention registers as enchantment, and what is she arguing about the relation between moral vocabulary and moral experience?
2. Burnett’s principal instrument in this chapter is the undercutting adverb — Colin speaks ‘indifferently,’ Colin is ‘resentful,’ Mary is ‘unsympathetic,’ Colin’s father is said to ‘wish it.’ Analyze how the adverb functions as the chapter’s ethical syntax, and argue why tonal diagnosis is more respectful of the reader than direct narratorial commentary would be.

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide