Not-So-Secret Gardens

I sent off the paper this morning that I'm submitting for the edited collection celebrating the upcoming 100th anniversary of the publication (in 1911) of The Secret Garden. My paper looks at a collection of books, mainly picture books but also two longer works, published in the last decade of the last century that seem to borrow extensively from The Secret Garden, in that in almost every single book, children from disparate socio-economic backgrounds, themselves maimed or hurting in various ways, come together to reclaim an abandoned plot of ground, turning it into a flourishing garden. In the process, the individuals themselves are healed, and as they heal themselves, they also heal their community.

My paper argues that the profliferation of these books on Burnett's resonant theme, all published in such a short period of time, contribute to making the theme seem predictable and doctrinaire, the slavish following of a formula rather than an original re-inhabiting of a timeless truth. There are only so many times that one can read about a vacant lot in the inner city, littered with junk and garbage, transformed by an ethnically diverse group of children and adults (including, always, at least one person in a wheelchair), into a celebration of community. The most egregiously heavy-handed in his treatment of this theme is Newbery-medalist Paul Fleischman in Seedfolks, who offers us no fewer than 13 almost instantaneous transformations of his narrating characters, often at their very first glimpse of the garden-in-progress. His characters are Vietnamese, Rumanian, Guatemalan, Jewish, Haitian, Korean, Mexican, Indian, British. . . And just as the cynical reader asks, "But where is the person in the wheelchair?" in rolls Mr. Myers, African-American AND in a wheelchair.

But of course, as an author myself I know that none of these authors set out to write something banal and formulaic. It's more the accumulated totality of all the books together that contributes to this numbing effect. So maybe it's unfair to be so critical. It isn't any one author's fault that everybody else had the same idea at roughly the same time in publishing history. Well, perhaps except for Fleischman, who himself had the same idea 13 times in the span of a single book.

And yet I can't help remembering my high school English teacher who summarized the plot of King Lear for us in six words: "Eyes, eyes, blindness, blindness, get it?" Here, it feels like, "Gardens, gardens, healing, healing. Get it?"

I got it.