The Secret Garden — Chapter 23

Narration Prompt

Summarize Chapter 23 not as plot but as a chapter of performative speech acts. Consider the sequence of declarations Colin makes (and asks others to make with him): Dr. Craven's cautioning prescription Colin overrules; Mary's blunt 'It is always having your own way that has made you so queer'; Colin's scientific-theological oration; Dickon's dialect benediction; the collective chant; Colin's closing prescription of secrecy and rehearsed restoration-speech to his father. The chapter is structured as a succession of utterances, each of which alters the social reality in which it is spoken. Trace how authority over reality migrates among speakers in this chapter.

Discussion Questions

1. Burnett inherits, complicates, and arguably transcends the Romantic 'child-as-nature-priest' trope (Wordsworth's Intimations Ode, Blake's Songs of Innocence, Traherne's Centuries). Colin is not, however, an innocent child in Wordsworth's sense — he is a spoiled, dying invalid, aesthetically theatrical, philosophically syncretic. How does Burnett's specifically Edwardian-colonial version of child-priesthood differ from its Romantic ancestors, and what does the difference tell you about the theological and psychological shift between 1800 and 1911? Consider particularly the role of dialect, animals, and the walled garden as devices unavailable to Wordsworth.
2. Dickon's theological doctrine — 'Th' same big thing as made th' seeds swell an' th' sun come up made thee a well lad' — is a compact statement of one-Magic monism: no ontological difference between plant growth and human recovery, between inorganic and organic life, between natural and supernatural agency. This is philosophically serious. How does this position relate to Spinoza's deus sive natura, to Bergson's élan vital (which Burnett's American contemporaries like William James were then translating into English), and to the contemporaneous New Thought movement (Mary Baker Eddy, Ralph Waldo Trine)? Is Burnett unwittingly or deliberately an exponent of this family of positions?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide