The Secret Garden — Chapter 17

About This Passage

This passage contains the novel's central diagnostic claim, delivered by Burnett's intrusive narrator in a single uninterrupted breath. The two sentences together accomplish three literary moves at once: they indict sympathy that only agrees, they name the etiology of Colin's illness ('created by himself'), and they locate the cause not in Colin's body but in the emotional 'atmosphere' the adult world has compelled him to breathe. The claim is psychological, moral, and meteorological at the same time.

Narration Prompt

Retell Chapter 17 as an argument about the ethics of contradiction. Trace the chapter's structural inversion — sympathetic adults have been harmful, a cross child is curative — and organize the retelling around the central diagnostic sentence ('most of his fright and illness was created by himself'). Close by analyzing the rhetorical function of Mary's closing incantation about the garden as the chapter's deliberate choice of whispered imagination over clinical verdict.

Discussion Questions

1. The narrator delivers the chapter's most important claim in a single embedded sentence: 'most of his fright and illness was created by himself.' How does this declarative breaking of narrative distance position the reader of Colin's case as a diagnostician rather than as a spectator of suffering, and what does Burnett gain by stating the verdict outright rather than allowing the reader to infer it?
2. Consider the moral weight of the sentence 'a nice sympathetic child could neither have thought nor said such things.' The line contains a quiet indictment of an entire theory of care — that kindness is identical with agreement. Trace how the novel has been building this indictment from the introduction of Colin in Chapter 13 forward, and evaluate whether the book is endorsing a genuinely radical claim about the ethics of contradicting a sufferer or merely an idiosyncratic one.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide