The Secret Garden — Chapter 3

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct Chapter 3 as a sequence of linguistic and architectural crossings: Mrs. Medlock's shift to Yorkshire at Thwaite Station, the station-master's opaque dialect, the long dark brougham-drive across Missel Moor with Mary's first real question ('What is a moor?') and her first metaphor ('the sea'), the avenue's 'dark vault' of trees, the iron-bound oak door of Misselthwaite, the dim hall with its portraits and armor, Pitcher's husky relay of Archibald Craven's refusal, and the corridor-upon-corridor delivery to two rooms Mary is forbidden to leave.

Discussion Questions

1. Mrs. Medlock's linguistic flip at Thwaite Station — standard English in London, Yorkshire 'Aye, that's her' at home — is accomplished in a single unglossed line. Examine Burnett's decision to let the shift stand without narrator's comment, and consider how the understatement trains readers to measure belonging by cadence rather than by introduction. Connect to the novel's later investment in the dialect of Martha, Ben Weatherstaff, and Dickon.
2. Mary's 'What is a moor?' and 'I feel as if it might be the sea, if there were water on it' are her first question and her first metaphor in the novel. Philosophically, consider what Burnett implies by pairing them in the same chapter: that curiosity and figuration surface together when a will to command has been rendered irrelevant by a landscape too large to order. Is this a hopeful theory of attention or a melancholy one?

+ 2 more questions in the complete study guide