GIRLS AND GREEN SPACE:
SICKNESS-TO-HEALTH NARRATIVES IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
by
JANET MARIE GRAFTON
B. Arts, Malaspina University-College, 2004
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
in
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
(Children’s Literature)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
(Vancouver)
August 2010
© Janet Marie Grafton, 2010
ii
ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the vital role of green space in the lives of young female
protagonists in Jane of Lantern Hill by Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Secret Garden by
Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. The
transformations from illness to wellness that each protagonist undergoes are linked to
experiences in rural environments. The application of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and
ecopsychology to fiction from the past unearths the ways in which the pastoral nature of
the texts is connected to contemporary environmental concerns.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ............................................................................ ............................................. ii
Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... iii
Acknowledgements ......................................................... ............................................ iv
CHAPTER ONE: Introduction and Literature Review
Introduction ........................................................... ..............................................1
Origins of Interest ................................................. ..............................................2
Rationale for Selection of Primary Texts .............. ..............................................3
Introduction to Primary Texts ............................... ..............................................5
Research Questions ..............................................................................................7
Overview of Thesis Chapters ................................ ..............................................7
Literature Review ........................................................... ..............................................9
Transformation Narratives ...................................................................................9
Green Space: Literary and Literal ......................................................................10
Green Space as a Psychological Resource ............. ............................................14
The Necessity of Firsthand Experience ................ ............................................16
Illness and Metaphor ...........................................................................................20
Children and the Environment …………………… ............................................25
Children’s Literature and the Environment ........................................................28
CHAPTER TWO: Theory and Methods ..................................................................32
Methodology ........................................................................................................43
CHAPTER THREE: The Nature of the Illness .......................................................46
CHAPTER FOUR: The Nature of the Green Space ...............................................60
CHAPTER FIVE: The Nature of the Transformations ..........................................75
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................92
Works Cited ..................................................................................................................97
Works Consulted ........................................................................................................111
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my thesis supervisor, Judy Brown, for her invaluable
encouragement and feedback throughout the completion of this thesis. I am also very
grateful to Margot Filipenko for agreeing to be on my committee, and for her enthusiasm
and support.
I have learned a great deal in the researching and writing my thesis, most
significantly, how important friends and family are to the process. Thank you to Brianne
Grant for her untiring empathy and words of encouragement. Cheers to Lizzie Walker,
Karen Taylor, Bryannie Kirk and Vasso Tassiopoulos for being the most fabulous cohorts
a girl could ask for. To Theresa Rogers, Kathie Shoemaker, and Judi Saltman, thank you
for helping to make my MA experience at UBC such a great one.
Many thanks to Holly, Dean and Sophie Broadland for sharing their home with
me during thesis-centred visits to Vancouver.
And to my understanding ‘roommates,’ Brian and Sylvia Grafton, who welcomed
me back home and were unfailingly supportive during the writing of this thesis, even
when four months turned into fourteen, thank you with all my heart.
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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW
Introduction
I have long been aware of the ways in which land and literature have shaped my
life. The research, analysis, and writing of my thesis gave me the chance to fully explore
this awareness. Growing up in a semi-rural setting in the Cowichan Valley on
Vancouver Island, I had access to forests and riverbanks, fishing docks and fields. I
know what it is to roam freely and unsupervised in green space. During my childhood,
the old farm estates and wild lands of the valley stood on the cusp of development, and I
had the chance to explore many of these places before they were parcelled off and
subdivided, as seems to be the inevitable trend. Time spent in these green spaces gave
me the confidence that firsthand experience brings and the consolation of peace in nature.
My taste in books reflects my love of the land. I am often drawn to stories that
take place in wild or rural settings, set in past times. My grandmother’s memories
supplemented these stories and made the details real: she told stories about creating a
swimming hole by damming the creek, berry-picking in sight of bears, and not going
hungry during the Depression because, though her family was poor, they grew their own
food.
The way people interact with the environment has changed since my
grandmother’s time. The land is transforming quickly, just as taste in literature is shifting.
I believe there is a connection between endangered green spaces and endangered books.
As our relationship to green spaces is altered by development, our ability to connect with
the green spaces in fiction – spaces from the past that no longer resonate with us today --
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diminishes. In this context, though, fiction from the past can, with readerly imagination,
serve as a portal, a window into a natural world and a way of life that are mostly gone
now.
Considering these texts as artefacts, particularly in light of the natural world they
represent, is just as problematic as the contemporary trend of speaking about the natural
environment solely in terms of crisis. But it is difficult to avoid an elegiac tone when we
are losing both aspects of the natural world and our textual link to it. For me, books from
the past provide a way to maintain green spaces. But, I wonder, are these spaces
important because I knew them outside of books as well? Without firsthand experience,
can the environments in books hold much meaning for readers? What will happen when
my grandmother’s generation is gone and there is no one left to decode the natural
environments of these books?
Exploring the intersection of the real world with worlds in literature is at the
heart of my thesis. In examining pastoral children’s literature from the past, my intention
is to collect and articulate, through textual analysis, a strong argument for the connection
between the natural world and the sense of self in pre-adolescent girls as represented in
literary narratives. In regarding both textual and actual green space as psychological
resources, I hope to contribute to the survival of these stories and these spaces.
Origins of Interest
The ideas in this study have been on my mind for several years now. In 2004, I
went to Japan to teach English. Because I enjoy the comfort of revisiting beloved books,
I packed a number of long-time favourites to keep me company there. One afternoon
during my second year of teaching, I looked at the books on my shelves and noticed a
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pattern: many of the stories had transformations at their core. Later, in graduate school, I
would learn that the transformation trope is almost as common in children’s literature as
the orphan trope. But at the time, I was struck by how important these books have been
to me since childhood, and I began to look closely at the reasons why. A number of the
stories on my shelves deal with characters’ transformations from sickness to health; the
three books that stood out as being especially significant to me -- Frances Hodgson
Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy (1917),
and L.M. Montgomery’s Jane of Lantern Hill (1937) -- all centre on sickness-to-health
transformations that are rooted in each female protagonist’s experiences within a rural
green space.
Rationale for selection of primary texts
When I first began talking about my research ideas with colleagues and
instructors in the Master of Arts in Children’s Literature program at the University of
British Columbia, a number of related primary texts were suggested, such as Anita
Horrock’s Almost Eden and Eloise McGraw’s The Moorchild. I read and enjoyed these
books, along with Jasmin by Jan Truss, Alone at Ninety Foot by Katherine Holubitsky,
and Willow and Twig by Jean Little. All these stories deal with some variation of a
sickness-to-health transformation, as do classic novels like Johanna Spyri’s Heidi,
Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna, and Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did. Picturebooks such
as The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse by Beatrix Potter and Miss Rumphius by Barbara
Cooney also hold aspects of the transformation narrative I was interested in researching.
All these stories were contenders, but my reasons for not choosing them helped
bring my final choices into focus: in Almost Eden, it is the mother who is ill, and not the
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daughter; I knew I wanted to focus on child characters, preferably prepubescent girls.
The Moorchild is a fantasy text, and I wanted to incorporate environmental literary
criticism, or ecocriticism, into stories grounded in realism. The young female protagonist
in Jasmin undergoes a marked transformation, but the timespan as it relates to her
immersion in the natural world and in which the change occurs is too brief; stories that
moved through at least one full season were what I was looking for. The protagonist’s
transformation in Alone at Ninety Foot is based on trauma rather than issues of self-
perception and self-esteem, and would require a psychoanalytic background that took me
away from my research interests; also, the text is very contemporary, as is the case with
Willow and Twig. Because I knew I wanted The Secret Garden as a cornerstone text in
my research, I was unsure how to bridge this historical work with more contemporary
stories. With Heidi, the historical criterion is clearly met, but the sickness-to-health
aspect is convoluted: although Heidi suffers away from the mountains, she is a healthy
child at the start of the story; Clara undergoes a huge transformation, but she is not the
protagonist. The transformations in Pollyanna and What Katy Did are much the same:
both protagonists are healthy at the start of the each story. And finally, while I am
interested in the ecocritical themes of Cooney’s and Potter’s texts, I am keen to focus on
the textual theories of chapter books rather than on theories of visual literacy.
The three texts I have selected -- The Secret Garden, Understood Betsy, and Jane
of Lantern Hill -- all reflect an idea expressed by Rosemary Sutcliff in her autobiography,
Blue Remembered Hills. Of her childhood in the English countryside she writes, “Above
all, I soaked in the ‘feel’ of the downs, the warm sense of the ground itself actively
holding one up; a sureness, a steadfastness; and the sense that one gets in down country
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of kinship with a land that has been mixed up with the life of men since it and men
began” (37). The protagonists of my chosen texts are all “held up” in various ways by
the land. Each girl’s connection to the land builds her sense of personal capability, and
the environment is more than backdrop.
Introduction to Primary Texts
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
My three primary texts are considered classics, but of them all, only The Secret
Garden is still widely read. It was published in 1911 and was received with mostly
positive reviews, though as Phyllis Bixler reports, there were some critics who found it
“over-sentimental and dealing almost wholly with abnormal people” (13). The most
damning review dismissed it as a story that “will appeal to many women and young girls”
(qtd. in Bixler 13). In 1951, Marghanita Laski reassessed the literary value of The Secret
Garden, and by the 1980s, it was labelled a classic. Since then, it has garnered much
scholarly attention and is listed on the syllabi for many university children’s literature
courses.
Since first reading the book as a child, I have never tired of Mary’s transformation
story. It has become a seasonal read for me: when the snowdrops come up, I read The
Secret Garden, as that is when Mary’s metamorphosis begins. The symbolic connection
of Mary with her environment is endlessly satisfying as her journey to health is paralleled
with that of the secret garden’s: her isolation and unhappiness match the barren landscape
of the English winter; both she and the garden have been ‘locked up’ for 10 years; and
together, they come to life.
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Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Dorothy Canfield Fisher is remembered more for her liberal politics and academic
career than for writing Understood Betsy. There is very little scholarly material on the
novel, and existing reviews tend to come from online bookseller’s sites, written by
contemporary adult readers who loved the book as children. Even at the time it was
published, in 1917, the story was considered a little didactic and a little dated.
But the same appeal that keeps regard strong for The Secret Garden propels
Understood Betsy: at its heart, the story holds the power of metamorphosis. Elizabeth
Ann begins her tale as a pale, shadowy ghost of a girl. The twist of fate that relocates her
from an urban environment to the Vermont countryside also triggers her transformation
into a strong, capable child, re-named Betsy. The value of self-reliance and simple living
runs like an undercurrent throughout Understood Betsy.
Jane of Lantern Hill by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Jane of Lantern Hill is Montgomery’s second-to-last book. One of her
biographers, Jane Urquhart, notes that Montgomery wrote this story during a time of deep
unhappiness, which accounts for the element of fairytale wish-fulfilment noted by critics
Mollie Gillen and Theodore Sheckels. As with Understood Betsy, very little critical
discussion exists on this work. Because of its benign subject matter, it is often
overlooked, particularly when compared to Montgomery’s other works, such as the Anne
and Emily series.
But the fairytale elements of Jane’s story are what make it compelling: witnessing
a young girl move from awkwardness and self-loathing to sturdy self-confidence contains
the primal appeal and power of transformation.
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The parallels between my three primary texts that are most significant to my study are
these: the amount of time each girl spends in a healing environment is similar in all three
stories. Mary’s transformation begins in winter and ends in late summer. Betsy’s story
begins in winter and ends the next fall. And Jane’s time on the island spans two
consecutive summers, totalling six months. In each story, the sickness-to-health trope is
centred on a lack of confidence, or on being ill at ease, versus actual illness. All three
protagonists are nearly the same age: on the cusp of adolescence but still children. And
finally, each story is set in the Edwardian era.
Research Questions
The questions most central to my thesis deal with the nature of green space in the
pastoral novels by Burnett, Fisher, and Montgomery. How does contact with green space
change the protagonists in a way urban living cannot? What is healing about these rural
environments? In terms of engagement with the natural world, does lack of firsthand
experience in nature cause illness, or the state of being ill at ease with oneself and the
world? Considering the context of these novels, what is the function of nostalgia? Do
pastoral settings from the past have any bearing on contemporary readers, in terms of
both fiction and our current environmental climate?
Overview of Thesis Chapters
The scope of the research for my thesis is broad, and my literature review,
immediately following in this first chapter, reflects both the wide range and the
interconnectedness of the different disciplines I draw from. In analysing the
metamorphoses at the heart of my primary texts, I make links between transformation
narratives and the larger world.
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In the second chapter, I introduce my focal theory, ecocriticism, as well as my two
subsidiary theories, ecofeminism and ecopsychology, and discuss the ways in which I
apply them to children’s fiction from the past.
In analysing the nature of the illness each protagonist suffers from at the beginning of
her story, I apply a less traditional definition of disease to my primary texts in Chapter
Three. The ways in which an underdeveloped sense of self-confidence affects the
protagonists on multiple levels is the main focus of this chapter.
Chapter Four centres on the pastoral nature of the green space in the texts. I look at
the role of place in the protagonists’ transformations, and at the nature of the experiences
available to the girls in these rural spaces.
The focus of the final chapter is the nature of the transformation each girl goes
through by her story’s end. I look at the ways in which the rural environments change the
protagonists, and the specific factors behind their transformations.
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Literature Review
Transformation Narratives
Popular culture is fixated on transformations. From personal style makeovers to
weight loss journeys to home renovations, TV programs and magazines are full of before-
and-after stories. But these tales of change are not just a modern fascination; found in
fairy tales, Greek myths, Shakespeare, and the Bible, transformation stories have been
enthralling audiences for centuries. In her foreword to Metamorphoses in Children’s
Literature and Culture, Leena Kirstina observes that “the idea of metamorphoses is a
central concept” of human life, and that “we live in a continuous state of metamorphoses
from birth to death, especially in childhood” (7). It makes sense, then, that our cultural
products reflect this central facet of our lives. And as childhood is naturally a time of
heightened metamorphosis and growth, transformation narratives are central to children’s
literature. Many of these tales are animal stories or fantasy texts that address the change
from human to animal.
In the primary texts I have chosen to work with, each protagonist undergoes a
marked transformation from illness to wellness. The aspect of the sickness-to-health
narratives that I explore in my thesis centres on the places in which these transformations
occur. The link between the role of place in children’s literature and the role of place in
children’s lives is not often discussed jointly in academic writing. This thesis represents
my attempt to begin bridging disciplines. I draw on what Juliet Dusinberre distinguishes
as the literary and the literal (220); in my research, I have found that the borders between
the two are often blurred and often intersected by similar or complementary ideas.
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Green Space: Literary and Literal
Green Gables, Wonderland, The Limberlost, Sunnybrook Farm: place names are
emblazoned in the titles of many children’s classics, highlighting the vital role of place in
these stories. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s texts, natural spaces
are given particular importance, suggesting that setting is more than just backdrop.
Author Astrid Lindgren, in an interview with Jonathan Cott in his book, Piper at the
Gates of Dawn, articulates the significance of the natural world in her own childhood:
Rocks and trees were as close to us as living beings, and nature protected and
nurtured our playing and our dreaming. Whatever our imagination could call
forth was enacted in the land around us, all fairy tales, all adventures we invented
or read about or heard about, all of it happened there and only there, even our
songs and prayers had their place in surrounding nature. (151-2)
Edith Cobb extends the idea that nature permeates the physical and imaginative lives of
children in The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood; her hypothesis explores how
childhood experience in nature forms the foundation of creative adult experience. In
other words, Cobb is interested in the way nature shapes people:
Experience in childhood is never formal or abstract. Even the world of nature is
not a “scene,” or even a landscape. Nature for the child is sheer sensory
experience, although any child can draw in the wings of his surroundings at will
and convert the self into a “theatre of perception” in which he is at once producer,
dramatist, and star. (29)
In a chapter entitled “Theatres of Girlhood” from Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A
Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter, Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden is
11
described as “director of this drama” (246). Rather than regard her as a female character
who is usurped by Colin at the story’s end, Lerer sees Mary in a much more active role,
and as she “digs up, replants, orders, organizes, and reshapes the garden,” it becomes “a
stage for her performance” (245).
In my primary texts, I argue that nature, or green space, functions as more than a
place for performance. In her thesis, Daughters of the Land: An Ecofeminist Analysis of
the Relationships Between Female Adolescent Protagonists and Landscape in Three
Verse Novels for Children, Victoria VanSickle, drawing on Rebecca Lukens, defines a
backdrop setting as “universal; in it, the particulars of time and place are fairly
inconsequential and have little effect on the story” (18). An integral setting, however, “is
essential to the story and influences plot, character, and conflict” (18). In all three of my
primary texts the landscape is integral to the protagonists’ transformations, an argument I
flesh out in Chapter Five.
In most stories with integral settings, values are prescribed to the land. In her
regional work, The Power of Place: Landscape in New Zealand Children’s Fiction, 1970-
1989, Diane Hebley writes, “[T]here is nothing either good or bad in the landscape, but
thinking makes it so” (9). Her discussion of the ways in which landscape in literature
reflects cultural attitudes finds echoes in Shelagh J. Squire’s essay, “Ways of Seeing,
Ways of Being: Literature, Place, and Tourism in L.M. Montgomery’s Prince Edward
Island”:
In cultural geography, much landscape research has been concerned with
describing the meanings and values associated with particular environments.
What has tended to go unrecognized is that culture and the cultural landscape
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must be interpreted as active human constructs and … systems of communication
(144).
The pastoral and Romantic literary traditions evident in my primary texts demand
analysis of the values inherent in such depictions of landscape.
The tendency of children’s literature to oversimplify the differences between urban
and rural settings by demonizing one and valorizing the other is discussed by Myra
Pollack Sadker and David Miller Sadker in Now Upon a Time. They observe that often
in children’s stories, “the city becomes an example of a disrupting and dysfunctional
environmental influence … the enemy of a pure and clean environment” (276).
Interestingly, this dichotomy is not just a feature of children’s literature. Authors such as
Raymond Williams in The Country and the City and Leo Marx in The Machine in the
Garden document this longstanding pattern in English literature. Williams’ systematic
and thoughtful inquiry into perceptions regarding divisions of country and city reads like
an act of archaeology. Of the newly post-Industrial world, he writes:
in and through these transforming experiences English attitudes to country, and to
ideas of rural life, persisted with extraordinary power, so that even after the
society was predominantly urban its literature, for a generation, was still
predominantly rural; and even in the twentieth century, in an urban and industrial
land, forms of the older ideas and experiences still remarkably persist. (2)
Frances Hodgson Burnett, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and L.M. Montgomery were writing
with these “older ideas” in mind, and their work is tinged with nostalgia. As a reaction to
change, and as a form of conservation, nostalgia serves multiple functions in my primary
texts, an idea which I discuss further in Chapter Four of my thesis. Williams does an
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impressive job of searching back in history to explain the persistence of nostalgia, and the
role of the Romantics in circulating it, noting that “[t]he agrarian confidence of the
eighteenth century has been counterpointed, throughout, by feelings of loss and
melancholy and regret” (127). It is Wordsworth, Williams argues, who heralds a return
to “a confidence in nature” (127), however fictional and idealized. Marx’s work also
explores the myth of the pastoral ideal in literature, and the longstanding human
fascination with utopias, Edens, virgin wilderness, and prelapsarian paradises, but from
an American perspective, and with more focus on the conflict between technology and
nature than Williams. Marx’s belief that the literary and the literal are not separate makes
his work invaluable to my study as he connects environments and attitudes about
environments in books to the larger world. He believes that “[t]o appreciate the
significance and power of our American fables it is necessary to understand the interplay
between the literary imagination and what happens outside literature, in the general
culture” (4).
Anthropologist Barbara Ching and English professor Gerald W. Creed discuss in
depth the issues surrounding the opposition of rural and urban places in both literature
and the literal world in Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy.
They explore the politics of place, and the biases and prejudice inherent in the social
hierarchy of urban versus rural. Two of my primary texts, Jane of Lantern Hill and
Understood Betsy, illustrate this complicated hierarchy explicitly. Urban environments
are intentionally portrayed by the authors as being simultaneously more sophisticated and
more degraded than their rural counterparts. While Ching and Creed document that “the
urbane believed rustics incapable of appreciating nature” (21), Burnett, Fisher and
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Montgomery privilege rural living and rural lives with superior health/healing capacities
in their respective works.
Green Space as a Psychological Resource
The central question of my study asks, What is healing about green spaces? The
tenets of environmental psychology, or ecopsychology, a theory I discuss in depth in
Chapter Two, provide a starting place in my search for an answer. The Power of Place
by Winifred Gallagher and The Experience of Place by Tony Hiss both look at how place
affects well-being, and the importance of understanding the effects of environment on
human behaviour. Gallagher in particular looks at the apparent resistance to
acknowledging this relationship: “Like those of other living things, our structure,
development, and behaviour rise from a genetic foundation sunk in an environmental
context. Yet while we readily accept that a healthy seed can’t grow into a plant without
the right soil, light, and water, and that a feral dog won’t behave like a pet, we resist
recognizing the importance of environment in our own lives” (16). My primary texts do
not resist this recognition but instead intrinsically acknowledge the importance of nature
as a natural part of the girls’ lives.
Using narrative to impart ideas such as the importance of environment is a tactic
used by Hiss; he uses anecdotal detail to support the idea that “the places where we spend
our time affect the people we are and can become” (xi). He is particularly concerned
with the ramifications of rapidly altering landscapes, a feature of late twentieth- and
twenty-first-century living. In my key texts, the natural world is unthreatened, which
perhaps points to a definition of utopia. I discuss the prevalence of utopian landscapes
15
and nostalgia in children’s fiction, and take a closer look at the ideologies beneath
nostalgia, in Chapter Four.
Writing from a contemporary and literal perspective, Colin Ward works to debunk the
myth of “nostalgia-ridden rural mythology” concerning children who are raised in rural
areas (7). In The Child in the Country, he documents the advantages and disadvantages
of both rural and urban upbringings in the twentieth century. Burnett, Fisher, and
Montgomery valorize rural experience in their respective works. Ward explains the roots
of some of the mythic traditions these authors are writing in, with particular emphasis on
the Romantics.
Gill Valentine likewise addresses the rhetoric surrounding contemporary children and
the environment in Public Space and the Culture of Childhood. She examines the adult
language of fear and crisis that permeates the environment and outdoor play. Carolyn
Sigler parallels Valentine’s point, but from a literature standpoint in Wonderland to
Wasteland: Toward Historicizing Environmental Activism in Children’s Literature,
noting that now “even isolated wonderlands and secret gardens are endangered” (150).
Valentine extends the idea that even seemingly idyllic experiences are no longer available
to children living in rural places by pointing out that “contemporary rural children, like
their urban counterparts, also have less opportunity to explore their local environment
than previous generations” (72).
Valentine defends the importance of children experiencing the natural environment,
and in a section titled “Battery-Reared Children,” she states that “independent outdoor
play in public space is a vital means through which children develop physically, mentally
and socially” (80). Environmental psychologists Andrea Faber Taylor, Frances E. Kuo,
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and William C. Sullivan believe that even green views can provide significant
psychological benefits to children, as documented in “Views of Nature and Self-
Discipline: Evidence from Inner City Children” (49). But not all researchers share this
outlook. Owain Jones wrote “Naturally Not! Childhood, the Urban and Romanticism” in
defence of the possibility of healthy urban childhoods. He argues that “notions of
childhood and notions of the urban are largely unacknowledged and unexamined. These
disjunctures are to do with romantic inheritances that see childhood as a state of
naturalness and innocence, and the urban as a cultural (often corrupted) edifice which has
moved away from nature” (17). He addresses the impact that Romantic and children’s
literature has had in perpetuating the myth of innocence in nature, and offers suggestions
for moving past limiting perceptions: “our countryside is repeatedly shown to be a
cultural creation, just as much as the urban is … their strengths and weaknesses as
childhood spaces need to be assessed relationally and contingently” (28).
The Necessity of Firsthand Experience
Considering the argument from both sides, what is it about rural environments that
allows the protagonists in my primary texts their transformations? Much research exists
on the calming effect of nature, and there is much qualitative, anecdotal evidence that
points to the peace of mind that green spaces inspire. But there is more to the
transformations in my key texts than the girls simply coming into contact with nature. I
argue that the protagonists become healthy and at ease with themselves because of the
type of experiences granted them in rural settings. Richard Louv, Stephen R. Kellert, and
Edward S. Reed each write passionately about the importance of direct contact with
nature in childhood. In “Experiencing Nature: Affective, Cognitive, and Evaluative
17
Development in Children,” Kellert notes there are now “unprecedented technologies for
representing nature through the mass media … evidence suggests a concurrent decline in
children’s direct experience of healthy and abundant natural systems” (120). Not only
are contemporary children learning about nature in terms of crisis, as suggested by Sigler,
but their chances for firsthand exposure to green spaces are endangered.
Kellert goes on to say that as second-hand knowledge of nature takes precedence,
“[a] worrisome feature of contemporary society is that many children increasingly
experience nature through the imagined and exotic rather than through the actual and
local” (128). Louv similarly believes that “[t]oday, kids are aware of the global threats to
the environment – but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading” (1).
The effects of detachment from nature are established early in my key texts, serving as a
reference point for the state of dis-ease the girls must each recover from. Most important
to my study is Kellert’s assertion that the “functional benefits stemming from [close
contact and immersion in nature] include inclinations for exploration, discovery,
curiosity, inquisitiveness, and imagination, enhanced self-confidence and self-esteem by
demonstrating competence and adaptability in nature, and greater calm and coping
capacities through heightened temporal awareness and spatial involvement” (emphasis
added, 131).
Louv is largely concerned with behavioural disorders such as Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which he feels are on the rise in contemporary society
due to detachment from nature in childhood. Conditions such as this are thought to
derive from over-stimulation, yet Kellert observes that “the natural world is the most
information-rich environment people will ever encounter” (123). So what is it about
18
green spaces that reduces mental overload, that calms and soothes? I give this answer
much consideration in Chapter Four of my thesis.
My key texts elucidate beliefs and concerns about children’s contact with the natural
world that are emerging increasingly in the forefront of environmental and developmental
psychology today. Just as Louv and Kellert explore the ramifications of a de-natured
childhood, Burnett, Fisher, and Montgomery use fiction to do the same. These early
twentieth-century authors were writing at a time when “the child’s direct experience of
nature [was] viewed as largely unplanned rather than formally organized into structured
programs and activities” (Kellert 119). Reed distinguishes between the quality of
experiences in his treatise, The Necessity of Experience.
Authors such as Louv and Gary Nabhan discuss the importance of nature-based
experience in childhood, but Reed discusses the need for both adults and children to
experience the world firsthand, giving no special attention to green space. He is
concerned more with the human need for experience and the lack of opportunities for this
experience in contemporary schools and workplaces. He believes the current focus on
technology and philosophy results in detachment from the literal world. This
detachment, which he calls the “degradation of opportunities for primary experience,”
can result in an inadequate understanding and perception of the world, which in turn
affects relationships and overall health (5). By his definition, “[e]xperience … is a search
for meanings in order to find and use the goods of the earth and the social world around
us” (126). He sees lack of experience as a Western ailment, noting that in traditional,
rural cultures, children learn by doing; Western schools lack the balance between first-
and second-hand experience (127-28). All three girls in my primary texts are educated
19
and attend school, but suffer an almost total lack of firsthand experience in their urban
lives. It is not until they are each relocated to the countryside that they begin to develop
skills from hands-on learning. Though products of fiction, and of a prior era, these
protagonists seem to illustrate perfectly the ideologies concerning health and experience
as voiced by Louv, Kellert, and Reed.
Nicholas Tucker bridges the literary and the literal in his essay, “Good Friends, or
Just Acquaintances? The Relationship between Child Psychology and Children’s
Literature.” His support of interdisciplinary approaches to research is pivotal to my
study:
Psychology is a far more normative study than those who argue for its purely
scientific status are prepared to admit. Both it and children’s literature will go on
evolving, setting new norms in time and continuing to have a two-way influence
upon each other. For while psychologists are now quite good at painting the
wider picture of different developmental processes, individual psychological
portraits have always been best created by novelists. (173)
Drawing on Rousseau’s belief, and in consequence, the Romantics’ belief, in primary
experience, he points out that the children in children’s literature [largely early-mid
twentieth century] “are rarely shown doing any reading. They are too occupied instead
learning at first hand from Mother Nature” (158). Burnett, Fisher and Montgomery are
undoubtedly writing in this tradition. But their girls are not replicas of Rousseau’s
Sophie. They learn by doing, and not just by doing domestic, indoor tasks. Tucker notes,
“[F]or whatever reasons, the image of the child always learning best from or in the
presence of nature remains an important literary ideal right up to our own times” (159).
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Does lack of first hand experience cause illness, or the state of being ill-at-ease with
oneself and with the world? Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, in tracking the
influence of the natural world on children’s development and their future connection to
nature in The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places, find that adults’
recollections of books they read as children often have the same effect on memory as
time spent in wild places. This suggests there is something about land and literature
experienced in childhood that changes and forms us.
Illness and Metaphor
Millicent Lenz’s overview of children’s texts that engage with the human/earth
relationship, “Am I My Planet’s Keeper? Dante, Ecosophy, and Children’s Books,” is a
wide-ranging essay that introduces topics like ecofeminism, anthropocentrism, and deep
ecology, all mentioned later in my study. Of the power of image and metaphor in
children’s environmental literature, Lenz writes, “Since traditionally children’s books
tend toward the hopeful rather than apocalyptic, I have selected books that express a
variety of responses to the environment, and I … approach their images as … metaphors
that generate certain attitudes” (160). She believes “ it is imperative that we become
aware of the impact of the metaphors of nature presented to young readers and of how
these metaphors are likely to shape ecological realities in the future” (160).
The power of metaphor in influencing attitudes is at the core of Susan Sontag’s
Illness as Metaphor. She examines the ways in which language surrounding disease
influences perceptions of the ill. Writing specifically of tuberculosis, cancer, and AIDS,
she says, “it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill
unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped” (4). Sontag
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makes the connection that attitudes toward the ill are evidence of larger cultural
discomforts:
Our views about cancer, and the metaphors we have imposed on it, are so much a
vehicle for the large insufficiencies of this culture: for our shallow attitude toward
death, for our anxieties about feeling, for our reckless improvident responses to
our real “problems of growth,” for our inability to construct an advanced
industrial society that properly regulates consumption, and for our justified fears
of the increasingly violent course of history. (87)
In my study, I differentiate between disease and dis-ease (defined in Chapter Three), or
the state of being ill at ease. I argue that as evident in my primary texts, dis-ease brought
on by lifestyle and environment is as disabling to all three protagonists as would be
disease. John J. McDermott’s philosophical essay, “Ill-at-Ease: The Natural Travail of
Ontological Disconnectedness,” addresses this difference explicitly: “Alice James knew
the difference between ill-at-ease and dis-ease. For her, to be ill-at-ease was far more
painful to her person than to be racked with a dis-ease afflicting her body” (10).
In Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for
Girls, Lois Keith explores disability as opposed to illness in popular children’s stories.
As Sontag does with illness, Keith seeks to dispel the myths surrounding aspects of
disability, particularly the nostalgia of “miracle cures” (95). And like Sontag, she is
interested in examining the language that pervades depictions of disability, and the
ramifications of this language. She questions the trend in Victorian children’s literature
to first cripple and then heal girls, noting that the trope is often used as a teaching tool to
cure them of independence and high spirits. Written just after the Victorian period, the
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primary texts of my study involve three protagonists who gain independence and high
spirits, who become stronger by their stories’ ends and are not tamed by illness. Keith
writes that “illness and the eventual cure of the disabled child are not recognised as
significant issues in themselves but as the metaphorical equivalent of sadness,
powerlessness and dependency” (97). The transformations from sickness to health in my
key texts work against this trend. The girls gain health and confidence not because of
caregivers or medicine; I argue it is their individual connections to green space that heal
them.
Much of my research has revealed a surprising resistance to social and literary norms
on the part of Montgomery, Fisher and Burnett in their creation of Jane, Betsy, and Mary,
respectively. The authors were writing in an era whose traditions, socially and in
literature, were uncomfortably close to the repressive Victorian period. But all three of
them constructed ultimately strong female characters at a time when “the brand of
patriarchy typical of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England actually
promoted female sickness as a goal, surrounding women with ‘images of disease,
traditions of disease and invitations to both disease and to dis-ease,’” as pointed out by
Kimberley Reynolds in Girls Only? Gender and Popular Fiction in Britain, 1880-1910
(95), who draws on Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic (57).
The authors were not alone in their resistance to mainstream schools of thought
about female health and body image. In Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful:
Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women 1800-1870, Jan Todd documents the
esoteric culture of Victorian female body-building. She shows where Rousseau and his
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beliefs concerning women and exercise played a key part in influencing attitudes of later
generations:
Where Emile’s physical training was expected to instil the desirable attributes of
strength, autonomy, and independent thinking, Sophie exercised because it
enhanced her physical appeal to Emile. The more attractive women were,
Rousseau reasoned, the more men would wish to mate with them, and the stronger
the family would be. (12)
Through their fiction, Burnett, Fisher, and Montgomery show that embracing a physical
life instils in their girls the attributes reserved only for males at the time. Rousseau’s
contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, said “the women she most admired, those who in
her circle of acquaintances acted like rational creatures and showed vigor of intellect,
‘have been allowed to run wild’ as children” (15). Location is assumed in
Wollstonecraft’s statement: children need wild places in which to run wild. In my
primary works, I study the ways in which green space enables Mary, Betsy, and Jane to
develop both physically and in self-confidence.
Todd reports that a century after Wollstonecraft’s time, “[reformer-physician
Dioclesian] Lewis changed forever the basic dialogue concerning women’s bodies.
Rather than encouraging women to view their physical ideal as small, frail, slightly ill,
and painfully weak, Lewis championed health, vigor, and substance” (274). As he was
writing in the 1860s, and Victorian attitudes towards women’s bodies and health
prevailed in fiction for some time after, I would argue that Todd over-credits Lewis’
success in shaping cultural attitudes, however much he may have helped the cause.
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At the time Lewis was writing, Romanticism was at the height of its influence in
England. In Louise Chawla’s interdisciplinary study, “Spots of Time: Manifold Ways of
Being in Nature in Childhood,” she makes invaluable links between literature and the
natural world, illuminating the Romantic belief that “our connection with the natural
world depends on how we inhabit our bodies in the world” (221). When Chawla’s essay
is paired with McDermott’s work on being ill-at-ease with the human condition, the
relationship between humans and the natural world becomes more complicated to define.
He points to nature as a source of dis-ease in that it is terrifying, unpredictable, and
indifferent, but acknowledges Edward O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia, defined as a love
of living things, as a remedy for dis-ease. “We are both fed and destroyed by nature”
(23), McDermott states in his struggle to come to terms with the “Janus face” of nature
(17). He does not state the connection explicitly, but he does suggest there is a link
between human activity contributing to the degradation of nature and the subsequent
illnesses, both metaphysical and physical, that result.
All three theories I work with and elucidate in Chapter Two of my study –
ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and ecopsychology – have at their cores many of the
questions and musings McDermott raises in his essay. The primary texts I work with
appear to portray relatively uncomplicated depictions of the human/nature relationship.
In applying my three theories, and in regarding these texts of the past from a
contemporary perspective, I offer a more substantive discussion than has previously been
attempted.
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Children and the Environment
In my primary texts, direct experience with the land puts the girls at ease with
themselves, and with others. Peter H. Kahn, in The Human Relationship with Nature
asks, “Do children have a deep connection to the natural world, which in time gets
largely severed by modern society?” (1). This query brings up a question specific to my
key texts: Do the girls in my primary texts reach their natural states of being by the end of
their stories? Or do they become the best versions of themselves? How does their
contact with green space change them in ways that urban living cannot? Kahn, like
others I draw from in my study, acknowledges that the human relationship with nature is
an interdisciplinary topic. He applies the concept of “the machine in the garden” to literal
explorations of humans and the environment, focussing largely on childhood
development.
Kahn also uses Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis as a theoretical framework, but recasts
it to “take development and culture seriously” (3), rather than the more generalized idea
that all humans have an affinity for living things. Unlike some of the researchers I draw
from (for example, Owain Jones and Jane Jacobs), Kahn argues “that nature is not a mere
cultural convention or artifact, as some postmodernists maintain, but part of a physical
and biological reality that bounds children’s cognition” (7). He furthers his discussion of
children and nature in his essay, “Children’s Affiliations with Nature: Structure,
Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia.” His proposal
that “we all take the natural environment we encounter during childhood as the norm
against which we measure environmental degradation later in our lives” (106) is integral
to my study. I believe that fiction from the past such as The Secret Garden, Jane of
26
Lantern Hill, and Understood Betsy serves as a reference point for a way life that no
longer exists. Even if the environments in these books are fictional and idealized, they
serve as a reflection not just of human desires but also of attitudes toward landscapes that
have changed.
Contemporary trends in fiction lean toward dystopian themes rather than the more
utopian ideals that were popular in prior centuries. Monica Hughes’ The Refuge is an
ideal example of this trend: she takes Burnett’s The Secret Garden and “relocates it in
that paradigmatic modern wasteland, the industrial park” (Wallace 77). The protagonists
in my primary texts initially live in urban or foreign worlds free from environmental
problems, yet they suffer poor health. Not until they are relocated to rural spaces do they
experience recovery.
Kahn advocates firsthand experience as a way of understanding environment and
environmental problems, and says that “we are biological beings with an evolutionary
history … any account of children’s affiliation with nature needs to build from this
perspective” (“Affiliations” 104). He does not take into account any differentiation in
experience based on gender. But the longstanding association of females with nature in
literature warrants examination in my study. In The Role of Place in Literature, Leonard
Lutwack comments, “It is no accident that emphasis on place begins to assume real
importance in fiction when the plight of a female character is the subject” (109). I
address the question of why females and nature are so connected when I look at the
ecofeminism in Chapter Two of my study. Lutwack makes no mention of children’s
literature, but his discussion of the function and effects of landscape on characters,
particularly the male/female differences, is central to my thesis: in all three of my
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primary texts, the “plight” is that the girls are ill-at-ease/dis-eased, and it is a specific
change of environment that brings them back to health, defined here as a confidence in
self. Seth Lerer also acknowledges the effects of landscape on gender, with particular
reference to children’s literature, claiming that “the garden is a space that defines boys
and girls as different” (248).
Gardens serve, among other things, as microcosms of how people interact with the
larger natural world. They are places to learn stewardship, sustainability, and balance.
And just as global green space is being degraded, so, too, are garden spaces. In
“Childhood’s Garden: Memory and Meaning of Gardens,” Mark Francis notes that
“many unstructured or wild areas have been systematically removed from suburban and
urban places, including home gardens” (3). The effects of domination over the land are
not just visible in once-pristine areas but have also infiltrated cultural productivity, as
reflected in garden spaces. As Patrick Imbert points out in “The Garden and Its Multiple
Contexts in Canada, the United States, and Latin America,” gardening becomes a
metaphor for “reactivation of the biblical narrative that claims that Man was made of and
from the earth” (52). While on one hand this metaphor grants the human/nature
connection and symbiosis, it also implies a right to domination by possession.
The act of gardening plays a focal role in The Secret Garden and Jane of Lantern
Hill, and the gardens of both texts are portrayed as healing spaces. In their essay, “What
Makes a Healing Garden?”, Ulrika A. Stigsdotter and Patrick Grahn ask, “Is it possible
for a garden to be anything else than healing? Is not the aspect of healing woven into the
very concept of garden?” (60). Philosophical and speculative, the piece outlines theories
and definitions surrounding healing gardens and horticultural therapy, as well as garden
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design. Their findings link back to views held by Louv, Kellert, and Reed: “The health
effects are due to the fact that the garden or the wild nature with its shapes, colors, odors,
etc., plus the activities that can be carried out there, can restore a person to a more
positive view of himself and his capacities” (63). The opportunity for direct experience
with nature in a garden environment is also valued by Francis, who writes, “when
children become involved as gardeners or farmers rather than as passive observers of
gardens, a deeper significance and meaning is established” (8). According to these
researchers, the connection between interaction with living things and natural rhythms is
key to both personal and social health. Many seem to agree with Francis that a
disconnection from nature in childhood “may mean a missed experience of place that
may affect their environmental and spatial values as [the children] become older” (11).
In The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective, Rachel Kaplan and Stephen
Kaplan support this stance explicitly:
As psychologists we have heard little about gardens, about foliage, about forests
and farmland … Perhaps it is time to recognize this resource officially for what it
is, time for governments and mental health professionals and economists to
acknowledge what others may have already figured out … Perhaps this resource
for enhancing health, happiness, and wholeness has been neglected long enough.
(198)
Children’s Literature and the Environment
In “The Girl in the Garden: Variations on a Feminine Pastoral,” Gwyneth Evans
discusses The Secret Garden in conjunction with Hughes’ contemporary retelling, The
Refuge. By pairing the two novels, written nearly 80 years apart, Evans finds that “what
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happens to the image of the secret garden in the later twentieth century suggests both the
nature of this distinctively feminine pastoral form and the ways it has responded to social
change” (20). Her analysis illuminates “the value and importance of the garden, in terms
of the psychological development of the young girl who creates and shelters in it and in
terms of society’s need for and responsibility to Nature” (20). Explicit environmental
messages are generally regarded as a feature of contemporary children’s literature, but as
Sigler documents in “Wonderland to Wasteland”, while
many Victorian and early-twentieth-century children’s writers continued to
develop the radicalized or activist view of nature … in response to growing
threats to and separation from nonhuman nature, … another response to
industrialization can also be seen in the tendency of Victorian fantasy to return to
the conventional pastoral tradition of escape into an idealized, removed setting,
remote from both human and nonhuman concerns. (150)
So while the fiction produced by Burnett, Fisher, and Montgomery does not appear to
contain green messages that coincide with contemporary issues surrounding the
environment, it is likely these authors were responding to more than a desire for pleasant
fiction.
The Victorians’ complicated relationship to the natural world is clarified by Suzanne
Rahn in “Green Worlds for Children”: “Awakened by Romanticism to nature as a source
of poetic and spiritual inspiration, they lived at a time when exploration and scientific
discovery were opening up new realms of nature on an unprecedented scale” (2-3). She
goes on to note that “[t]his intense interest in nature, however, was often bound up with a
desire to control it, or even exert dominance over it” (3). Interestingly, Rahn illustrates
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how the popular adventure stories for boys of the time reflect this penchant for
domination, but how they were followed by books like The Secret Garden, “in which the
protagonist, [Mary], lived close to nature and in harmony with it” (5). Rahn and Sigler
both open an unexpected window into the early environmentalism apparent in Victorian
children’s literature, and they elucidate the progression towards current trends in
literature for children.
Lisa Lebduska builds on the discussions posited by Rahn and Sigler in “Rethinking
Human Needs: Seuss’s The Lorax.” She takes a thoughtful look at the place of
environmentalism in children’s literature from the 1970s onwards. Like Lenz and Sigler,
she extends the borders of her discussion to encompass politics, philosophy, and
consumerism. Especially relevant to my study as a contemporary reference point is her
critique of “[e]nvironmental extravaganzas [such as “fund-raising events to save whales
or rainforests”] that organize nature into spectacle and divorce it from daily lived
experience. Nature becomes a vacation, environmentalism a momentary event or a
product whose purchase Saves the Planet” (172). I position the green space in my
primary texts as natural to the lives of the protagonists, and intrinsic to their
transformations from illness to wellness. No nature lessons are needed.
My research and analysis of transformation narratives and the environment point to
two major findings: that humans need nature to both survive and to thrive, and that there
is a link between poor human health, degraded environmental health, and our waning link
to the natural world, both fictional and real.
I have found that most current criticism of pastoral children’s stories from the past
analyses issues of race, gender, and class from a postcolonial perspective. There is little
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critical discourse on the environment in these critical works. Recent discussions of
setting in contemporary children’s literature centre on current environmental crises,
which positions the environment as under threat. Such a position emphasizes the
detachment of contemporary human life from the natural world.
I propose that there is value for contemporary readers in engaging with texts from the
past – texts that promote a harmonious relationship with the natural world. I aim to use
environmental theories and perspectives that encourage real-world application. Drawing
from both literary and literal theories, I form in the chapters ahead an interdisciplinary
argument that supports critical discussion of past landscapes from a contemporary
perspective. In examining the context in which Edwardian pastoral children’s literature
was written, and in applying theories of psychology, ecology, environmental theory, and
literary theory to validate the necessity of these texts’ long-term survival, the link
between land and health is illuminated.
At the core of my argument are reasons why these books still matter, and will
always matter. My intention is to encourage the survival of these texts from the past in
contemporary homes, libraries, and classrooms.
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CHAPTER TWO: THEORY AND METHODS
Ecocritical scholar Cheryl Lousley believes that “[e]cocritical analysis should attend
not only to representations of nature or environment, but, more fundamentally, to how
characters, narrators, and readers are positioned as knowing or not knowing the
environments they inhabit and produce” (13). As I examine literature that incorporates
green space as a point of renewal and resolution, ecocriticism is a natural theoretical
framework for my study. I use the theory to answer questions that engage specifically
with how a close relationship with the natural world is associated with positive growth
and development in girls on the cusp of adolescence. Ecocriticism strives for a practical
application that sets it apart from other literary theories, making it a near-ideal theory to
apply to a study that attempts to bridge the literary and the literal.
In Practical Ecocriticism, a book that reviewer Michelle Scalise Sugiyama describes
as having “one foot in ecology and one foot in literature” (4), Glen Love writes,
“Literature loves interrelationships” (47). I find that the researchers with the most
impact in their fields are the ones who engage in exploring interrelationships – that, is,
they are able to bridge disciplines and to extend and cross borders effectively: Rachel
Carson (biology and literature); Ralph Metzner (psychology, mythology, and ecology);
Theodore Roszak (psychology, ecology, and history); Lawrence Buell (literature and
ecology). Inspired by these thinkers, I have chosen to analyse my primary texts from an
interdisciplinary perspective, using ecocriticism as my critical framework, and drawing
from the related fields of ecofeminist literary theory and ecopsychology to supplement
my analysis. All three theories are considered interdisciplinary in nature.
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Cheryll Glotfelty asks, “What cross-fertilization is possible between literary studies
and environmental discourse in related disciplines such as history, philosophy,
psychology, art history, and ethics?’ (xix). Jonathan Levin extends this question in
considering what can be achieved by crossing literary studies with “resources associated
with natural history, earth sciences, and even new scientific fields like complex systems
theory, ethology, and cognitive science” (qtd. in Heise 7). These are important questions
in analyzing the effectiveness and fortitude of an emerging theory. The possibilities of
ecocriticism appear vast and diverse, qualities that can be regarded as both strengths and
a source of weakness as they suggest the lack of a coherent centre. The stance I take in
my study draws from a general sense of the science of ecology – the recognition of
interdependencies – and focuses on ecocriticism’s potential to illuminate cultural
attitudes embedded in texts, and to shift attitudes toward the environment by highlighting
our reliance on the natural world.
Lawrence Buell observes in his ecocritical work The Environmental Imagination,
“We live our lives by metaphors” (3). In my study, I look at the power of language and
representation in shaping cultural attitudes. Specifically, I am interested in examining
how nature is positioned in my primary texts and what this position reveals about cultural
values. I agree with Love in his statement that the “most important function of literature
today is to redirect human consciousness to full consideration of its place in a threatened
world” (“Revaluing” 237). And so the function of ecocriticism from this view is to
“analyse critically the tropes brought into play in environmental debate, and, more
tentatively, to predict which will have a desired effect on a specific audience at a given
historical juncture” (Garrard 14). Glotfelty asks as a way of defining the emerging
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literary theory, “How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it?” (xix).
For my part, questions surrounding metaphors are repeated throughout my research, and I
draw from William Howarth’s summation of the function of ecocriticism: “Ecocriticism
seeks to examine how metaphors of nature and land are used and abused” (81).
Ecocriticism has been used largely in the past to address environmental issues in
explicit nature writing such as that of Rachel Carson and Henry David Thoreau. In recent
years, ecocriticism has been applied to a wider range of writing, including children’s
literature. I am using it to look at transformations that take place within an idealized rural
setting during the early twentieth century to construct an analysis that connects a healthy
body and mind with a healthy earth, as well as to build a comparison between past and
contemporary landscapes in literature. Ecocriticism looks not simply at how characters
interact with setting, but at how a society’s understanding of, and consequently, attitudes
toward, the environment are reflected in literature. The idyllic spaces in my three
primary texts are not necessarily entirely accurate representations of landscapes, but I
believe they do reflect a social attitude toward the environment in the early twentieth
century. In contrast, the environmental crises at the heart of much contemporary
literature reflect current perceptions of the environment.
The interdisciplinary nature of ecocriticism allows for a flexibility and flow of ideas
not possible in more fixed theories: its critical strength is due in part to the fact that “it
has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates
between the human and nonhuman” (Glotfelty xix). The potential of ecocriticism to
move between the real and the theoretical brings its subject matter an immediacy that is
becoming increasingly relevant from an environmental perspective. In applying this
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relatively recent theory to my study of early twentieth-century fiction, I hope to bridge
the gap between representations of the natural world from the past with contemporary
understandings of and attitudes toward the environment.
Extending the literary into the literal is one of the central challenges and opportunities
posed by ecocriticism:
Ecocriticism is unique amongst contemporary literary and cultural theories
because of its close relationship with the science of ecology. Ecocritics may not
be qualified to contribute to debates about problems in ecology, but they must
nevertheless transgress disciplinary boundaries and develop their own ‘ecological
literacy’ as far as possible. (Garrard 5)
Love argues that much modern literary theory is inaccessible in its deliberate obtuseness;
it is designed for the enlightenment of a few and not intended for practical application by
the many. He believes that “recognizing the primacy of nature, and the necessity for a
new ethic and aesthetic embracing the human and the natural [is] our best hope of
recovering the lost social role of literary criticism” (“Revaluing” 238). This is why I
chose Love and Glotfelty as my key ecocritics: they ground their philosophies in the real
world while maintaining the theoretical rigour needed to engage with the larger academic
world, and they stay focussed on the central issue: human regard for nature. David Orr
provides an ideal example of this regard in “Political Economy and the Ecology of
Childhood”:
The important fact is not simply the effects of materialism but the more complex
effects of the worldview conveyed in relentless advertising that hawks the
message of instant gratification in a world of endless abundance. Whatever its
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other effects on the child, nature in a culture so lived can only recede in
importance. Time once spent doing farm chores, exploring nearby places,
fishing, or simply playing in a vacant lot has been replaced by the desire to
possess or to experience some bought thing (emphasis added, 228).
As technological culture continues to take precedence, nature’s place within the new
scheme is further marginalized. In contrast, nature plays a central role in my primary
texts, and is of vital importance to characters’ lives. As ecocriticism is concerned with
cultural production, applying the theory to texts in which nature exists centrally is one
way of understanding this shift in the contemporary natural world’s role from integral to
marginal.
David Mazel’s definition of ecocriticism is appealing in its simplicity: “the study
of literature as if the environment mattered” (1). In A Century of Early Ecocriticism, he
explains how ecocriticism is a direct product of environmentalism, and how it differs
from other landscape studies, which are concerned with social rather than ecological
consequences. In “The Postnatural Novel: Toxic Consciousness in Fiction in the 1980s”
Cynthia Deitering documents how “[f]iction of the 1980s, in its sustained and various
representations of pollution, offers insight into a culture’s shifting relation to nature and
to the environment at a time when the imminence of ecological collapse was, and is, part
of the public mind and of individual imaginations” (196). This insight begs the question,
Does the fiction of every era offer this insight? Considering contemporary depictions of
nature in fiction, and through investigating the historical context of my primary novels,
my analysis points to the affirmative.
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Ecocriticism as a literary theory is new, but its roots are Romantic, which is a
tradition Burnett, Fisher and Montgomery were either working in or drawing from. As
England shifted from an agricultural society to an industrial culture, treatment of
landscape in literature likewise shifted. Louise Westling explains that “British
ecocriticism … emerged from within an older literary tradition concerned with long-
domesticated and densely populated landscapes and, for the past 200 years, with the
problems of industrialization and urban space” (3). Howarth offers the American
perspective: “most of [America’s] early myths (frontier, virgin land, garden) derived
from the imperious natural science that drove European exploration and settlement across
the New World” (75). Taken together, “[t]hese contexts create very important theoretical
differences between British and American ecocriticism”(3). As The Secret Garden is set
in England and was written by a British-born author who later lived in America, and
Understood Betsy and Jane of Lantern Hill are North American works, understanding the
inception of ecocriticism on both continents helps shed light on attitudes toward the
natural world in older works such my primary texts. In Chapter Four of my study, I draw
from Leo Marx and Raymond Williams to further discuss the differences in American
and British forms of ecocriticism.
Susan Fenimore Cooper is counted among the early ecocritical writers, as she
wrote about the environment as if it mattered, under Mazel’s creed. In Rural Hours, she
recounts an area’s history from the perspective of nature1, effectively situating “human
history under the gaze of the pines in order to redefine it as accountable to natural history
1 This biocentic perspective aligns with the principles of deep ecology, a philosophical branch of radical
environmentalism. As defined by Greg Garrard, deep ecology promotes the “shift from a human-centred to
a nature-centred system of values” (21). Conversely, ‘shallow ecology’ focuses on anthropocentric
environmental concerns such pollution and resource depletion.
38
as a higher authority than its own parochial institutions” (Buell 265). So often, “Nature is
only valued in terms of its usefulness to us. Many environmentalists argue that we need
to develop a value system which takes the intrinsic or inherent value of nature as its
starting point” (Garrard 18).
Positioning a stance within ecocriticism requires broaching a question central to
the theory: Are people part of nature, or apart from it? The first of the secondary theories
I work with, ecopsychology, addresses this question explicitly: “Ecopsychology is a
psychological undertaking that essentially says ‘we too are nature’” (Fisher 7). Ralph
Metzner, who prefers the term green psychology, observes that most theories of
psychology exist as though “in a vacuum or a space capsule” (2). He notes that the
people who have begun to remedy this imbalance are not psychologists but ecologists,
historians, theologians, and philosophers (2). As my study is concerned with the role of
green space in both the psychological and physical transformations of the protagonists in
my primary texts, the interdisciplinary nature of ecopsychology strengthens my
argument. As with ecocriticism and ecofeminism, ecopsychology combines tenets of
ecology with other theories. In Radical Ecopsychology, Andy Fisher defines the nature
of this hybrid theory in stating, “Ecologists study nature, while psychologists study
human nature. Assuming these natures overlap, psychology already has obvious
potential links to ecology” (4). This is an assumption that is only beginning to be
explored.
Ecopsychology attempts to unravel the connection between social ills and
psychological illness. In “Nature and Madness,” Paul Shepard explores the self-
destructive, and consequently earth-destructive, tendencies that have evolved over the
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course of human history, and why these tendencies are difficult to remedy: “Something
collective seems to block the corrective will, not simply private cupidity or political
inertia. Could it be an inadequate philosophy or value system?” (23). He cannot provide
an answer as to why the human race has increasingly severed its harmony with the
natural world, but speculates that the reason is “irrational and unconscious, a kind of
failure in some fundamental dimension of human existence, an irrationality beyond
mistakenness, a kind of madness” (24). The result of this failure is illness and its rippling
effects: as a society becomes ill, so follows the natural world, and vice versa.
In “The Ecopsychology of Child Development,” Anita Barrows looks at why
mainstream psychology has historically ignored the resources for healing and wholeness
found in nature. Drawing on Theodore Roszak, she observes that “[t]he psychological
theories that frame our late-twentieth-century grasp of the human condition were evolved
… in urban settings by urban theorists” (102). Kahn’s hypothesis of generational
amnesia can be applied here: the reference points for rural life had faded, or were fading,
at the time the major theories used in contemporary psychology were being developed, a
fact that makes ecopsychology and ecocriticism a potent theoretical combination when
being applied to literature from the past.
Robert Kern states that “ecocriticism becomes most interesting and useful …
when it aims to recover the environmental character or orientation of works whose
conscious or foregrounded interests lie elsewhere” (qtd. in Heise 8). As Leavis and
Thomson argue in “The Organic Community,” “we have to consider the fact that the
organic community has gone; it has so nearly disappeared from memory that to make
anyone, however educated, realize what it was is commonly a difficult undertaking” (73).
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To my mind, the key function of applying new theories such as ecocriticism and
ecopsychology to texts from the past is to highlight and decode the role of these
narratives in providing an environmental reference point: “[The organic community]’s
destruction (in the West) is the most important fact of recent history – it is very recent
indeed. How did such a momentous change – this vast and terrifying disintegration –
take place in so short a time?” (Leavis and Thompson 73). Understanding the answer to
this question is arguably the central challenge of ecocriticism; understanding the
ramifications of this question to psychological health is likewise the challenge of
ecopsychology.
The final theory I apply to my study is ecofeminist literary criticism, a literary
offshoot of the larger political theory of ecofeminism. As I focus my thesis on the
relationship between female protagonists and green space, ecofeminist literary criticism
completes my theoretical framework as it centres on the relationship between women and
nature as depicted in literature. Whether people are part of, or apart from, nature is also a
central question of ecofeminism. Garrard writes that “in the dominant Euro-American
culture, humans are not only distinguished from nature, but opposed to it in ways that
make humans radically alienated from and superior to it” (25). Ecofeminism extends this
observation in a way that ecocriticism does not, or cannot, as its central concern is the
way in which gender affects differences in experience with landscape. Although he was
writing before the term was coined, Raymond Williams in The Country and the City,
defines the core of ecofeminism: “There is the separation of possession: the control of a
land and its prospects. But there is also a separation of spirit: a recognition of forces of
which we are part but which we may always forget, and which we must learn from, not
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seek to control” (127). Ecofeminist literary criticism works to identify locations of
domination over the natural world in literature, and to reconceptualize the dualistic
hierarchies that position culture above nature and male above female. The goal of
ecofeminism, as VanSickle notes, is “to integrate these concepts as complementary and
of equal value” (40).
Stephanie Leland theorizes that in “viewing ourselves as separate from nature,
through seeing the earth as Object and ourselves as Subject, the earth has also become
that which should be subdued, controlled, dominated” (70). In such a worldview, and in
terms of literature, nature becomes backdrop rather than an integral part of experience.
In “The Rape of the Well-Maidens: Feminist Psychology and the Environmental Crisis,”
Mary Gomes and Allan Kanner use the Arthurian story of the well-maidens to illustrate
how “the despoiling of the Earth and the subjugation of women are intimately connected”
(112). Because I focus on the relationship of female child protagonists to the natural
world, an ecofeminist perspective is especially useful in analyzing both the nature of the
green space and the nature of the transformations the girls experience within those
spaces. In linking psychologist Mary Pipher’s notions of contemporary “girl-poisoning
culture” (12) with the pollution of the earth, an ecofeminist critique as applied to pastoral
children’s literature from the early twentieth-century becomes an invaluable comparative
approach to my study.
The longstanding association of females with nature, which extends to the trope
of land as feminine, is a divisive issue in ecofeminism. As VanSickle notes, “whether or
not women should affirm or reject this perceived association” is an ongoing ideological
question (39). In citing Catherine Roach, Christine Cuomo points to the problem of
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“environmental theories which naturalize the relationships between women and nature”
(100). Children and nature are often naturalized in the same way, though without the
sexual politics of reproduction. The pairing of children with nature has its roots in
Rousseau’s concept of children, nature, and original innocence. But Rousseau placed
boys in nature; Fisher, Burnett, and Montgomery place their girls in nature. In my study,
I look at how female child protagonists, who do not yet possess the physical attributes of
adult sexuality, interact with the natural world. Where do female children stand in the
nature/woman dualism?
In “Naturalized Woman and Feminized Nature,” Kate Soper talks about women
and nature without using the term ecofeminism, but addresses “this coding of nature as
feminine -- which is deeply entrenched in Western thought, but has also been said by
anthropologists to be crosscultural and well-nigh universal …[that] lies in the double
association of women with reproductive activities and of these in turn with nature” (139).
Because the association of women with nature is generally thought to centre on fertility
and reproduction, the preadolescent status of the girls points to a potentially different
mode of analysis. Cuomo writes, “Women must be empowered with regard to their own
bodies, their role as creators of culture, about their role and power in sexuality, and about
their self-creation of identities other than as mother” (102). In their respective novels,
Burnett, Fisher and Montgomery create strong female characters who gain independence
and health as a result of their engagement with the natural world. Nature is not feminized
in these stories, and the girls are not limited by gender. The apparent lack of sexual
politics in these books makes the applications of ecofeminist theory particularly
interesting.
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The matching of children’s literature with all three of my theories – ecocriticism,
ecopsychology, and ecofeminism -- is a relatively new undertaking, and potentially a
potent one. It is possible that the inherent limitations in each of these critical fields can
be partway remedied by a partnership. These are young theories, interdisciplinary in
nature, with flexible, evolving parameters. William Rueckert asks, “[H]ow can we do
something more than recycle WORDS? Let experimental criticism address itself to this
dilemma” (121). Rueckert believes the experimental and fluid nature of ecocriticism
grants it the capacity to push past the limits that contain more established theories.
Flexibility is a feature of all three of my key theories. They each deal with land, but they
are liquid: they pool, permeate, are muddied, are clarified, freshen, flow through and
around. These theories are also practical and grounded in realism. In applying them to
children’s fiction from the past, I am essentially aiming to defend why these books still
matter in contemporary society. Nature is very central to many children’s books from the
past. Arguably, in today’s literature, nature is still as central, but the tone has shifted
from nature as an integral part of characters’ lives to nature as depicted in a state of crisis.
In focusing on theories that are involved with various forms of ecology, I hope to
illuminate the interdependence that exists between cultural attitudes and literary
representation.
Methodology
The three ecologically centred theories I draw from are complementary in both
their similarities and diversities. My decision to follow an interdisciplinary approach as a
means of extending discussion beyond the literary in my study models an approach
favoured by many of the researchers I encountered, such as Juliet Dusinberre, Leo Marx,
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and nearly all the theorists from the three theoretical fields. As I aim to connect the
phenomenon of transformations located in my primary texts with the healing effects of
green space in the literal world, I have intentionally sought out researchers who are
comfortable bridging one discipline with another. Accessing the literal in understanding
the literary, and vice versa, is not common practice in most literary theories, but in the
research and assessment of my three key theories, I have found that there is a growing
trend towards practical application of theory as a means of validating a real-world
context.
My own beliefs surrounding the shaping power of land and literature, which I
discuss in the introduction, are embedded in my choices of both primary texts and
theories. Undergraduate English studies familiarized me with the popular postcolonial
theories surrounding The Secret Garden, and children’s literature courses on classic
fiction inevitably covered the sexist and racist values inherent in this fiction. In this
study, I aim to highlight the aspects of these classic books -- namely the treatment of the
natural world -- that can be discussed alongside contemporary values without the
postcolonialist’s need to pardon the writers. Engaging with fiction from the past requires
an understanding of the era that produced these texts, and in the course of my research, I
have located a number of relevant overlaps between Edwardian fiction and the inception
of ecocriticism. Both the appeal and apparent falseness of the pastoral settings of my
primary texts provide a rich analysis for comparison with the more elegiac and crisis-
riddled contemporary environmental writing being produced, particularly through an
ecocritical lens.
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I offer comparative analysis of the three novels in each of the three chapters that
follow, and apply the three theories accordingly: in Chapter Three, I use ecocriticism to
identify the nature of the green space in the texts. In Chapter Four, I apply both
ecofeminism and ecopsychology to look at the nature of the illness in all three books, and
Chapter Five incorporates both ecofeminism and ecopsychology in my discussion of the
nature of the transformations in the three books. In discussing the well-known and
critically well-covered The Secret Garden alongside the lesser known Jane of Lantern
Hill and Understood Betsy, I hope to unearth parallels not previously discussed; through
close comparison and with the application of interdisciplinary theories, I hope to uncover
nuances in the transformation narratives that will validate their long-term survival.
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CHAPTER THREE: THE NATURE OF THE ILLNESS
The nature of the illness depicted in The Secret Garden, Understood Betsy, and
Jane of Lantern Hill is central to my argument for restorative environments. Sander
Gilman uses the concept of illness “to represent physical and mental states that are
understood in Western culture as pathological and ‘dangerous’ because of their life-
threatening, stability-threatening or chronic nature” (11). Gilman’s distinction between
illness and disease provides a foundation for my analysis:
‘Disease’ is the social construct that always provides the frame for an
understanding of ‘illness’. … What the cause of that illness is remains
unspecified. It may be somatic or psychosomatic or, as is usually the case, a
complex mixture of physical and psychic causes and/or symptoms. (12)
Drawing from this definition, I define illness as it relates to dis-ease, that is, being ill at
ease, in my analysis of sickness-to-health narratives. The parameters of my definition
include psychological symptoms as they relate to physical symptoms, which are
collectively linked to the larger world. The protagonists in all three novels in my study
begin their stories ill at ease, both with themselves and with their environments. In this
chapter I examine the possible connection between the manifestations of this dis-ease and
urban spaces.
In my primary texts, the state of being ill at ease affects the physical lives of all
three girls, who are each described at the beginning of their stories as thin, meek and/or
painfully awkward. When Mrs. Medlock first sees Mary, she [Mary] feels “as small and
lost and odd as she looked” (24). Likewise, Betsy is described as “nervous, self-absorbed,
unhealthy, and undeveloped” (Cummins 15), and Jane wonders “how any one so lovely
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as mother could have a daughter so plain and awkward as herself” (6). Gilman observes
that “[t]he dichotomy between the beautiful and the ugly seems to be inherent in all of the
cultural constructs of health and disease in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (54).
Montgomery, Burnett, and Fisher are clearly writing in this tradition as each girl is both
unwell and referred to as unattractive in some way at her story’s start: Jane “was rather
bony and awkward” (38); Mary had “a thin little face … and a sour expression” (3); and
at the beginning of Understood Betsy, Elizabeth Ann is described as being “neither very
strong nor very well. She was small for her age, with a rather pale face and big dark eyes
which had in them a frightened, wistful expression”(5).
For the purpose of my thesis, I argue that being ill at ease is arguably as
debilitating or disabling as other forms of illness as it affects not only how the
protagonists view themselves, but also their relationships with others. At her
grandmother’s house in the city, Jane is made to feel “silly and crude and always in the
wrong” (68). This near-constant negativity undermines her sense of self-worth, and
cripples her relationships with family and peers; more significantly, it colours the ways
she sees herself, because though she likes very few people, “she like[s] herself still less.
“What was the matter with her? [she asks herself]. Couldn’t she like anybody?” (56).
Mary suffers similar discomfort. Of the three protagonists, Mary is the most overtly
unwell in body, and this affects her way of interacting with others, earning her the
moniker “Mistress Mary Quite Contrary” (11). “People never like me and I never like
people,” she says to herself (38). Elizabeth Ann is too meek for any noteworthy
interactions, except that on her arrival at the Putney farm, Claudia Nelson notes the girl
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“is neurotic, helpless, and painfully timid” in her inability to communicate with the
family she has just met (64).
In What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of Classic Stories for Girls, 1850-1920,
Shirley Foster and Judy Simons discuss how psychologist Friedrich Froebel’s belief that
“a correlation between mind and body was necessary for healthy child development” is
embedded in The Secret Garden (174). But there is more to the connection: in all three
primary texts, the environment factors centrally in the correlation between land and
health. The binaries of urban/foreign and rural/natural, and illness and wellness, are
established early in all three key texts. All three protagonists grow up detached from
nature, and authors Burnett, Fisher, and Montgomery put considerable emphasis on the
unhealthy aspects of the non-rural environments in which each protagonist begins her
story.
In The Secret Garden, the rural/urban dichotomy is more politically charged in that
the opposite of Mary’s rural experience in England is India, which is relentlessly
positioned as different. Because of this perceived difference, Mary is at odds with India
(and initially with Yorkshire), and consequently, with herself: India is hot and humid, and
Mary never belongs there, nor does she seem at ease: “ Her hair was yellow, and her face
was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or
another” (3). However problematic the cultural assumptions are in this assertion,
Burnett’s beliefs in the connection between environment and health are inherent and
implacable.
In all three key novels, it is apparent that the writers share this philosophy. In
Understood Betsy, Fisher “makes no bones about her valorization of fresh air, rural
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landscapes, and nature, which she aligns with health, self-sufficiency, happiness,
freedom, and independence” (Cummins 15). Likewise, when Jane transitions from “the
urban hell of Toronto” to “heavenly P.E.I.,” the effect this move has upon her sense of
well-being is almost immediate (Sheckels 7). And when Jane returns to Toronto after a
summer on P.E.I., she feels her environment restricting her:
She ran to the window, opened it, and gazed out … but not on starry hills or the
moon shining on woodland fields. The clamour of Bloor Street assailed her ears.
The huge old trees about 60 Gay were sufficient unto themselves … they were not
her friendly birches and spruces. A wind was trying to blow … Jane felt sorry for
it … checked here, thwarted there. (146)
The effects of oppressive environments and the subsequent inability of these
environments to provide primary experience are central to Edward Reed’s belief that
there is something wrong with a society that “does little or nothing to help us explore the
world for ourselves” (original emphasis 3). In the books I have chosen, the girls are
almost entirely denied primary experience in their urban environments. Montgomery’s
narrator reports that“[i]t was so seldom [Jane] was allowed to walk anywhere alone … to
walk anywhere at all, indeed” (30). Jane craves the chance to move freely, but the
narrator states that “[o]ne was almost terrified to walk over the lawn lest one do
something to Uncle William’s cherished velvet. You had to keep to the flat stepping-
stones path. And Jane wanted to run. You couldn’t run at St. Agatha’s either” (4). In
Understood Betsy Aunt Frances tells the doctor, “I try to see that she [Elizabeth Ann] has
plenty of fresh air. I go out with her for a walk every single day. But we have taken all
the walks around here so often that we’re rather tired of them” (Fisher 53). Exercise
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becomes a mechanical activity in the city, and Aunt Frances’ idea of fresh air is not the
fresh air of the farm that Betsy will later experience and that Fisher valorizes. In these
three novels, then, the freedom to explore is curbed by the limits of urban geography, by
concerned caregivers, and by fear and restraint.
Environmental psychologists Russell Veitch and Daniel Arkkelin admit that “[w]hile
there certainly seem to be some ill effects of city life, some theorists have argued that
much of this research starts with a biased and pessimistic assumption that cities are bad”
(235). This is a longstanding trope in English literature, both for adults and children, as
evident from centuries of stories that pit the virtues of the country against the city.
Maureen Devine touches on this phenomenon in Woman and Nature: Literary
Reconceptualizations, noting that by “1900, the wilderness was becoming rare and the
over-crowded cities came to be regarded with as much hostility as the wilderness had
been a century or more earlier” (65). With overcrowding came pollution and disease, and
consequently, a heightened sense of urban life as degraded in comparison to the natural
world.
Of my three primary authors, Fisher’s sense of this urban degradation is most
apparent. Her narrator dismissively describes the story’s opening setting as “a medium-
sized city in a medium-sized state in the middle of this country” (1). Aside from
providing a way of understanding Elizabeth Ann’s poor health, little other attention to
paid to the city. Aunt Frances says, “I suppose the exciting modern life is bad for
children” (11), but no details of what constitutes this sort of life are given. Aunt Frances
may be vague, but Fisher is not: in terms of providing health, the country trumps the city.
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Impersonal and stale, Fisher’s urban setting is incapable of supporting health, and the
contrast of the Vermont countryside as healing is established.
Reed’s conviction that “a number of our society’s psychosocial ills have a common
root in our culture’s disdain for primary experience” (133) is embedded in my primary
texts: urban life is depicted as providing few opportunities for firsthand experience. Jane
has “strong, capable little hands” (16) and no place to use them in the city, and Elizabeth
Ann’s initial attempts at creating something leave her “in dismay, looking at the
shapeless, battered heap of butter before her and holding out her hands as though they
were not part of her” (53). The girls are disconnected from their abilities, and
environment is the common denominator, as is made poignantly obvious when in India,
Mary sticks cut flowers into piles of dry earth in a sad pantomime of gardening. The
effects of detachment from nature manifest themselves in a state of dis-ease experienced
by all three girls. Lack of engagement with the natural world creates a poor sense of
belonging to the environment. Reed comments that “[f]or understanding our place in the
world, ecological information is thus primary, processed information secondary” (2). As
is implied in this statement, understanding comes with experience, which the girls are
denied, just as they are denied freedom to explore.
The girls’ urban lives echo the contemporary situation that concerns Richard Louv in
Last Child in the Woods: children in urban environments are afflicted with “too much
watching, too much sitting” (10). In Mary’s early days at Misselthwaite Manor, “[i]t was
plain there was not a great deal of strength in [her] arms and legs when she first began to
skip” (76). And as Christine Wilkie notes, “When we first meet Mary, she is wild,
passionate, bewildered, and hostile” (76); but more significantly, and perhaps as the
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cause of her behaviour, “Mary is rootless” (Wilkie 76). India, in its difference, is
unnatural to her and therefore not able to provide her with the stability she needs to
flourish. In a similar vein, Fisher’s narrator imparts that in the city, “Elizabeth Ann [is]
very small and thin and little. And yet they all had plenty to eat” (2). It is implied here
that the problem behind the girl’s poor health lies elsewhere than in a shortage of healthy
food.
In Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life, Andy Fisher writes that
“the childhood need for nature is poorly recognized by most psychologists” (144). It is a
need that Burnett, Fisher and Montgomery acknowledge in their respective works. And
Nicholas Tucker states that “while psychologists are now quite good at painting the wider
picture of different developmental processes, individual psychological portraits have
always been best created by novelists” (173). As demonstrated by my primary authors,
novelists also have the power to depict situations and environments that affect the
psychology of their characters. At the beginning of all three stories, the girls live
restricted, urban lives. Through his collective research, Richard Louv demonstrates how
such lives are susceptible to dis-ease: “as the young spend less and less of their lives in
natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically, and this
reduces the richness of human experience” (3). Being both ill and ill-at-ease are the by-
products of this detachment from nature. The girls begin their lives and their stories
untouched by the natural world and in a state of dis-ease; their authors provide an
antidote in green space, which I discuss further in Chapter Four of this study.
John McDermott believes being ill-at-ease is a natural part of the human condition,
“that the being of being is to be disconnected, ontologically adrift”(11). My primary
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authors illustrate that urban environments, depicted consistently as unhealthy, create this
disconnect, this illness. Through their stories, Burnett, Fisher and Montgomery show
support for the connection between illness, wellness, and environment, but psychologist
Stephen Kellert, from a broader, contemporary perspective, notes that the “relative
absence of published material on this subject may be indicative of a society so estranged
from its natural origins it has failed to recognize our species’ basic dependence on nature
as a condition of growth and development” (118). Despite testimony that supports the
connection between land and health, both in fiction and in psychology, the connection is
difficult to quantify; as a result, the value is only anecdotal.
The problem of estrangement lies at the core of ecofeminism. In Wild Things:
Children’s Culture and Criticism, Marion Copeland recognizes Beatrix Potter and Gene
Stratton Porter as early ecofeminist writers as they align their work with concern about
“the domination [by a patriarchal, industrial culture] of nature and of all animals, wild
and domestic, human and nonhuman” (71). I consider Burnett, Fisher and Montgomery to
be ecofeminist writers in their concern with the relationship between place and health,
and in their alignment of girls with nature. In their respective works, degraded urban
environments (or, in Mary’s case, an environment unnatural to her) diminish the girls,
and they need rural spaces to be replenished. In speaking to this need, Louv echoes the
ecofeminist principle that
[r]educing the deficit – healing the broken bond between our young and nature –
is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also
because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends upon it. The health of
the earth is at stake as well. (3)
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Contemporary North American “girl-poisoning culture,” defined by Mary Pipher as
being sexualized and media-saturated (23), and the poisoned landscapes of the
contemporary industrial world (Louv 198), are paralleled to a degree in my primary texts.
While there are no clues in the texts pointing to a natural world in peril, the industrial
shift was affecting rural landscapes at the time the authors were writing. In depicting
early twentieth-century urban landscapes and culture as “poisonous” to the health of the
girls, Montgomery, Burnett and Fisher align with the contemporary concerns voiced by
Louv and Pipher.
In “The Superfund Gothic: Susanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic: An Environmental
Memoir,” Christine Flanagan discusses the ways in which Antonetta charts “the radical
poisoning of a landscape and her subsequent psychic and physical illness” (49). The
assumption that the urban landscapes in my primary texts are poisoned and/or poisonous
is found in the effect these places have on the girls. Both contemporary fiction and
fiction from the past can effectively portray the link between land and health. Shepard
addresses how the problem of ignoring the connection between environmental health and
human health is fatal to both people and land, and that
the private cost is massive therapy, escapism, intoxicants, narcotics, fits of
destruction and rage, enormous grief, subordination to hierarchies that exhibit this
callow ineptitude at every level, and perhaps, worst of all, a readiness to strike
back at a natural world that we dimly perceive as having failed us. (Shepard 35)
Flanagan points out that as Antonetta relates her father’s contemptuous attitude towards
the women’s liberation movement, she realizes that the “natural world is similarly
dismissed” by him, and by the larger culture (51).
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Incomprehension and dismissal are apparent in the girls’ perspectives when they first
behold the rural spaces imposed on them. Travelling from the city into the Vermont
countryside, Elizabeth Ann “looked out dismally at the winter landscape, thinking it
hideous with its brown bare fields, its brown bare trees … nothing looked colder than that
bleak country into which the train was now slowly making its way” (21). Jane’s journey
and impression are much the same. When she travels by train to Prince Edward Island
for the first time, she thinks to herself, “So this was P.E. Island … this rain-drenched
land where the trees cringed before the wind and the heavy clouds seemed almost to
touch the fields” (54). And Mary, crossing the moor for the first time, “felt the drive
would never come to an end and that the wide, bleak moor was a wide expanse of black
ocean through which she was passing on a strip of dry land” (23). Each girl is being
forced into a new, rural environment, each is unwell in body and mind, and each sees the
land in terms of her state of being.
Ill regard for the natural world is a product of detachment from this world. As Paul
Shepard notes, this disconnect is amplified over time in that “[f]rom this erosion of
human nurturing comes the failure of the passages of the life cycle and the exhaustion of
our ecological accords” (35). Detachment in itself becomes an illness, a failure to
acknowledge the connection between human health and environmental health. Ralph
Metzner supports this idea in Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the
Earth: “The disease metaphor for our planetary condition depends on the following
underlying analogy: Earth is a living organism, and humans and other individual
organisms are the cells in this superorganism” (81). Following this analogy, an
“organism cannot continue to function healthily if one group of cells decides to dominate
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and cannibalize the other energy systems of the body” (97). This statement can be
extended and applied to a number of hierarchies: human domination of the natural world,
the effect of urban sprawl on the individual, and the patriarchal oppression of women.
The ecofeminist concern that the “devaluation [of women] is conceptually related to
devaluation of the natural environment and its members” (96) is reconfigured, to a point,
by Burnett, Fisher and Montgomery. By asserting the alignment of female child
protagonists with a pastoral landscape and clearly positioning the restoration of health in
a natural setting, they focus on the results of a life lived in nature. In Chapter Five of this
study, I discuss the changes that occur in the girls’ attitudes toward their environments as
they each grow in health.
My primary authors also reconfigure depictions of illness, particularly as they relate
to gender. The historical context of the novels supports the portrayal of pale, heroic
invalids in literature. In The Madwoman in the Attic, an analysis of nineteenth-century
women writers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar write that “[s]urrounded as she is by
images of disease, traditions of disease, and invitations both to disease and to dis-ease, it
is no wonder that the woman writer has held many mirrors up to the discomforts of her
own nature” (57). Though Montgomery, Fisher and Burnett were writing in this
tradition, they each use the transformation trope to work against this discomfort by
ultimately creating strong, healthy girls.
Discomfort with a culture that supports “the close relationship between
representations of illness and cultural fantasies about illness” is also evident in their
respective works (Gilman 18). Literary fashion of the era centred on
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the aesthetic cult of ladylike fragility and delicate beauty – no doubt associated
with the moral cult of the angel-woman – obliged ‘genteel’ women to ‘kill’
themselves into art objects; slim, pale, passive beings whose ‘charms’ eerily
recalled the snowy, porcelain immobility of the dead. Tight-lacing, fasting,
vinegar-drinking, and similar cosmetic or dietary excesses were all parts of a
physical regimen that helped women either to feign morbid weakness or actually
to ‘decline’ into real illness. (25)
Rather than create suffering, angelic heroines or use illness as punishment, these writers
subvert this common trend by creating girls who move past the confines of illness, and by
removing their protagonists from an urban culture that adheres to these views.
The issue of illness, gender and space permeates the tenets of both ecofeminism
and feminist literary theory. In analyzing George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Elaine
Showalter states, “Because he is a cripple, Philip has led a girl’s life; he has been barred
from sports and swordplay and ultimately forced to be ‘perfectly quiescent,’ as
immobilized as Maggie herself” (Literature 127). The assumptions latent in this
statement suggest that a healthy body is masculine, and that indoor space is feminine. A
number of questions are raised with regard to my primary texts: Because the girls are not
thriving at the start of their stories, does this mean they are more feminine when they are
ill than at the story’s end when they are strong in body and self-confidence? What is the
nature of the connection between space and wellness if indoor space is feminine and
equated with illness/stillness? Does the opposite stand to reason, that outdoor space is
active and masculine? I address the questions of transformation and space in Chapters
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Four and Five of my study, and conclude Chapter Three by addressing the issue of illness
and gender.
In all three primary texts, the girls are granted the freedom to develop their
physical selves once they move to rural locations, but the initial restrictions of their urban
environments do not allow this development, either culturally or geographically. In
Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American
Women 1800-1870, Jan Todd documents the restrictions placed on women at this time:
In the eighteenth century, French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau provided a
philosophical rallying point for exercise with his descriptions of the importance of
outdoor athletics in the formation of manly, ideal men. Unfortunately, Rousseau
did not advocate the same sorts – or the same intensity – of purposive exercise for
women. Rousseau did not want women to be truly weak, but he did want them to
be fertile, submissive, nonambitious and content to stay at home. (11)
In Emile, Rousseau reveals that his attitude towards women extends to girls in his
assertion that “Sophie exercised because it enhanced her physical appeal to Emile” (12).
The limitations inherent in this statement are not supported by my primary authors.
Rather, they remove their girls to rural spaces that allow them freedom not often granted
girls in this era. Nineteenth-century women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton
writes, “We simply cannot say what the woman might be physically, if the girl were
allowed all the freedom of the boy” (qtd. in Todd 184). But in their respective works,
Burnett, Fisher and Montgomery offer a statement about what females can be, given the
freedom and the appropriate environment. And writing in the late 1800s, Doctor J.H.
Hanaford said
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Woman has muscles and she as right to use them in a proper manner … there is
no reason why she should ignore them or be ashamed to develop them. … What if
her limbs become a little rotund, her hands enlarged, her brow somewhat bronzed.
… She need not be ashamed of it, since such efforts will impart just the vivacity,
suppleness, stamina and endurance she will need. (qtd. in Todd 295).
In relocating their girls from sickness to health, Montgomery, Burnett, and Fisher
embed this creed in their work. The hope inherent in metamorphosis is at the heart of
these narratives of healing. Gloria Feman Orenstein believes the function of ecofeminist
literature is to act as “‘medicine stories,’ literature whose function is to teach us lessons
about healing” (qtd. in Flanagan 52). There is an element of the ‘medicine story’ in each
of my primary texts. Through transformations that bind personal health and wellness to
the land, the healing potential of green space is illuminated.
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CHAPTER FOUR: THE NATURE OF THE GREEN SPACE
As a cornerstone question of ecocriticism, Cheryll Glotfelty asks, “Where is the
natural world in the text?” (xxiii). In their respective novels, Burnett, Fisher, and
Montgomery position the natural world centrally, and in opposition to urban spaces. At
the heart of their stories lies green space, and it is the nature of this space that determines
the transformation each girl experiences.
My study draws on Louise Chawla’s definition of nature as “the ‘green world’ of
forests, fields, farms, parks and gardens – the elements of earth, water, air and growing
things that exist independent of human creation, although they may be shaped into forms
of human design” (200). The green spaces of all three texts are alternately referred to in
critical discussion as idyllic, Arcadian, agrarian, and utopian, revealing the parallels and
the interchangeable quality of these terms. These are cultivated spaces that appear to
balance nature and culture. The concept of wilderness is beyond the scope of my study.
In terms of green space versus green places, I look to Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The
Perspective of Freedom for distinction: “place is security; space is freedom” (54). The
protagonists in my key texts are relocated to rural places – farms, gardens, villages – that,
over the passage of at least one full season, grant the girls space to breathe, move, grow,
and learn.
Only in rural spaces can these girls journey from sickness to health. The green spaces
there are sites of transformation and potential, standing in opposition to the sterility of the
urban environments in which each girl begins her story. Yet these rural environments are
not without restrictions. In her discussion of classic children’s texts, Maria Nikolajeva
notes that in “many texts, the secluded character of the setting is emphasized. The garden
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walls or fences are boundaries to the surrounding – adult – world, boundaries both
protecting and restricting” (23). This idea of existing in a borderland connects to the
Edwardian era in which my primary texts were written, an era in which the inherited
Victorian culture and a burgeoning modern world were vying for position. Seth Lerer
observes that
the Edwardian [identity] embodies something about childhood itself. All children
live on such a cusp: between the memories of their comfortable youth and the
fears of the future … between a natural world through which they romp and the
demarcation of that world by the fences, walls, rails, roads, and bridges of adult
administration. (273)
As Lerer indicates, a demarcated world is not necessarily restricting, but the quality of the
experiences available in these semi-controlled spaces varies. For example, Robert Pyle
maintains that “Nature reserves … are not enough to ensure connections. Such places,
important as they are, invite a measured, restricted kind of contact” (qtd. in Kellert 146).
At Lantern Hill, where nature is a natural part of Jane’s life, she finds a landscape with
“free hills and wide, open fields where you could run wherever you liked, none daring to
make you afraid, spruce barrens and shadowy sand dunes, instead of an iron fence and
locked gates (Montgomery 83). Betsy’s life on the Putney farm and Mary’s experiences
in the walled garden are more overtly circumscribed than Jane’s, but within each of these
environments, the girls are granted a freedom to explore that is comparable to Jane’s.
Around the time my primary texts were written, “children’s environmental literature
began to depict nature in a more ‘realistic’ manner and not merely as an illusion or
fantasy. Nature became something wild, something that changed, something with which
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children may interact, not merely sit prettily within” (Holton 151). As I focus on female
protagonists, I am interested in examining how gender affects this interaction. Jacqueline
Rose and Kate Soper offer insights on the ramifications of regarding nature as gendered.
Rose writes that in “fictitious romance for boys … discovering, or seeing, the world is
equivalent to controlling, or subduing it” (58). The underlying ecofeminist assumption
here is that the natural world is feminine. Soper complements this observation by noting
that “[f]eminized nature is not … emblematic simply of mastered nature, but also of
regrets and guilts over the mastering itself; of nostalgias felt for what is lost or defiled in
the very act of possession” (143). The history of gendered landscapes in literature and
cultural mythology is discussed by Patrick Imbert in “The Garden and its Multiple
Contexts in Canada, the United States, and Latin America”:
Christian mythology arrived here on the shores of North America in October of
the year 1492. At which point God as man met God as woman … and thereby
hangs a tale of what are probably the worse cases of rape, wife battery and
attempted wife murder in the history of the world as we know it. (61)
In tracing the connection of New World mentality to attitudes of possession and
domination toward land and women, Annette Kolodny extends the discussion to gardens,
referring to “the initial impulse to experience the New World landscape, not merely as an
object of domination and exploitation, but as a maternal ‘garden’” (172). There is much
critical discussion about the secret garden as a maternal, internal space. The nature of the
garden space in terms of gender is interesting, but as the green spaces of my primary texts
encompass myriad life cycles, and there is no textual evidence to support a particularly
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feminine landscape, it is the nature of the experience offered by these green spaces that is
relevant to my study.
While the landscapes of my primary texts are not explicitly gendered, the fact that
I centre my discussion on female protagonists as written by female authors bears analysis.
Mary Rubio writes in consideration of the era in which Montgomery was writing that
[c]hildhood, obviously, is the only time of her life during which a woman is
permitted not to know that her reality inevitably involves marriage. It is tempting
to speculate, then, that Montgomery’s attitude toward marriage might well have
influenced her preference for treating in fiction the lives of young girls. What is
possible for a girl in childhood far exceeds what is allowed her after the onset of
adolescence. (142)
All three of my primary texts reflect a level of freedom that is unusual for girls from this
era: Mary is largely left alone to explore the Misselthwaite estate; Jane roams freely
around the PEI countryside, herding cows and once, a lion; and Betsy navigates her way
to school and to the county fair solo. But some critical work on the nature of the sexual
politics in these texts de-emphasizes the freedom granted the girls. Critics such as Mollie
Gillen and Theodore Sheckels regard Jane as a Cinderella-type figure, entirely
domesticated, and in her view of Mary as being cultivated into a normative female role,
Price fears Mary is “train[ed] to be in a drama for which others have written the script”
(12).
The garden space is particularly subject to discussions of gender, an idea
supported by Lerer’s argument that “the garden is a space that defines boys and girls as
different” (248). He asserts that gender dictates the type of experiences available to male
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and female characters in these spaces. For boy characters such as Colin, the space fosters
an outwardly active dynamic. For girls, the garden is a quieter, more introspective place.
Gwyneth Evans supports Lerer’s argument in her view of Mary’s journey as inward,
enclosed, and emotional. Price sees Mary’s cultivation as incorporating many qualities of
“the perfect garden: enclosure, imprisonment, and instruction, producing beauty and
comfort for the enjoyment of the male sex” (7). As well, feminist readings of The Secret
Garden often point to Mary’s apparent negation in the story as Colin’s health improves.
But Nikolajeva’s concept of the collective protagonist is more useful to my study
as it promotes the idea of multiple life cycles and interconnectedness. She states that
“[w]ith the notion of the collective protagonist, the emergence of Colin is merely a shift
within the character … What Dickon is to Mary, Mary is to Colin, the triple character
evolving from the eternity of death toward the eternity of life” (39). This perspective not
only connects the experiences of male and female characters, but it also considers the
characters as one, as “the emergence of Colin is merely a shift within the character”
(original emphasis 39). According to Nikolajeva, “Colin is the lazy, dormant, apathetic
part of the protagonist, and Mary’s eventual discovery of him … is an essential step in
the protagonist’s self-fulfilment” (39); in this scenario, Dickon represents “the most
liberated part” of the protagonist. In extending this perspective to a seasonal cycle, Colin
is winter, Mary is spring and summer, and Dickon is timeless and representative of all
four seasons.
In her study of Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Gabriella Ahmansson
notes that an “aspect that female writers of utopias usually have in common is that they
describe a matriarchy or in extreme cases, a world entirely without men. In both cases
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the separation from our world has not primarily anything to do with time or place, but is
realized as an escape from patriarchal society” (129). But male characters are, to varying
degrees, integral to my three primary stories: Ben Weatherstaff, Dickon, Colin, Mr.
Craven in The Secret Garden; Uncle Henry and Ralph in Understood Betsy; and Jane’s
father, Andrew, in Jane of Lantern Hill. There are no power struggles between the male
and female characters in these narratives; rather, there is a natural symbiosis in the
relationships. And nowhere in the texts are male characters depicted as having a
privileged or hierarchical relationship to the land in comparison to the female
protagonists.
Lerer’s supposition that “[g]ardens … may be places of the theatre” points to the
problem of gender and performance (251). He notes that in much early twentieth-century
children’s literature, “[g]irls always seem to be up on stages. How they look and sound
is, in a way, far more important than how boys do” (229). But in my primary texts, the
green spaces of garden and farmland are more than backdrop: they are integral settings in
which the girls do. Green space for them is a place where their actions are not a
performance but rather proof of their abilities. And while there is much emphasis in all
three texts on the girls’ growing attractiveness, the emphasis on their looks provides
testimony as to the restorative nature of the green spaces; beauty equals health in these
texts.
Wilkie notes of Burnett’s novel that “[t]he secret garden is unquestionably a
therapeutic and regenerative site” (78), a fact that is supported by Stigsdotter and Grahn,
who apart from listing the physical attributes of gardens, also believe that the “health
effects are due to … the activities that can be carried out there, [that] can restore a person
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to a more positive view of himself and his capacities” (63). This is true of Jane’s and
Mary’s experiences with gardening and green space. Betsy is never shown to be
gardening, but she is an active participant in farm life. Lutwack asserts that “[i]n spite of
the honorable position of the garden image in our national ideology, American literature
has never been captivated by the farmer and his way of life” (153). This may be true of
literature for adults, but the farm is a consistent setting in children’s literature,
particularly from the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries, in American texts
like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Farmer Boy, Strawberry Girl, and Sarah, Plain and
Tall.
In order to understand the nature of the green space at the heart of my primary
texts, it is helpful to define the nature of the texts themselves. They are the product of a
Protestant, white culture in the Edwardian era. They are Western -- English, American,
and Canadian, respectively: a Yorkshire estate and garden on the edge of the moor; a
farm in Vermont on the edge of a forest; a Prince Edward Island cottage at the edge of the
sea. Each story is roughly set at the turn of the century. Trains figure in all three books,
and there is the occasional mention of a motor car in Jane of Lantern Hill, but in all three
worlds, “technology is only barely there” (Lerer 272). The Industrial Age is heaving
forward, but as Jane Urquhart observes in her recent brief biography of Montgomery, “it
was status in a rural world, rather than an urban one, that really mattered. Most
Canadians at the beginning of the twentieth century were still connected to the land and
to the small towns and villages carved out of the bush only a century, at most, before”
(18). But change was happening fast, and in their celebration of rural landscapes, the
authors were conserving a moment in history by idealizing their environments. As Squire
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notes, “Montgomery’s juxtaposition of Prince Edward Island and Toronto, a utopian-
dystopian polarity that has no parallel elsewhere in her fiction, enabled her to make her
most explicit statement about Prince Edward Island” (141).
Lawrence Buell writes, “The best environmental writers continually recalibrate
familiar landscapes” (261). In this vein, my primary authors drew from the pastoral
tradition as a means of focusing on the best possible version of their environments. But
the pastoral nature of the books is often criticized for avoiding the realities of both the
natural world and people’s place within it: “the sheltered, even juvenile, landscapes of
Lucy Maud Montgomery … they are situated in a fantasy world devoid of industry,”
write Norcliffe and Simpson-Housely in “No Vacant Eden” (5). Such a summation
denies any link to the literal world, as does the accusation that Montgomery was “writing
purple prose” in her detailing of “landscape and how it shapes character (Urquhart 53).
Most disdainful is Mary Rubio’s report of the acid criticism that Montgomery “writes
only about an unblemished bucolic paradise for undiscriminating women and children”
(6).
Burnett suffers similar critical dismissal, particularly at the hands of Humphrey
Carpenter, who regards The Secret Garden as little more than a story Burnett accidentally
stumbled upon rather than a work she created. In What Katy Read, Foster and Simons
undermine the value of the natural environment Burnett portrays in stating that “[t]he
details of house and garden, the food Mary eats, the bulbs that she plants, the visual and
tactile recreation of the landscape: all serve to reinforce the solidity of the world that she
inhabits. This surface realism … fails, however, to diminish the power of the fantasy
which remains the core of the story” (176). While not an entirely negative summation,
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the reality of Burnett’s green space in the book comes second to the fairytale qualities of
the story. Phylis Bixler recognizes that the natural world of The Secret Garden goes
beyond the surface, and is, in fact, deeply rooted:
Burnett underscores the parallel transformations of Mary and the garden through
an archetypal use of the seasonal cycle. Mary had arrived in late winter, the
season often associated with death. Now, when a changing Mary enters the secret
garden about a month later, the green shoots provide the promise of spring, the
season typically associated with rebirth. (41)
While the fairytale aspect of the story is appealing, the real-world depictions are, from an
ecocritical perspective, more valuable. Mary’s transformation is directly located in the
natural world, thereby underscoring this value, a topic discussed in depth in Chapter Five.
To avoid a dismissive summation of nature in children’s literature and to
approach an understanding of the nature of these textual green spaces requires an analysis
of the pastoral in literature. William Howarth writes, “Ecocriticism, instead of taxing
science for its use of language to represent (mimesis) examines its ability to point (deixis)
… deixis locates entities in space, time, and social context” (80). Through the work of
Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Clare, “we witness a crisis of sensibility by
which nature becomes idealised in the face of its threatened destruction” (Coupe 5).
Arguably, the pastoral depiction of nature in my primary texts is a product of Romantic
concern, a view supported by Rubio’s suggestion that “Montgomery’s own responses to
nature may have been heightened by her reading of Wordsworth, Longfellow, and
Emerson” (33). The landscapes she created are ideal in their pastoral depiction, and free
of environmental threat. As Greg Garrard notes, “Romantic nature is never seriously
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endangered” (43). The green spaces of my primary texts are intact, with no evidence of
ecological crisis or decay, apart from the secret garden when Mary first finds it in a state
of neglect and winter dormancy.
Classical English pastorals are criticized for “present[ing] a vision of rural life so
removed from the processes of labour and natural growth that they constitute a persistent
mystification of human ecology” (Garrard 38). But Montgomery, Burnett and Fisher
portray the workings of the natural world in conjunction with human life: growing food,
making butter, fishing, learning to swim in the sea, seasonal activities: in this sense, my
primary authors reconfigure and render vital the classic pastoral. As Jacqueline Rose
writes, “Literature is the repository of a privileged experience and sensibility at risk in the
outside world where these values are being crushed under the weight of cultural decay”
(43). In my primary texts, the green world is depicted as rejuvenated and rejuvenating,
illustrating the potential of pastoral literature to preserve environmental values.
In “Fresh-Air Kids,” Lois Kuznets defines pastoral literature as “traditionally
demonstrat[ing] the human need for the healing power of the simple, rural, or rustic life
by contrasting that life with the complex, urban, or urbane one” (156). The portrayal of
these urban/rural binaries is often criticized for being simplistic, regressive, and escapist
in nature. The pejorative use of the term ‘pastoral’ coincides with critical attitudes
toward nostalgia. As a reaction to being ill at ease with our place in the world,
McDermott feels that “some of us retreat to a vicious nostalgia, whereby the past takes on
a glow that it never had in the present and seduces us into living our lives backwards. …
We become trapped in our own glass menagerie” (22). This sentiment is shared by Perry
Nodelman, who in writing about children’s books such as The Secret Garden, says, “The
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utopia these novels progress towards is actually a regressive world of perfect childlike
innocence. … It forces us into a fruitless nostalgia – a lust for something we simply
cannot have anymore” (81). But the nostalgia inherent in these pastoral texts speaks to a
homesickness for a natural world that was being dismantled at the turn of the twentieth
century, and points to the need for conservation. Roni Natov writes, “In the literature of
childhood, the green world may serve to expose the cruelty and waste of our society. In
revealing various ways we are ruptured from our nature, these stories can be as deeply
critical as the literature for adults” (92). In my study, I support a wider analysis of
nostalgia and pastoral than Nodelman’s and McDermott’s. Terry Gifford believes the
literary pastoral offers “versatility …to both contain and appear to evade tensions and
contradictions – between country and city, art and nature, the human and non-human, our
social and inner selves, our masculine and feminine” (qtd. in Natov 92). The richness of
interpretation offered by viewing the pastoral from multiple perspectives leads to the
acknowledgment of multiple functions which depend on context, subject, and authorial
intent.
For the purpose of my study on how land affects health, I look at pastoral
children’s literature as “texts [that] do reflect how a civilization regards its natural
heritage” (Howarth 77). Darcy’s assertion of The Secret Garden that “the real as well as
the ideal is much in evidence; in fact, the two are inextricably connected” (213) further
supports this reflection. Novels such as Understood Betsy and Jane of Lantern Hill “are
perceived to be the acceptable face of our cultural heritage [and] it would be a great loss
if they were to be dismissed altogether as not dealing with the realities of life now”
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(Darcy 222). But the realities Montgomery depicts in her work are dismissed by critic
Muriel Whitaker, who believes the enduring charm of texts such as the Anne books is
partly that of a period piece. Canadiana is "in" at the moment: though we no
longer use gin jars for hot water bottles or keep up a parlour for serious occasions,
hooked rugs, patchwork quilts, and butter churns are highly prized and highly
priced. Is the appeal of L. M. Montgomery's novels simply a matter of nostalgia
or do they contain something of lasting, if minor, literary value? (52)
Whitaker lists cultural products. But my primary authors, Burnett and Montgomery in
particular, list detailed aspects of the natural world in their respective works, as illustrated
in this passage from Jane of Lantern Hill:
Jane did not know she was looking out on the loveliest thing on earth … a June
morning in Prince Edward Island … A wave of fragrance broke in her face from
the lilac hedge … The poplars in a corner of the lawn were shaking in green
laughter. An apple tree stretching out friendly arms. There was a faraway view
of daisy-sprinkled fields across the harbour where white gulls were soaring and
swooping. The air was moist and sweet after the rain. Aunt Irene’s house was on
the fringe of the town and a country road ran behind it … a road almost blood-red
in its glistening wetness. Jane had never imagined a road coloured like that. (60)
From an ecocritical perspective, this inventory reads like an act of conservation, a means
of committing to memory something which could fade. Garrard writes, “At the root of
the pastoral is the idea that nature is a stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive
energy and change of human societies” (56). Inherent in this statement is the idea that
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pastoral texts serve as a reference point for the natural world at a particular time in
history.
My primary texts depart from classical pastoral literature in that the three
protagonists stay, for the most part, in the rural spaces in which they are healed. More
common in literature is the insistence “on a return from the pastoral, so that the discovery
that took place in nature can be integrated into our world in an offering of hope and
renewal” (Natov 92). But as Love discusses in “Revaluing Nature,” “the western version
of pastoral may be said to reverse the characteristic pattern of entry and return so that it is
the green world which asserts its greater significance to the main character” (235). The
transformations from sickness to health at the core of my primary texts serve to highlight
the significance of the green world, as does the fact that the girls do not permanently
return to urban environments: Mary’s home is indefinitely to be Misselthwaite, Betsy
chooses to stay with the Putneys, and Jane secures Lantern Hill as a summer home.
The healing nature of the green space in my primary texts is rooted in the pastoral
tradition. In deliberately transforming the girls on these green sites, the authors
emphasize the significance and value of that space. From a contemporary perspective,
“people are born and die in clinical settings, and in between spend much of their time
shuttling about through offices, malls, clubs, and transport designed as neutrally benign
and predictability interchangeable spaces” (Buell 69). Illness and ontological discomfort
abound; urban lives offer limited exposure to green space. While Jones argues that the
“urban can offer green spaces and contact with nature, but also a range of environments
beyond that available in rural settings” (28), it is the quality of the experience and the
immersion in nature that truly heals, as my primary texts illustrate. Green patches and
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parks are not enough. The girls are not just visitors sent to rural places for a country cure;
their lives take root in these green spaces. And interestingly, though the girls do not
regard their environments as utopian or ideal at first, their adoration grows as their health
strengthens in connection to the land.
Pastoral children’s literature from the Edwardian era has the power of “metaphor,
or symbolizing in general … [that] helps us explore the possibilities of experience, [and]
suggests that we might, on a highly conscious level, call into play once more our
evolutionary adaptive ability to create and re-create our own images of reality” (Kolodny
178). In this light, whether they are viewed as fairytales, as products of nostalgia, or as
literal worlds is unimportant to define. What matters is that these texts offer a chance to
explore possibilities for ways of living in harmony.
In attempting to understand the mythical appeal of gardens, Stigsdotter and Grahn
write, “Perhaps it can be described as a yearning for devotion and beauty, or for a place
without sin” (67). This idea is perhaps at the root of all attachment to the green spaces of
pastoral literature: knowing that somewhere, nature has not been meddled with, to know
it exists, even if only in books.
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CHAPTER FIVE: THE NATURE OF THE TRANSFORMATIONS
At the beginnings of their stories, Mary, Betsy and Jane are ill-at-ease with
themselves and at odds with their environments. At the outset of the novels in which
these characters appear, authors Burnett, Fisher and Montgomery clearly define the
parameters of their protagonists’ urban, or in Mary’s case, unnatural, settings: Mary is
shuttered by India’s climate; Betsy’s urban life is circumscribed by her aunt’s home and
by school; and Jane’s life, like Betsy’s, is largely confined to her grandmother’s house
and to school. At the time these novels were written, the Industrial Age had altered
Western society’s relationship to land, and in The Power of Place, Winifred Gallagher
observes that in “one of the least remarked of these transformations, the Industrial
Revolution drew the West indoors” (13). Apart from taking walks, the main action of the
girls’ lives at the start of their stories occurs in largely interior environments.
In a study of detachment from the natural world in North American culture,
Kellert notes that “a society so estranged from its natural origins … has failed to
recognize our species’ basic dependence on nature as a condition of growth and
development” (118). Failure to acknowledge the ecology of human and environmental
health leads to a disconnect illustrated by Harold Fromm in his ecocritical essay, “From
Transcendence to Obsolescence.” In telling of a woman who regards potential solutions
to pollution as a threat to her preferred lifestyle, he writes, “Somehow, she is alive: she
eats food, drinks water, breathes air, but she does not see these actions as grounds of life;
rather, they are acts that coincide with her life” (37). Living in urban environments, the
protagonists of my primary texts are as disconnected from human reliance on natural
processes for survival as the woman in Fromm’s essay. But through deliberate relocation
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and transformation of the protagonists, my primary authors offer an antidote to this dis-
ease. Jane of Lantern Hill, The Secret Garden and Understood Betsy each
“[acknowledge] and [promote] our biological connection with nature as a therapeutic
recovery from our misguided detachment from the earth” (Henderson 137). Arguably, it
is detachment from the natural world that causes the girls’ ill states of being, and
likewise, engagement with the earth leads to their recovery.
A number of critics have commented on the nature of the transformations in all
three texts. In discussing Jane’s burgeoning abilities, Theodore Sheckels states that “it is
difficult to read Jane’s immersion in household tasks as exemplifying female freedom or
independence” (529). He limits the scope of her transformation to simple domestic
indoctrination. But Jane’s growing capabilities centre on more than household tasks.
During her summers at Lantern Hill, she learns to swim in the ocean, catch fish from a
pond, conquer her fear of cows, drive a load of hay behind a horse, and use a plane to fix
a stuck door. While she takes pride in and enjoys household activities, she is observant,
self-reliant, and resourceful, not mindlessly domestic, as is evident when she watches her
father start a fire. The narrator writes, “Dad had kindled a fire in the stove and fed it with
some of Aunt Matilda Jollie’s wood, Jane keeping a watchful eye on him as he did it.
She had never seen a fire made in a stove before, but she meant to know how to do it
herself next time” (81). In her new environment, Jane’s determination to rise to any
challenge transcends normative gender roles.
Other critics focus on the politics of the texts. Using nationality as her point of
argument, June Cummins believes that “Betsy’s transformation is linked to her becoming
an American” (15). This critical tack is shared by Danielle Price in her discussion of
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Mary’s transformation: “This metamorphosis is accompanied by – in fact, is inseparable
from – the Indian-born Mary’s inculcation in English ways and values” (4). But apart
from the physical transformations, the bulk of the critical material on transformations in
my primary texts centres on spirituality, particularly with regard to The Secret Garden.
Foster and Simons point to a Christian reading of the novel, stating that as “a version of
the Edenic world of innocence, the garden is also the site of Mary’s transfiguration from
moral ugliness to spiritual beauty” (187). Likewise, Gwyneth Evans makes no mention
of Mary’s physical transformation in her essay on the feminine pastoral. Instead, she
focuses on “the stories of gardens in which children work with nature, creating beauty
through growing things and at the same time experiencing spiritual and emotional growth
in their lives” (20). Jane Darcy extends Evans’ discussion by including the physical
aspect of Burnett’s story, noting that “[s]trong beliefs about the role of the natural world
in developing a healthy mind and body and ensuring spiritual peace inform The Secret
Garden” (216).
While the spiritual value of green spaces is clearly worth considering, especially
in light of ecopscychologist Ralph Metzner’s comment on “the West’s fixation on the
life-destroying dissociation between spirit and nature” (67), including a discussion of the
spiritual nature of the transformations in my primary texts would take me beyond the core
of my study. Instead, I align my discussion with Kaplan’s observation of “the sense of
being ‘at one,’ a feeling that often … occurs in natural environments. Although the
spiritual does not hold a prominent place in the writings of most psychologists, the
concern for meaning, for tranquility, and for relatedness has not gone unnoticed” (197).
In my study, then, I focus on the physical and psychological nature of the transformation:
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I take note of the serenity that green spaces offer the girls rather than the spirituality.
After a period of stress, “Jane went out and up and sat on the hill … ‘to get back into
herself,’ as she expressed it” (Montgomery 99). Likewise, when Betsy must make a life-
changing decision, she goes “straight away from the house and the barn, straight up in the
hill pasture toward her favourite place by the brook, the shady pool under the big maple
tree” (Fisher 188). These spaces soothe and restore the girls in a way urban spaces
cannot. The reason lies in the chance for quiet and solitude, in freedom and connection to
a land where natural rhythms have been undisturbed by technology. When Jane and her
father first move into their Lantern Hill home and are getting acquainted with the place,
Jane takes stock of the things she loves about her new life on the island. Lying in bed,
she notices “how quiet it all was … no honking, no glaring lights” (83).
I am interested in the aspects of the girls’ transformations that involve proximity
to and activity in green space. The pastoral depiction of the rural world in all three
novels reflects the Romantic tradition in which they were written, but in his introduction
to Ward’s The Child in the Country, Richard Mabey brings the real world to the
justification of a country childhood, noting that “recent history is full of examples of the
growing and learning that happens when children, regardless of whether they are from a
rural or urban background, live for a while in close contact with the land and other living
things” (9). Both fiction and nonfiction effectively depict how “our connection with the
natural world depends on how we inhabit our bodies in the world” (Chawla 221). In their
urban environments, the protagonists of my primary texts are removed from their
physical lives and have no connection to the natural world, which in turn limits their
inner lives and psychological growth. In rural spaces, they engage with the land as they
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engage with their bodies, through such activities as swimming, farming, skipping, and
gardening. The result is a growing comfort with both their environments and themselves.
With one short statement, Jane gets to the root of why her time at Lantern Hill
changes her so completely: “It was nice to live where you could show how capable you
were,” she realizes after being on PEI just a short while (85). In Toronto, not only is
there no place for her to test her independence, she is also discouraged by her
grandmother from testing her abilities. Mary is likewise discouraged from engaging with
her environment by India’s climate, and Aunt Frances’ overprotection of Betsy keeps her
from developing her abilities. The transformations apparent in all three novels are rooted
in experience. But it is not until the girls get to rural places that they move from being
spectators to participants. Francis’s distinction between being in nature, and being active
in a natural environment, relates directly to my core argument, as he believes that “when
children become involved as gardeners or farmers rather than as passive observers of
gardens, a deeper significance and meaning is established” (8). Arguably, in terms of
my key narratives, a deeper healing is established, too.
The firsthand experience granted the girls in their rural locations is the key factor
in their transformations. Betsy’s early days on the Putney farm parallel Jane’s
experiences at Lantern Hill, though hers is a slower growing confidence. After protesting
numerous times that she does not know how to do certain things, a “dim notion was
growing in her mind that the fact that she had never done a thing was no proof that she
couldn’t” (102). In a rural environment, Betsy wakes up to the fact that she can learn to
be capable, a phenomenon confirmed by Louv’s research on nature as “a place to use all
the senses – and to learn by doing” (84). Mary’s awakening is directly aligned with the
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recovery of the garden. Her activity there brings the garden to its full potential. In Take
Up Thy Bed and Walk, her book on disability in classic children’s fiction, Lois Keith
writes, “The Secret Garden deals centrally with faith and healing … the psychological
dimension is more important than the religious one. Trust and belief in God are largely
replaced with confidence in the self”(96). There is more behind the ideologies of healing
landscapes than simply being in them; the key factor in why the rural landscapes are
healing for Mary, Betsy, and Jane is what I call the necessity of doing, an idea that is
supported by Edward Reed in his belief in the connection between dis-ease and lack of
primary experience in an increasingly virtual world (133).
As a means of determining the ecocritical value of an experience, Glen Love asks
if the activity “adapts us better to the world or … estranges us from it” (“Revaluing”
228). Nearly all the skills the girls develop in their respective rural environments are
purposeful -- gardening, herding cows, making butter, driving a wagon, fishing --
enriching their understanding of the connection between their lives and the natural world.
Writing about the contemporary world, Robert Pyle hypothesizes that “the extinction of
experience [is] sucking life from the land” (qtd in Kellert 141). This idea is supported by
Wendell Berry’s belief that “without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without
the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the
place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed” (qtd in Buell 78). The lack of
primary experience within the natural world today is causing a connection deficit, and the
consequences are entangled: as physical and psychological human health is affected
adversely, so is the land. A professor of landscape architecture “charted the shrinkage of
natural play spaces in urban England, a transformation of the landscape of childhood that
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occurred within a space of fifteen years” (Louv 33). With the rapidly altering landscapes
of the twenty-first century come fewer opportunities for first-hand knowledge and
experience of the land. My primary novels highlight the value of this space and this
experience, just as they highlight the ill effects of losing or being denied them.
Child psychologist Roger Barker conducted a study in the 1960s that concluded
“settings were more important determinants of his subjects’ behavior than their
personalities” (qtd. in Gallagher 127). He believed that culturally constructed places such
as offices, restaurants, and schools “encourage us to maintain the status quo” (128),
meaning there are expected and appropriate modes of behavior in given environments.
Following the idea that social settings have the most prescribed expectations of conduct
attached to them, green space provides some relief from these prescriptions and allow
more authentic aspects of personalities to appear. In the city, Jane is restrained in her role
as granddaughter and student, just as Betsy is confined by an over-caring aunt. In India,
Mary has issues of race and class affecting aspects of her nature. The girls all undergo
marked changes in personality with their relocations to green spaces; they have more
freedom to explore who they are beyond the trappings of social expectation. Writer
Barry Lopez’s belief that “the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by
genes” supports these transformations (qtd in Buell 83): in the country, Jane’s
awkwardness is replaced with self-assurance, Betsy sheds her timidity, and Mary’s
contrariness fades.
These transformations occur because of engagement with natural spaces. But in
contemporary society, as our attachment to technology advances and our detachment
from the earth increases, so grows the danger of “thinking that the dimension of nature
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[holds] no path of communication or consequence to the human body” (Flanagan 55).
Flanagan’s exploration of Susanne Antonetta’s The Body Toxic proves that a “sort of
‘mutuality’ that exists between organisms and their normal environment has become a
requirement for physiological and psychological well-being” (Dubos qtd. in Cobb 75).
Cobb calls this mutuality ‘ecology’; inherent in the term is the idea that all things are
interconnected, all reacting to each other and causing reactions. Living in cities and
places where natural life cannot affect them, the girls live wan half-lives. In country
settings, surrounded by living things, they, too, come to life.
In Practical Ecocriticism, Love calls for “ecological, naturalist, scientifically
grounded arguments that recognize human connection with nature and the rest of organic
life (8). My primary texts recognize this connection from a narrative point of view. In
The Secret Garden, for example, Mary realizes that
[f]our 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 some one. (52)
In listing the good things brought about by Mary’s relocation, Burnetts’ narrator
acknowledges that physical engagement with the world changes Mary mentally and
physically. Kahn’s assertion that “nature is not a mere cultural convention or artifact …
but part of a physical and biological reality that bounds children’s cognition” confirms
the mind-body connection (7). As noted by Keith, when “Mary finds psychological
health [she] simultaneously regains physical strength” (126). While the garden is the
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main factor in providing the “spatial agency for her psychic and bodily transformation”
(Wilkie 79), it is the overall nature of her environment that restores her. At the story’s
end, the narrator comments that when
[Mary’s] mind gradually filled itself with robins, and moorland cottages crowded
with children, with queer crabbed old gardeners and common little Yorkshire
maids, with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day, and also
with a moor boy and his ‘creatures,’ there was so room left for the disagreeable
thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and made her yellow and tired.
(294)
Mary’s close contact with living things gradually changes her outlook on life and her
interactions with others. Her transformation aligns with Kahn’s research, which supports
the belief that “people who affiliate positively with nature tend to be happier, more
relaxed, more productive, more satisfied with their homes and jobs, and healthier” (110).
And as stated in a Welsh government report from 1949,
the men and women who live most closely to the great rhythms of the natural
world possess a greater integration within themselves than is common among
those who live in cities. They are more serene and inwardly poised, less
susceptible to fluctuations of spiritual moods and depression of material
resources, because their roots are deeper, their primary necessities are assured and
their characters have been steadily formed by the influences of nature and the
unhurried circuit of changeful seasonal occupations. (Ward 97)
My primary texts illustrate that time spent in rural spaces changes the girls because the
transformations are synchronous with the rhythms of the seasons.
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The most seasonal and grounding of all the activities the three girls experience in
their rural environments centres on food production: growing, harvesting, cooking, and
consumption. All three girls tend gardens of some kind and live off the land in some way.
In tending the earth, they gain a direct relationship with it, growing the food they eat and
engaging with growing seasons and lifecycles. Food links the girls to the land; it
becomes a part of them, sustains them. In contrast, Jane’s and Mary’s bodies do not
seem to assimilate the food they eat in the city; there, food is too detached, too unnatural,
too severed from the land. And for Mary, because India is a foreign place, its food
cannot become part of her. The authors’ portrayal of urban food reflects the
contemporary “severance of the public and private mind from our food’s origin” that
concerns Louv (19). He sees this severance as a major source of disconnection between
people and the environment. Food can only be sustaining, in other words, if people
participate in and understand the processes of production.
Phyllis Bixler explicitly states how much of “the mind-body connection in the
early chapters of The Secret Garden is expressed through Mary’s relationship to food,
which often reflects her psychosocial situation” (32). During Mary’s early days at
Misselthwaite Manor, she does not feel hunger. Food is tasteless to her, and she has no
interest in eating. Bixler notes how Mary’s “lack of appetite suggests her lack of interest
in herself and her own fate” (32). Each girl suffers a lack of appetite at the beginning of
her story. For Betsy and Jane, the lack of appetite is linked to restraint, as well as a lack
of interest in food. Jane’s grandmother, with her constant judgement, paralyses the girl
at mealtimes (12). Her appetite is restored to her on the island, where she is free from her
grandmother’s influence. In Betsy’s case, Aunt Frances promotes the idea of Betsy’s
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frailty through her constant concern, and the suggestible girl lives up to these
expectations. But when Betsy arrives at Putney farm, she is stunned to discover she is
allowed to eat “all she wanted. … Nobody here knew that she ‘only ate enough to keep a
bird alive’ and that her ‘appetite was so capricious!’”(58). Food and appetite are
normalized at the Putney farm, and just as Jane can eat freely without her grandmother
passing judgement on her, so Betsy has the freedom to eat all she wants.
In her exploration of food in children’s literature, Holly Blackford discusses
“eating [as] a means of self-reproduction: consuming food is what the individual does in
order to reproduce himself” (41). Considering that each of the three protagonists suffers
from a marked lack of appetite at her story’s start, Blackford’s concept of self-
reproduction can be linked to a discussion of environment. In unnatural and/or urban
environments, the girls lack the capacity to thrive. When they are relocated to rural
places, this capacity grows unconsciously as their engagement with the land increases,
and they become more in tune with their physical environments and their bodies. In her
essay, “Trials of Taste: Ideological ‘Food Fights’ in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in
Time,” Elizabeth Gargano discusses how L’Engle, in her works, “grounds individual
sensibility firmly in the body and physical existence, in acts of touching and tasting, in
the sensations of appetite and mutual sustenance” (217). This connection between
engagement with the land and appetite is particularly emphasized in The Secret Garden.
When, after a month of running and skipping outdoors, Mary begins to enjoy her food,
Martha exclaims, “Two pieces o’ meat an’ two helps o’ rice puddin! Eh! Mother will be
pleased when I tell her what th’ skippin’-rope’s done for thee” (86). And after a morning
spent in the garden, Mary says to Colin, “I sometimes feel as if I could eat three [muffins]
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when those nice fresh heather and gorse smells from the moor come pouring in at the
open window” (267). The time Mary spends outdoors directly affects her desire for food.
Gargano notes that “L’Engle links food and its pleasure with an appreciation for
nature” (211). In my primary texts, food is likewise connected to seasons and the land.
Eating maple sugar, Betsy tastes the “[c]oncentrated sweetness of summer days … in that
mouthful, part of it still hot and aromatic, part of it icy and wet with melting snow” (113).
And food is a major factor in the girls’ restoration. After a demoralizing day at school,
Betsy is outside eating “ the last of her sugar, looking up at the quiet giant there, towering
grandly above her … there was no lump in her throat now” (114). In this scene, food is
recuperative and soothing, and attached to the land from whence it grew. Mary and
Colin’s secret food cache behind the rosebush is an especially rich example of
sustenance: the bushes are rooted in the land, the cache acts as a hidden nest, and it is the
motherly Susan Sowerby who supplies the children with their extra food.
Embracing their appetites is part of the girls’ healing. As they grow sturdier in
body, so they grow in their capabilities. Jane and Betsy in particular participate in
growing, harvesting, and cooking. They take pride in developing their skills, and they
enjoy eating and sharing their creations. Jane regards cooking as a challenge, and buys
herself a copy of Cookery for Beginners. She is fearless, inventive and not entirely
successful in her creations, experiencing for the first time the “joy of achievement” (84)
that is denied her at her grandmother’s house. Nearly all the food she works with, from
saltfish to berries, is the product of her immediate environment. And Betsy’s first
cooking venture produces applesauce that is in her “own private opinion … the very best
applesauce ever made” (96). Their new environments give the girls the chance to gain
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confidence in their abilities and in their place in the world, and to become familiar with
the harvests of the seasons.
Seasons are clearly delineated in all three novels. In Understood Betsy and The
Secret Garden, the girls arrive in their new locations in winter when the land is still
brown and bare. For Jane, her father’s letter requesting her visit arrives at “the shabby
end of winter” (41). Winter represents dormancy and death, and in her exploration of
cyclical time in Burnett’s novel, Nikolajeva discusses the “sleepy” quality of winter (33).
All three girls are dormant in their respective states of being ill at ease. At the beginning
of their stories, they are inactive and disengaged from life. As the seasons pass, Mary
and Betsy come to life in conjunction with spring, and Jane arrives on the island in
spring. This is the archetypal season of rebirth, a “time of renewal, of clearing out the
past” (Lerer 264). For the girls, it marks a fresh beginning, and an awakening. For
Mary, her winter dormancy is chased off when “the big boughs of rough fresh air blown
over the heather filled her lungs … and whipped some red colour into her cheeks and
brightened her dull eyes” (46). The two summers that Jane spends at Lantern Hill
transform her enough to sustain her through winters back in Toronto, and Betsy’s story
ends in the fall, during harvest time. Her spring and summer on the Putney farm leave
her as rosy and strong as the fruit in the apple trees she loves.
Claudia Nelson observes that “under the influence of her farming relatives, Betsy
becomes another crop to be cultivated into thriving sturdiness” (64). In essence, she
becomes a part of the land, and with this identification comes a shift in her attitude
towards her new settings. While she is eating maple sugar and gazing up at the landscape
around her, she remembers that “Uncle Henry had promised to take her up to the top as
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soon as the snow went off. She wondered what the top of a mountain would be like”
(113). As she becomes curious about and engaged with her environment, she grows at
ease with herself and comfortable with the rural landscape.
The more time the girls spend in rural places, the stronger their connection to the
land becomes. Their transformations are entwined with the seasons and growing cycles of
the green spaces they inhabit. The close association of the girls with nature is an example
of the biocentrism found at the core of much ecocritical discussion. Sigler identifies this
biocentrism as allowing “writers and critics to explore the interconnectedness of all
nature, human and nonhuman, rather than merely looking at nonhuman nature as setting
and/or metaphor for the human condition” (148). The girls begin to take on qualities of
the natural world. Colin notices that Mary has a “nice smell of leaves” about her after
being in the garden. Betsy and her charge Molly are described as a couple of “wild
creatures, careering through the air like bright blown autumn leaves” (201). And Jane’s
hair is described as russet; in the city, the colour of her hair is not noteworthy, but after
time spent on the island, she beings to take on the tints of her landscape. In their
identification of the girls as part of nature, Montgomery, Fisher, and Burnett illustrate the
facet of biocentric writing that, as Sigler defines it, lends “a perception of the self as part
of a larger, unified natural world” (148).
As the girls become more at ease with themselves, their attitude towards the land
changes. Mary in particular feels animosity for her new environment when she first
arrives at Misselthwaite, but after a month or so, she “was beginning to like to be out of
doors; she no longer hated the wind, but enjoyed it. She could run faster, and longer, and
she could skip up to a hundred. The bulbs in the secret garden must have been much
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astonished” (94). The pathetic fallacy at the end of this quote is especially interesting
from an ecocritical perspective: in considering the bulbs’ reaction to Mary’s growing
health, Burnett steps away from an anthropocentric viewpoint and instead offers an
ecocentric one. A similar moment occurs in Montgomery’s text when upon Jane’s return
to the island, her father says to her, “Come out and see the garden, Jane … it burst into
bloom as soon as it heard you were coming” (170).
The authors’ consideration of the natural world’s point of view highlights the
growing relationship the girls have with their environments. Mary’s identification with
the garden grounds her transformation: both are neglected for ten years, and both come
alive together. Jane’s connection to the island is more biological than symbolic, as the
roads there “seemed to be running through her veins like quicksilver” (66) and the “song
the sea-wind was singing was music native to her ears” (76). Neighbour Timothy Salt
tells her, “The island’s got into your blood. It does that to some folks” (141). And even
after she leaves, the place stays with her. When she returns to Toronto after her first
summer on Prince Edward Island, her grandmother says, “‘She will soon forget
everything about Lantern Hill.” But Jane’s Mother isn’t so sure. “She felt the change in
Jane, as did everybody”(146). Time spent in a place where she feels a kinship with the
land grants her a stronger body and a stronger mind.
The obvious physical transformations of the girls, along with the changes in their
self-confidence, are confirmed by the alterations of their respective names. In her
discussion of Montgomery’s text, Jean Little observes that “Jane’s position at the outset
of the book is shown clearly in the names by which she is called” (79). The same can be
said of all three girls. Their names change as their experiences in the country change
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them: Mistress Mary outgrows and sheds the ‘contrary’ aspect of her name, Victoria
Jane, whom her mother calls Jane Victoria, unshackles her name from her grandmother’s
and sticks to the name she has preferred all along: just Jane; and Elizabeth Ann, prim and
timid, becomes the more comfortable Betsy. The act of renaming reflects new lives and
new ways of identifying with the world.
Watching the stars from her Toronto window and picturing Lantern Hill, “Jane
knew she would never be the least bit afraid of grandmother again” (199). Elizabeth
Epperly recognizes that though Jane is “[b]ack in the prison of Gay Street she can still be
refreshed by Lantern Hill because she herself has been strengthened by self-knowledge”
(225). Her time in the countryside of Prince Edward Island gives her what Chawla calls
“a fund of internal strength … a fund of calm that [she] could later draw on”(214-5).
Betsy’s time in Vermont grants her the same strength. When she must find a way to
navigate a difficult situation, the answer comes to her “up by the brook under the big red
maple tree” (190). There she finds the certainty she needs to make the right decision. As
for Mary, it is Dickon who shares with her the belief that there “doesn’t seem to be no
need for no one to be contrary when there’s flowers an’ such like, an’ such lots o’
friendly wild things runnin’ about makin’ homes for themselves, or buildin’ nests an’
singin’ an whistlin’” (115). She seems to take his words to heart, for after this dialogue,
she becomes increasingly more at ease with herself and others.
In all three novels, the environment is central to the girls’ development, both
emotional and physical. The transformations are active, not magical and not incidental,
meaning the girls participate in their individual metamorphoses. Their transformations
centre on gaining experience, not maintaining innocence. Childhood is, by nature, a time
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of massive growth and transformation. But childhood is not the state they must recover
from. They are children who become at ease with themselves, and they do not have to
wait until they grow up to achieve this self-confidence.
In moving toward a healthier world, Stephen Trimble writes, “We can wish for
more … women who glory in their accomplishments and independence, but before such
growth is possible, the bedrock of self-esteem must stand solid. The land can help” (65).
The novels of Fisher, Montgomery, and Burnett show us that land can help. By each
story’s end, all three girls are sturdy, capable, and healthy after time spent in a rural
environment. After a year of living on a Vermont farm, Betsy is startled by her reflection
in a full-length mirror. She sees a “a dark-eyed, red-cheeked sturdy girl, standing straight
on two strong legs, holding her head high and free, her dark eyes looking out brightly
from her tanned face” (159). Likewise, a more confident Jane reflects that
it must be that the P.E. Islanders were nicer, or at least more neighbourly, than the
Toronto people. She did not realise that the change was in herself. She was no
longer rebuffed, frightened, awkward because she was frightened. Her foot was
on her native heath and her name was Jane. (86)
After witnessing Jane’s newfound capabilities at Lantern Hill firsthand, Phyllis, Jane’s
condescending cousin, thinks, “What had come over Victoria anyhow … Victoria whom
she used to think was so dumb? This tall, arms-and-legs girl, who had somehow ceased
to be awkward in spite of arms and legs, was certainly not dumb” (175). And at the end
of The Secret Garden, Mrs. Medlock responds to Dr. Craven’s comment that Colin is a
“new creature” with the observation that
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[s]o is the girl. …She’s begun to be downright pretty since she’s filled out and
lost her ugly little sour look. Her hair’s grown thick and health looking and she’s
got a bright colour. The glummest, ill-natured little thing she used to be and now
her and Master Colin laugh together like a pair of crazy young ones. (272).
Marina Warner notes that “[t]ransformations bring about a surprise … The breaking of
rules of natural law and verisimilitude creates the fictional world” (18). But in my
primary texts, the rules of the natural world are sustained, and the surprise is not for the
reader, but for the protagonists and the people in their lives, who can hardly believe how
the girls have changed by their stories’ ends.
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CONCLUSION
The green space of farms and gardens, where growth is deliberately encouraged,
acts as a remedy for dis-ease in my primary novels. Transformation stories such as Jane
of Lantern Hill, Understood Betsy, and The Secret Garden depict green space as a
psychological resource rather than simply a physical or economic resource (Kaplan 198).
The natural world has restorative powers, but that world is being progressively damaged,
and human connection to it severed. Considering our dependence on the natural world
for not only our well-being but also our survival, illness is a logical consequence of this
severance. From this contemporary standpoint, the appeal of my primary texts lies in the
portrayal of healthy green worlds in which sick children come back to health.
My decision to approach this thesis from an interdisciplinary perspective is, in
part, a response to Glotfelty’s belief that “the environmental crisis has been exacerbated
by our fragmented, compartmentalized, and overly specialized way of knowing the
world” (xxii). Grounding my work in theories that combine the social sciences with
tenets of literature, feminism, ecological sciences, and political activism has both
validated my beliefs surrounding landscape and literature, and deepened my
understanding of the ecology inherent in my topic. As well, an interdisciplinary approach
was invaluable in discussing both contemporary and historical understandings of the
environment in fiction from the past from both a literal and a literary perspective.
Ecocriticism is often applied to pastoral literature from the past, and much current
research is critical of the pastoral for lacking in realism. From a contemporary
perspective, the traditional literary pastoral serves little purpose in its benign depiction of
landscape. Certainly, in their respective novels, Montgomery, Fisher, and Burnett portray
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an idealized vision of rural life, but by understanding the authors’ work as a response to
the brutally fast shift from rural to urban at the time they were writing, their texts hold
cautionary value for contemporary readers facing brutal shifts of their own.
At the heart of the pastoral novels of Burnett, Fisher, and Montgomery is the hope
and power of metamorphosis. There is something encouraging about witnessing obvious
change and recovery, which explains why the transformation trope is one of the most
enduring in literature. Transformation narratives contain an element of the mythical, and
the transformations of the protagonists in my primary texts, while grounded in real world
settings, belong to the primal nature of myth. Phyllis Bixler recognizes that “its rich
characterizations, mythic imagery and themes … have allowed The Secret Garden to
transcend its own era” (8). And Elizabeth Epperly proclaims Jane of Lantern Hill to be
“wholly fairy tale” (221).
The satisfaction of wish fulfillment and a happy ending are inherent in all three
novels, but in my research, I discovered a surprising rejection of social norms by Burnett,
Fisher, and Montgomery with respect to the nature of the recovery they each depict.
While the authors maintain the status quo with regard to many elements of the dominant
culture they were writing in, they are also resistant in many ways. At a time when it was
fashionable in literature to depict girls as invalids, or as tomboys tamed by story’s end,
they instead create girls who simply become sturdy and capable. The authors deliberately
relocate the girls from indoor places and release them into active outdoor life. In granting
the girls freedom to explore green space, they also grant them strong bodies. Mary, Betsy
and Jane begin their stories as typical early twentieth-century protagonists and are
transformed through the course of their narratives into something entirely new.
94
Burnett, Fisher, and Montgomery write against the anxiety that Gilbert and Gubar
associate with nineteenth-century female authors, who were “[e]nclosed in the
architecture of an overwhelmingly male-dominated society” (xi). Burnett introduces
Mary as “the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen” (3), and positioning her “as an
unfeminine little girl emphasizes the transgressive aspects of her role”; Burnett’s
description is “deliberately deflationary, deconstructing past fictional models of idealized
childhood and of conventional heroism” (Foster 179). Betsy and Jane are both more
conventionally domestic than Mary, and therefore more in keeping with the social ideals
of the time, yet there are transgressive aspects to their roles, too. Midway through her
time at Lantern Hill, Jane dons trousers and mends a roof. As well, she discovers a
passion for the traditionally unfeminine pastime of fishing. And as June Cummins
explores in her essay on the “queer” (15) aspects of Fisher’s text, Betsy’s role model, her
Cousin Ann, is a remarkably atypical female character. In their respective novels, my
primary authors achieve a balance between preserving social norms and pushing the
boundaries of gender.
The preservation of landscape is also at the heart of these pastoral novels. Jane
Urquhart, in her recent biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery, notes that Montgomery
writes of the same places repeatedly, and “when certain features of the landscape are
revisited so often … the world achieves reassuring stability. Nothing in the landscape
will ever change” (82). The natural and unchanging beauty of the green space in all three
of my primary texts grants this stability, and particularly in light of the changing
contemporary landscape, continues to resonate.
95
Potentially, recent theories such as ecocriticism will help keep texts from the
past vital and valid by bridging past understandings of the environment in literature with
current attitudes and perspectives. Ecocriticism’s interdisciplinary nature tells us “we
must not only turn to the human sciences but also to the species’ ancient wisdom as it is
preserved in myths, rituals, fairy tales and the traditions of the performing arts. Perhaps
our soundest model will be the art of gardening” (Turner 49). As my primary texts
illustrate, pastoral green space is not restorative because it is pretty; rather, the healing is
found in participating with and becoming part of the land, as the girls do.
With diminishing green space comes the loss of firsthand experience. What are
the implications of nature as an integral part of our lives becoming a foreign experience?
Contemporary young readers are well-versed in the language of crisis surrounding
environmental issues, but many only know green space in terms of crisis, and even then,
many of them only know it through second-hand experience. In her New York Times
review of the 1999 newly illustrated edition of Understood Betsy, Elizabeth Spires writes
that this book “is sure to delight a new generation of very busy, over-scheduled children
whose own chances for early independence and initiative are limited” (n.pag.). Delight,
or confound? To what degree are the nature-based aspects of fiction from the past still
accessible to modern readers?
Contemporary urban and degraded landscapes must be considered in the analysis
of contemporary literature, but their precursors need to be understood for contemporary
readers to recognize what they are responding to. Sheila Egoff refers to fiction from the
past still popular today as the survivor texts (22). But there is an increasing
disconnection between the contemporary world and the worlds depicted in literature from
96
prior centuries. From an environmental perspective, it is important these texts survive as
they serve as a reference point for what was, what has been lost, and what has changed.
Leavis and Thompson write, “If we forget the old order we shall not know what kind of
thing to strive towards, and in the end there will be no striving, but a surrender to the
‘progress’ of the machine” (76).
In an essay on texts that have survived through the ages, Peter Dickinson writes of
readers “to whom these survivals are permanent features in the landscape of the mind –
trees, as it were, which were already full-grown when they themselves first opened their
eyes and will still be there for the most part when they finally close them” (92). Such
personal connection to fiction from the past needs fostering. Contemporary trends in
literary theory tend to focus on the problems inherent in classic fiction, which negates the
better story. The green spaces of The Secret Garden, Understood Betsy and Jane of
Lantern Hill will stand when their issues of politics, race, class, and gender have faded.
These transformation narratives make clear that in green space and in literature is the
preservation of the world.
97
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