KidLit Forum

It's very easy to see that the book abounds in all sorts of secrets: Mary is kept a secret from her parents' associates; Colin is kept a secret by both his father and himself. Misselthwaite is full of hundreds of locked rooms; its servants are forbidden to speak of its history or of its inhabitants. Colin keeps the portrait of his mother a secret from everybody. The most pivotal secret is the fact that everyone hides from their awful disease: being miserable and unloved. This thing turns out to be really deadly. Mary can't eat and is histerical, Colin talks about death and all sort of horrid things and cries blue murder, Mr. Craven runs away from his past into foreign countries but he cannot run from himself etc.

There's a Poe imagery depicted here, sort of. The surroundings and even the house are very dim and gloomy. The light is forbidden for it blinds and burns the white diseased skin of Colin. The wuthering wind sounds like a cry, which is a lie told by the servants in order to keep Colin hidden. You have the feeling that this is a horror book about shadows and ghosts. Mary, the unwanted ugly girl, is not scared of those things, for she is like them. She tries to find, bit by bit, the greatest secret which hides behind the curtain. Along with her we learn that there's nothing wrong actually: the illness, the infirmity, the malady, the alienation, the sickness is only in the minds of those who deny everything. So there's no disability here, only emotional disorder.

Dikon is the sound of nature, is the voice which calls the "infirms" out in the opening where fresh air fills the spongious lungs and clear the sick minds. You feel like the scales fell from their eyes and they can see clearly what childhood is all about. "[Mary] Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for someone."

The garden is nothing more than their self image. Rotten, full of weeds, abandoned. And it's not dead, only uncared-for. They make it blossom again and along with her they come to life too and all the hidious manor.

"Oh! The things which happened in that garden! If you have never had a garden you cannot understand, and if you have had a garden you will know that it would take a whole book to describe all that came to pass there. At first it seemed that green things would never cease pushing their way through the earth, in the grass, in the beds, even in the crevices of the walls. Then the green things began to show buds and the buds began to unfurl and show colour, every shade of blue, every shade of purple, every tint and hue of crimson. In its happy days flowers had been tucked away into every inch and hole and corner... Iris and white lilies rose out of the grass in sheaves, and the green alcoves filled themselves with amazing armies of the blue and white flower lances of tall delphiniums or columbines or campanulas."

1) There are some references to Indian society. How does Mary characterize the natives? How does she describe her servants? In what ways are they different or similar to the English people she met?

2) Who is more responsible for their flaws? The children or the adults or both?
How come Colin and Mary get on well when they seem to have the same issues? They're both histerical and spoiled.

3) How does magic and the idea of Eden get together? Colin speaks about the science of magic. What exactly does he mean? Positive minds or the power of thought can change the course of things?
"You learn things by saying them over and over and thinking about them until they stay in your mind for ever and I think it will be the same with Magic. If you keep calling it to come to you and help you it will get to be part of you and it will stay and do things."

What Mary doesn’t possess is her parents’ love. That is way she is so rude and unaffectionate. Colin has the same problem. Both of them somehow miss their mother and unconsciously try to revolt through their only weapons: language and behavior. Because they are young they don’t realize it. Adult suffering is transformed in something much stronger. Colin’s father because he misses his wife, is isolated and cold. Being left alone in the world is the biggest fear of children, but because they don’t realize it properly only unconscious cannot be transformed into anxiety.
“Mary had liked to look at her mother from a distance and she had thought her very pretty, but as she knew very little of her she could scarcely have been expected to love her or to miss her very much when she was gone. She did not miss her at all, in fact, and as she was a self-absorbed child she gave her entire thought to herself, as she had always done. If she had been older she would no doubt have been very anxious at being left alone in the world, but she was very young, and as she had always been taken care of, she supposed she always would be.”
"Does your father come and see you?" Mary ventured.
"Sometimes. Generally when I am asleep. He doesn't want to see me."

The Mother Nature gives them straight and love. Children play happily in the garden and became healthier as the time pass. Nature doesn’t look at them as persons with physical disabilities or unhealthy body. Nature looks at them as human, and that’s it. Mothers care for their children no matter how they are, but because they lack one world is cruel with them. The human world, society excludes them only because they are different.
The Magic that Diana said is nothing but the freedom from the society judgment. Nature is connected with magic like in the believes of fairytales, you have to believe it. It about that nature that romantics talked about. The garden became as a reflection of children’s individuality and emotions. But is not about the sublimity of untamed nature but the opposite. Children imagination revives the garden which gives them straight only because they believe. It is a way of escaping from all the problems.

Very sensitive and intellignet observations, Diana! And a good set of questions (that make me feel sorry for this seminar not having taken place in class).

Loredana, I also enjoyed your ideas aboyut this book. Just one niggle thoug: when you say straight you actually mean strength, right?