The Secret Garden — Chapter 3

About This Passage

Burnett's arrival at Misselthwaite reads like the passage into a fortress from a romance: the 'long dark vault' of overarching trees, the 'immensely long but lowbuilt house' that seems to 'ramble' around a stone court, and finally a door of 'massive, curiously shaped panels of oak studded with big iron nails and bound with great iron bars.' The copywork rehearses the registers — architectural, adjectival, faintly mythic — that Burnett will reactivate whenever the novel crosses a threshold.

Narration Prompt

Narrate Chapter 3 as a series of linguistic and architectural crossings: the Yorkshire speech of the Thwaite station-master and Mrs. Medlock's own suddenly-Yorkshire tongue, Mary's first genuine question and first metaphor, the 'black ocean' of Missel Moor by carriage lamp, the vault of trees and the iron-bound door of Misselthwaite, Pitcher's flat relay of Craven's refusal, and the corridors that deliver Mary to a firelit pair of rooms she must not leave.

Discussion Questions

1. Mrs. Medlock, a London-English speaker on the train, shifts to Yorkshire at Thwaite Station ('Aye, that's her'), and the station-master speaks an opaque dialect ('I see tha's got back, an' tha's browt th' young 'un with thee'). Analyze Burnett's use of linguistic bilingualism as social geography: what does the North/South speech-divide tell readers about the kind of world Mary is entering, and how does it position Mary as a foreigner to English itself before she has become a foreigner to the Manor?
2. Mary's question 'What is a moor?' is the first curiosity the novel has recorded from her. Philosophically, consider what Burnett implies about the relationship between wonder and defeat: that attention arrives in Mary only when her will to command has been rendered irrelevant by a landscape too large to order. Is this a hopeful theory of how the will yields to perception, or a melancholy one?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide