![]() ![]() After meeting Mary, and spending time outside with her and learning about love and friendship, he is magically cured? Or, it was all in his head in the first place. The son is a miserable tyrannical child who lives his life in bed having panic attacks about being ill. So, in this book the uncle is a romantic wretched fellow who is a “hunchback.” After being widowed by a beautiful girl who it is made clear should never have looked at him twice he never recovers and abandons his son who is also disabled, to wander around the world being morose and stinking rich. Now, as to the depiction of disability and chronic illness, that gets complex. These overt lines are of course scrubbed from modern retellings, but can you really remove the attitudes which form the basis and premise of this entire book? Does simply erasing the overt lines actually do more bad than good because it makes it harder to critically look at the entire structure? And how does this affect if and how we approach reading it. Serious question, is it possible to find a classic book that isn’t full of a deep base of white supremacy and colonialism? I’m not sure. ![]() In fact upon her arrival at the English manor her maid says that India is full of “a lot of blacks instead of respectable white people.” To which Mary very angrily informs her “Natives are not people.” It is not mentioned again overtly, but the implicit racism, colonialism, and colourism runs deep in the veins of this book. It is all very Edwardian gothic, she is a miserable “sickly little creature” and being back in the healthy English air and surrounded by good English people who take “no nonsense” improves her horrible temper and health. She is shipped back to England, to be raised in Misselthwaite Manor, the home of her Maternal Uncle by marriage. She couldn’t care less, beyond inconvenience to her lifestyle. The story is as follows, Mary is a British expat raised in India when, after Cholera strikes her parents and basically everyone she knows dies. You may be familiar with the story, it has been redone as plays, movies, picture books, etc., though I find that the original novel despite being a “classic” very readable for a modern reader, because Burnett was a boss writer. I was first alerted to the problematic nature of the portrayal and attitudes towards disability in this book while chatting with my friend Lucy, Previous to us discussing it I had never questioned this book. It is also, therefore perhaps surprisingly, the book I am putting forth today for #LibrarianFightClub, because when it comes to examining internal biases and problematic messages in books, nothing should be sacred. “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published as a full novel in 1911, is my favourite book of all time, since the first time I read it when I was a child. ![]()
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