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About This Passage
This passage carries the chapter's entire diagnostic argument in three successive adverbs: Mary is 'implored,' she is 'solemn,' she is 'indignant.' Burnett performs her characteristic move of diagnosing the interior transaction through exterior manner. The verb 'implored' belongs to someone who has moved from imperious heiress to suppliant friend; 'solemn' belongs to someone risking a closely-held secret; 'indignantly' belongs to someone who refuses to grant the premise of her listener's fear. The arc from imploring to indignance in a single page is Burnett's precise account of how a friendship becomes therapeutic.
'Can I trust you? Can I trust you—for sure—for sure?' she implored. Her face was so solemn that he almost whispered his answer. 'Yes—yes!' Mary said Dickon would come to see him tomorrow morning, but ...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Retell Chapter 18 as an argument about what Colin's illness actually IS and what its treatment actually IS. Trace the case Burnett builds: first through Martha's mother's axiom about always-or-never getting one's way; then through Dickon's perception of Colin's plight as a problem of deprivation from ordinary spring; then through the diagnostic force of Mary's Yorkshire dialect, which makes Colin laugh for what may be the first time Mrs. Medlock has ever witnessed; and finally through Mary's confession that the garden is real and accessible, which reframes Colin's future from 'will I die?' to 'when will I go?' Include Burnett's naming of laughter and imagination as medicines.
Discussion Questions
- The chapter places enormous weight on Martha's quotation of her mother's theory that the two worst fates for a child are 'never to have his own way—or always to have it.' Argue how the chapter then deploys Colin as a case study for the second clause — and whether Burnett's structural placement of this axiom, spoken by a working-class mother through an even more peripheral narrator, is itself part of her moral argument.
- Dickon's diagnostic method differs markedly from the London doctor's: he looks up at the sky, listens to the birds, inhales, and only then pronounces 'we mun get him out here.' Distinguish environmental reasoning from propositional reasoning, and evaluate Burnett's implied claim that a certain kind of truth about a sick body is accessible only to a reader of weather and living things.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A sudden arrival of an unwilled idea that carries the authority of having chosen the thinker rather than having been chosen; Mary reorders her morning on its force
Item 2
Held in a state of absorbed wonder so complete that self-awareness temporarily dissolves; Burnett reserves the word for the moment Colin forgets he is ill
Item 3
Characterized by a gravity that signals the speaker understands the weight of what is about to happen; the register of oath-taking and consequential confession
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Critical Thinking
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