![]() In order to understand how The Secret Garden engages with the production of girlhood and boyhood as gendered identities, I want first to contextualise the book within the tradition of juvenile literature and of ideological discourses about the child in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The philosophical and cultural implications of the construction of identity and sexual identity, together with the way literature takes part in such a construction, will be the main focus of this article. I want to analyse the nature and the implications of the relation between genre - a term referring to a set of formal criteria and literary conventions - and gender - a term which I take to refer to sexual identity as a social construction, different from biological sex (Butler, 1999: preface x and xi). By 'genre,' I mean the classification of literary works on the basis of their content, form, or technique by 'gender,' I understand the categorisation between the "feminine" and the "masculine" as cultural and ideological products and the attributes and roles assigned to them. ![]() I will study the genre of The Secret Garden under the light of gendered issues as I think that genre and gender were inevitably linked in the literature of the time. Ewing's, and Burnett's The Secret Garden are sometimes classified by literary critics (Reynolds, 1990, 94). Adventure or school stories were addressed to boys, while girls were prone to read tedious stories about self-sacrificing heroines (Reynolds, 1990, 51 and 100), designed to keep them in the position and function of domestic "angels" (The phrase comes from Coventry Patmore's poem The Angel in The House, 1854-1856).Īs girls tended to read their brothers' books, finding them more attractive and entertaining, a third category of stories appeared in juvenile fiction: books for both girls and boys, among which E. A division between books for boys and books for girls occurred in the nineteenth century, in accordance with the separate syllabuses that were designed depending on sex and class. However, the rapidly growing success of the genre triggered questions about what sort of books were proper for children to read. The nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth saw the explosion of the number of published works thanks to technical progress in the publishing industry, paralleled by a profusion of genres and subgenres, including children's literature. Women and homosexuals were perceived as threats to society because of the Victorian cultural reticence about sex and desire (Showalter, 1991, 3). It was a time when both the words "feminism" and "homosexuality" came into use, redefining accepted ideas of masculinity and femininity. Such changes inevitably raised crucial questions concerning the notion of a British nation, but also concerning the distribution of gender roles. ![]() When The Secret Garden was published in 1911, British society was entering a time of considerable industrial change and therefore of spectacular social upheavals which were to lead to unexpected cultural consequences. Questions of genre and gender lie at the heart of the book, which plays on different cultural and literary influences, and questions the ideological and social context in which it is inscribed. Mary, who is left alone most of the time, decides to explore the place and discover its secrets. The latter lives in a mysterious manor in the middle of the Yorkshire moors. In the opening pages of the novel, the heroine's parents die of cholera in India and the orphan is sent to England to live with her uncle. However, the book is considered a classic of children's literature in England and America, and as such, it is part of Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage. Today, the story of The Secret Garden is mostly known in France thanks to the 1993 Warner Bros film, directed by Agnieszka Holland. "If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden." Mary's last sentence in the film adaptation of The Secret Garden recalls the main metaphor of Burnett's book, and gives broader significance to the garden, thus endowing Burnett's story with a universal and atemporal dimension, and contributing to its lasting popularity.
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