Agnieszka Holland’s ‘The Secret Garden’ (1993)
reflections on the two-year anniversary of my mother's death
My name is Mary Lennox. I was born in India. It was hot, and strange, and lonely in India. I didn't like it. Nobody by my servant, my ayah, looked after me. My parents didn't want me. My mother cared only to go to parties. And my father was busy with his military duties. I was never allowed to go to the parties. I watched them from my mother's bedroom window. I was angry, but I never cried. I didn't know how to cry.
Recently we re-watched the 1993 adaptation of The Secret Garden. The film is beloved in our family, pulled off the shelf for viewing year after year. I have a soft spot in my heart for the beautiful novel by Francis Hodgson Burnett, originally published in 1911—the edition illustrated by Tasha Tudor was much coveted by my pre-teen self. But the visual and aural representation that director Agnieszka Holland created in film has sent the roots of the story deeper into my heart than the words of the novel could go.
The original story and the subsequent creations have been parsed apart by many a scholar and many a critic, some exploring themes of gender and power, and others observing political commentary. My own perspective is neither scholarly analysis or a critique. All I have to offer are thoughts from one who treasures both the book and Holland’s expression of it.
I love the central theme of a garden secretly tended, pregnant with long-cultivated and vibrant life.
I love the way the story winds through its characters gently waking up to connection with the ecosystem they inhabit.
And I especially love the way Burnett with her words, and then Holland with her addition of a lovely soundtrack, incredible storytelling, and dreamlike visuals, subtly handled the casting of and living under spells.
Magic is a common element in the conversations among the children, both in the film and in the source novel. There isn’t any context given for it, no clarification of “this is fantasy”, or “of course, the unfolding events were all coincidence.” There isn’t any justification, or any religious static, or self-awareness. There is none of the broken fourth wall and birds-eye view present alongside Magic in C. S. Lewis’s allegorical Chronicles of Narnia, none of the complex fantasy histories of Tolkien, none of the worldbuilding of Rowling’s Harry Potter or Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle.
The Magic in The Secret Garden just is. It swells up from the earth with the creeping in of spring, it shows up in the release of paralyzing faith in the grip of illness, it binds human hearts together across time and distance and differing visions.
It recomposes old stories and replaces them with truer, freer forms of expression. It lives inside the dead-looking rose bush stems in the garden Mary comes to inhabit.
It permeates the soil out of which the new bulbs and seedlings rise with the coming of warmer moorwinds. It courses through the story Mary tells her bedridden cousin Colin about a rajah who lived outwardly as a man but held the whole universe in his chest (there to be seen if ever one happened to look down the rajah’s throat).
Perhaps this commonness of Magic is why The Secret Garden feels so deeply comforting to me. It doesn’t ask for grand feats of logical belief, complete with requisite proofs. It doesn’t introduce anything intrinsically foreign to the human experience, or promise the granting of some passionate wish.
Instead, it begins with an element we all do—or will—comprehend in some form: a loss that uproots what is well known. Mary’s parents die. And all that feels familiar and safe, if also constricting and frustrating, is stripped away, replaced by a wholly unfamiliar landscape. Left without a caregiver Mary is sent from India, where she has spent her whole childhood, to the gloom of wintry English moors.
What follows is not some profound extraction from the pain of circumstance. No one shows up to intervene in Mary’s miserable existence with inflated promises for the future. No one brings her therapy or hovers over her to force a fixing of her spirit.
Instead, she wanders out alone into the frosty world into which she’s been plunged as a consequence of her parents’ deaths, without aim. She does not know how to play and her body and heart alike are in winter.
It is within her solitude and her wandering that she finds an invitation waiting for her. Instead of retreating into an internal fortress, she reaches outward, following that invitation to find tangible threads she may trace. Brick paths. Gardens behind walls. Flowing ivy swaying over locked doors. Gorse and shrub and the cheeping of a red-breasted robin who tends a mind of his own. An old key. A way through the mist. A door into a forgotten garden.
There is no swift salvation for her, no fairytale version of a Hail Mary pass on which all hopes for restoration hang. There is simply the garden, appearing as it does to lie dead beneath the resting shroud of the winter season. The garden, which, despite being long neglected, has not once lost its connection to Life.
It is there that the Magic unfolds. It begins with awareness, with Mary learning that stillness and dormancy does not equal death. She learns how to see past the cloaking of the cold and find thriving life rests within it, waiting and watching. As her engagement with what already is in existence deepens, a spell is cast. Not a spell that cloaks or manipulates but one that begins to peel away layers of disconnection. A spell of invitation, as it were.
Come and see.
Life calls to life.
There is no dramatic makeover, no vivid recovery. There is no denial of the loss that was. Instead, Mary discovers that she has a desire to plant seeds—cockleshells, lilies, daffodils—and in that simple act becomes a co-creator with the Magic that already is. The seeds grow, and with them the pleasure of their tending. And as she tends that hidden-away garden, she finds herself reaping both the delight of the garden itself and the far-permeating real-world Magic that flows from her connection with the earth and into the world around her.
One garden nourishes one girl…that is, until the ripple effects spread outward. As Mary begins to inhabit her body and her world, she inevitably, through the simple act of being exactly who she is, draws the people around her into restoration. Her rooting into the inherent Magic of life in turn invites her withering cousin and walled-away uncle to develop their own relationships with the garden, and with the lives they inhabit beyond the garden itself. For her uncle, it means returning to face the reality of having abandoned both his vision for life and his son. For her cousin, who lives within house walls, cut off from earth and sunshine alike, this means releasing the fantasy of helplessness and death that has defined him for as long as he can remember and engaging with his own vitality.
“Are you making this magic?” asks Colin.
“No,” says Mary. “You are.”
In the end, the story is fairytale-esque, simplistic in its resolution. In the end Colin no longer languishes; his father returns after a decade of neglect; Mary unwalls her heart.
It is a happy ending, both without melodrama and without the overt extremes of an adult world: there are no ultimatums, no conversations about rebuilding trust, no demands to accountability for parental failure. There are no remarks on the trauma of death and relocation. The storytelling, coming as it is from the perspective of a child, glosses over much of what the adult world recognizes as obstacles hard to surmount.
Even in its simplicity, though, the underlying restoration of life after death does not feel fantastical. It feels true. There is no promise of happily ever after, no erasure of what still may come as pain.
The Magic simply remains, in what is.
Before the film fades into an impressionistic haze on a darkening screen, Holland’s Mary, only her back visible as she meanders away from the camera, concludes the telling of her own story.
The spell was broken. My uncle learned to laugh, and I learned to cry. The secret garden is always open now. Open, and awake, and alive. If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
The Secret Garden is unique in that it is a story that is without mothers, and yet perhaps more about mothers than any other story I know.
The stage is set clearly, particularly in Agnieska Holland’s envisioning of the tale. Mary finds herself motherless in life, and motherless in death. In the end, she is drawn full circle to awaken to her own life within a mother’s garden—not HER mother’s garden, but the garden of a woman within her motherline. A garden that would not have existed without the presence of one who passed out of life before her. A garden that reaches her because it was tended with such great love that the spirit of it did not fade in power with the passing of the one originally in relationship with it.
To me, this reflects one of the deepest threads of story within The Secret Garden. Every shifting element within the story is contained by and contains mothers. Not once do we get a direct view at any mother. Instead, we see them in reflections, mirrored and echoed within the worlds they inhabited and the worlds they birthed: their children. Their gardens.
Mary’s mother, in the flashes of gold and beauty, in her daughter’s bitterness at her life and absence of tears at her death. Mrs. Susan Sowerby, in her daughter Martha’s enthusiastic goodwill and her son Dickon’s deep love of and intimacy with living things. In the surprising gift of a skipping rope. Colin’s mother (Mary’s aunt) in her verdant roses, in the crater her absence left in her husband, and in the smiling portrait that gazes down into the room of her son, where his life has been made an altar to illness and loss. In the faithfulness of the crusty old groundsman who continues the simple acts of caretaking originally asked of him, years beyond the life of the one who asked.
The camera lens is not on the mothers, but the mothers are the ones who set the tone and shape the story. It is the groundwork they have laid that leads their children back into connection from the separation inevitably imposed by death.
In her book Mothering From Your Center1, Tami Lynn Kent writes the following:
The task of mothering children reminds me of The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich. In the story, there is a man whose entire life is spent tending a grove of trees that will be made into a sacred drum when he is no longer alive. In mothering, we are tending the seeds of the sacred. Because we may scarcely witness the results of our tending, our satisfaction must arise from the sacred act of our tending.
Finding the garden, once tended by that long-gone mother and aunt, did not change the reality of death. At first, even the garden itself seems dead to Mary’s vision, a decayed and silent thing locked away from the world. But once within its walls, Mary finds that there is a life that runs far deeper and stronger than the ebb and flow of the seasons, a life that extends far beyond the physical embodiment of the two women who shared kinship across continents and time.
There among the roses, among the bulbs waiting to emerge from the earth and cry out in bloom, are the years of the mother who dwelt here. Here is her spirit, alive and wild and welcoming the child who never consciously knew her back to the fullness of a wakened life.
I’ve come here before when no one saw me. Your mother was so fond of this garden; she would ask me to look after her roses. She’d never ask anybody else. When she went away, orders were no one were to come in here. I come anyway. She gave her orders first.
— Ben Weatherstaff, groundskeeper
Is it a bit of a leap, finding all this in a family film? Perhaps. But the joy of being in relationship with any artistic work is getting to receive the unique overlap of one’s individual perspective with the artist’s vision. I’ll make that leap—if leap it is—again and again.
And you can find me out back this summer, in one of the gardens on our land (her gardens), tending her life in the soil on which we dwell today. Our stay here won’t last forever; the winds of change will call our family elsewhere before too long, whether that be in five years or ten. But when we go, it’ll be her life that goes with us.
After all, we are the worlds she birthed.
We are the gardens she yet nourishes.
We are the forest she planted, the visible evidence of the sacred act of her tending.
And we are nurturing the seeds of the sacred that we have been given to plant, knowing our practice of tending them as they grow is part of the greater interconnection of thriving life—even if what we tend does not bloom until we too have returned to the earth beneath it.
May we all find our way daily into that Magic.
Warmly,
Jan
Are there any stories that you hold near and dear to your heart, either in thinking of your own mother or in carrying a vision within your own mothering? I invite you to share in the comments, or in reply to this email.
You may also enjoy
The Makings of Love
Boxes of Darkness: An Inheritance for Our Children
To Accept That There Are No Choices Left
recently updated to Wild Mothering, Kent’s preferred edition of the book.
I loved reading this. It’s funny to me because as a very young girl, I know I had the Secret Garden, but I don’t remember if I read it or not. I feel like I read it over and over. When I started reading it for my boys this last year, the images of it in my bedroom on a shelf came back to me. I remember holding it in my hands and having a very strange relationship to the book—. As I was reading this, it reminded me of all the fairytales told in a more modern setting. Always the young girl, maiden, losing her own mother. And then she has to pass some sort of test to uncover the meaning of life/who she is/etc. This post reminded me that in the Secret Garden she is tended to by The Mother. When her heart is hardened, never mothered by her own mother, then she returns to the Earth Mother for her nourishment. Now it makes sense why I was torn by this book as a girl. I lacked birth mother mothering as a child, and subconsciously knew, that we all have to be a daughter of the Earth, a little wild, not always strictly “safe,” but always loved and welcomed to be part of life’s seasons and unfolding. In nature, all parts of us are allowed-Mary’s undesirable traits were never scorned by Mother Nature. She was in her own Winter, just like Earth. You opened so much up here for me with this share. Thank you.