Secret Gardens (The Gold Age of Children's Literature 8)

Catherine Storr, Marianne Dreams

Confined to bed, as a consequence of a long-term illness, a young girl entertains herself by drawing a picture of a house, which she then finds she can enter in her dreams. When she then draws a picture of a boy in the house she creates a companion for herself, Mark, a boy who, like Marianne, is also unwell. Unlike with Marianne, whose illness is never named - it seems more a storybook illness, allowing a long convalescence during the which the story can unfold - we eventually learn that he is recovering from Polio. Not just a creation of Marianne's imagination, he also corresponds to a boy in the real world who is, like Marianne, being tutored by a Miss Chesterfield who passes on news of her companion, whom Marianne otherwise only encounters in dreams.

The narrative follows the interaction between the two children in this peculiar landscape, created out of a child's act of drawing. Marianne gradually fills in the details of the house, and supplies food and games for her new friend. Unfortunately, early on, after an argument with Mark, she also draws a number of rocks with single eyes to keep Mark entrapped. The narrative eventually resolves itself into their attempt to escape these frightening, haunting figures which now people this barren landscape.

Mariano's attempts to help Mark build up his strength and escape, parallels his real world recovery from the effects of polio. It reminds me a little of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, specifically Colin's recovery from his unspecified illness (another storybook malady, more symbolic than real). Thankfully, Catherine Storr never descends to Hodgson Burnett's levels of sanctimoniousness about her character's illness. In place of a narrative informed by Christian science, we have something which feels - what - Jungian? Therapeutic, at the very least. The destination of their escape, a lighthouse - as with everything else, drawn by Marianne for Mark - seems symbolic of recovery, it's light piercing the eternal gloom of the dream landscape and temporarily blinding the nightmarish jailers. And the form those jailers take - rocks with single cyclops eyes - is something literally out of a child's nightmare - Marianne's.

I know almost nothing about Jung's theories, beyond a vague outline, so perhaps I'm stretching my argument here. Although, at the time she wrote her novel, Catherine Storr was married to the psychoanalyst Anthony Storr (her fiction published under her married name), who clearly had an interest in and knowledge of Jung's, as can be seen just from a glance at his bibliography, so there's no reason to suppose that she wasn't familiar with such ideas.

Perhaps it's just that any narrative of recovery, especially one which is couched in such fantastical, symbolic forms, is going to have a therapeutic note to it. It's certainly a powerful tale.

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There's an idea, though I can no longer remember exactly where I first encountered it, that a common trope of English children’s fiction is that of the ‘secret garden’. It derives from the title of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s famous novel of course, but refers to all the many hidden spaces and worlds which can be found in so much children’s fantasy. It’s close in some ways to Philip Sandifer’s trope of the ‘portal to fairy’ which he deployed in his epic examination of Doctor Who: the notion of a door or portal through which the protagonists pass, exiting the mundane world for one of fantasy and adventure. C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe leading into Narnia, basically, which easily maps onto the Doctor’s Tardis, and no doubt other children’s fantasy. But it’s there in The Secret Garden too, I think. Gardens by their very nature have natural boundaries, the passage through which can easily be freighted with literary, or even religious significance, if we think of the passage from the Garden of Eden in Genesis. Hodgson Burnett’s characters must first discover the means to enter the garden of the novel’s title, passing through an initially locked door into the space where they will achieve their own personal growth and restoration of health.

It appears to be quite a flexible trope. If I remember this correctly, I encountered it in the context of a piece about J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, which definitely works: as we all know Hogwarts is a secret world reached through a hidden doorway in King's Cross station. I’ve also found myself wondering if this isn't a trope that I’m finding within many of the children’s fantasies from the 50s and 60s which I’ve been reading over the last few years. I’m thinking specifically here of Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, The House of Green Knowe (which I didn’t get around to writing about, despite my good intentions). It’s most obvious in Philipa Pearce’s book: Tom literally steps over the threshold of his backdoor at night into a wonderful garden of the past. This actually underlines a significant difference though. What for Hodgson Burnet was a symbol of growth and unification with the world - both social and natural - which exists beyond the child characters’ sense of self has here become much more private, even solipsistic. Although he is sharing it with someone else, the experience of entering this hidden space remains Tom’s private engagement with the past.

In The House of Green Knowe it’s the eponymous house which serves as the magical space, hidden away from a threatening modernity. In order to reach it, the oddly named Toseland initially has to cross the barrier of floodwaters, which for the remainder of his Christmas holidays are the comforting barrier which help keep the rest of the world out, while he explores both the history of the house and his own family history through a series of ghostly encounters. Toseland's relationship with the past, both national and mythic is a sanctuary, keeping not only modernity at bay, but also an evil, storybook gypsy, the narrative's one source of conflict. I call her a 'storybook' gypsy, because that's exactly how she appears to me: a trope which bears little relationship to the real people we call gypsy's, although I am fully aware of the troublesome nature of that. As a gypsy, she is both the cultural and ethnic 'other' which is rejected by the national English past, the past which Toseland and his grandmother have continuity with through their ancestry.

Put like that, it feels like overly harsh with what is after all, a lovely children's fantasy. Yet, that reading is there. Much as I love it, and fully intend to read the other books in the series, I can still recognise that The House of Green Knowe is a deeply consolatory fantasy.

In comparison, both Charlotte Sometimes and Marianne Dreams feel far less consolatory. If anything, they're far more solipsistic, the secret worlds entered through sleep and dreaming. Charlotte Sometimes gestures at an alienating slippage of identity, and the world Charlotte travels back to and becomes trapped in is hardly a consolatory one, mostly dreary and unpleasant, overshadowed by the final stages of the First World War. If this is a secret garden, it is one which is despoilt, and to be escaped from.

Marianne Dreams is harsher still, since it isn't just Mark who needs to discover the resources within himself in order to fully recover from his illness. It's also Marianne who needs to learn to be a better person. It's her initial fit of pique and irritation with Mark which causes her to create the jailers in her dream in the first place. It's very nicely judged. She's never portrayed as a particularly unpleasant child - a bit self-centered, perhaps, but no more than most children can be - instead, her actions are the result of thoughtless anger, the sort of thing which we can all be guilty of at times. Marianne's desire to aid Mark in his struggle then is partly the result of her need to apologise and to atone for her earlier actions.

The magical space in which Marianne and Mark find themselves then, is intimately intertwined with the real, material world. It's a space in which they are both tested and ultimately learn to become better versions of themselves. Here, the 'secret garden' is located firmly within the self. Which is perhaps only to restate how the trope of the secret garden works. In contrast to the 'portal to faerie' as theorised by Philip Sandifer - where the portal is a doorway to a more magical, adventurous world - the 'secret garden' is ultimately always bringing the child characters face to face with themselves.