On the perpetual spring fever for The Secret Garden
Exploring the foundational art of our personality
We all knew I had to land here eventually, right?
Well, maybe not all, but there will be a subset of readers who—whether they consciously knew it or not—were looking at their internal calendars and wondering if it might be time for this young man’s fancy to turn to thoughts of Mary Lennox. I can also hear the groans a small but mighty faction are uttering over the subject line: “Not this movie again!”
Well sorry, but yes this movie again. And again and again and again and again probably for the rest of my life.
I want you to know that I just jumped my cursor back several full paragraphs, and that what you will read below was written before what I am writing now, because I completely took for granted that everyone reading this will know about The Secret Garden—the book, the movie, the BBC adaptation, the musical— and that no synopsis or history is necessary. Surely it’s as deeply etched into your psyche as it is mine? No? Context?
I’ve actually never read the original book, written in the early 20th century by Frances Hodgson Burnett—I worry that reading the original will mean I have to love the adaptations less—but can tell you that the general story across all forms runs about the same. Mary Lennox is a British child raised in India whose colonizer parents die (of cholera in all adaptations except the full-length film, which opts for the more visually dramatic mysterious-earthquake-causing-a-house-fire-that-somehow-kills-the-parents-even-though-it-looks-like-they-weren’t-in-the-house-at-the-time trope), meaning she is sent to live with her mysterious, reclusive uncle in the Yorkshire moors. She hears tell of a secret walled garden, long neglected. She finds the entrance to said garden and works to bring it back to life. She befriends her bedridden cousin, he learns to walk again, she learns to love and trust again, all the residents of the house find healing through the metaphor of the garden being tended as it deserves. A magical Yorkshire boy teaches Mary how to tell if something is ‘‘wick’’ (alive) even when it looks dead (anyone who’s read the book, please let me know: is Dickon a powerful sexual awakening moment in written form, as well as all others?).
I don’t know where movies watched on repeat as a small child lies on the nature-nurture binary (or what I think about that binary in general; but for the purposes of this train of thought let’s roll with it, yes?). But I do feel like this movie came into my life early enough that it imprinted on me in a more significant way than films can really hope to when I watch them now.
This writing is not a space where I want to make myself do any amount of research, but curiosity about how early childhood art impacts did send me to Google and I would like a few congratulatory head pats for instinctively using the word ‘‘imprint’’ which seems to refer psychologically to learning we do at key developmental phases by watching/experiencing—we learn to talk by imitating the sounds our parents make, for example. Imprinting is also what’s going on in stories of orphaned baby ducks running after the human they saw first after hatching because they assume that person is their mother. After we hit a certain age, we move away from imprinting and into learning—more conscious, less innate. This is why it’s a lot easier to learn a language when we’re young, for example.
While I don’t actually remember the first time that I watched the feature film version (my first and most revisited adaptation) I would put its influence in the same sphere as learning grammar rules through osmosis by reading Pride and Prejudice around age 10—absorbing things as unconsciously as I did consciously.
There are so many things I do that I know I do because of this movie. And so many personality traits I worry were given to me by it, rather than coming into existence of their own accord. The movie is definitely very tactile, but I also definitely feel it more deeply than I do other also-tactile movies I saw later in life. I grabbed this random (but important!) clip and it was a chockablock full of things I still do as probably any other clip would be. I still measure small things by pincing my thumb and first finger around them and pretending they’re large skeleton keys. When making my way through dense woods I crack small branches individually and deliberately like I have small child hands. I find myself humming the Discovery Choral Aahhs when intentionally exploring new spaces. Every year at this time of year when I push aside ground coverage to expose new shooting up growths of green things, I picture what Mary uncovers here.
And more than that—when I touch puzzle pieces I think of how they snap together in this movie. When I encounter spoiled brats I want to sarcastically call them Rajah. Whenever I open a jar I become—in my mind—a bedridden pre-teen scrabbling by candlelight for his jar of lotion to apply to his indoor-air chapped lips. My love of elephants sprang entirely from the fact that there is a pair of ivory elephants in this movie and Mary clinks their trunks together and it makes a perfect sound—and if anyone ever brings me a pair of elephants (not ivory though, thank you) and I can clink their trunks together and make that sound, I will marry that person and love them, deeply for all eternity.
Basically I do worry that pretty much all of my most charming mannerisms are copies of a very spoiled child learning to become a softer and more open human being. I’m not sure there’s a single instinct in how I interact with the world that’s entirely mine, separated completely from how this movie showed me to interact with this world. For better or for worse (is it a good movie? Couldn’t tell you! Are all its lessons worth keeping? Probably not! Do robins in Canada look the same as robins in England? They do not, and I will never get over the disappointment!), to know this movie is to know me. I am what it made me. And while asking people to tell me things in the comments of newsletters seems a little too much like a CTA at the end of a marketing pitch, I would very much like to know what movies or books or other pieces of art made you!
This story doesn’t really fit anywhere but I want to tell it so it goes right here: I once showed the movie to a couple of young men, one of whom values plot above all else in his movie-watching experiences. Both of them (probably fairly) objected to the lack of action in the movie—there’s not a lot of momentum in it besides the inherent momentum of the passage of time taking us from winter to spring. But one of them actually suggested, apparently seriously, that the movie would have been better if the bed-ridden Colin (who used a wheelchair to get around when he was first out exploring the garden) had fallen down a hole and gravely injured himself. Some people are just beyond redemption.
Hah, I’m chuckling about someone wanting more action in the secret garden 😆 heaven forbid we have a slow and meandering plot in a film where the main metaphor is a garden 😆
Me and Sophie loved the secret garden when young, I had the book, and was quite a fan. ❤️
For me, definitely Harry Potter is the biggest one - and that’s a complicated love now, for obvious reasons. But it still stands as the most foundational (books, especially), and will follow me probably forever.