Thinking Aloud: Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden

I had avoided Frances Hodgson Burnett for a long time. I had worked a little bit on the film adaptations of her book The Little Princess, and then didn't really dare to venture out to her other books. Or even The Little Princess. The colonial ideologies seemed too much on the face, and her little girls too stereotypical. Then,I picked up a copy of The Secret Garden from Half-Price a month ago. And I read it. Why? Because I figured, I should just try to process the colonialist shit rather than avoid it. Now, The Secret Garden does have its share of very direct colonial-racist representations. Indians are of only two kinds--the spoilt "Rajah" s and the ever-acquiescent, too-docile servants. The protagonist Mary loses both her parents in a cholera epidemic. Again, another of the stereotypes: India as the land of deathly diseases. And guess what, Mary is a spoilt brat. Why? This is what Burnett herself has to say about it:

She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived (4).

Basically, some of the Indian "darkness" had rubbed off on Mary. A good part of the book is thus all about re-whitening Mary. And of course, who accomplishes that task? The honest, upright working folks of Yorkshire. Now, this is where the book gets really interesting. The white working-class has been represented as somewhat of an anti-thesis of the Indian servants and workers. The white working folks are honest, straightforward, with distinct senses of their own selves and most importantly, not willing to give in completely to the whims of their masters. What interested me personally in this book is that, there are long chapters about the inner-lives of the servants who works in Mary's uncle's mansion. There are long and complicated accounts of her relationship with them. Now, this is not the terrain of the classic Victorian novel, where the interactions between the servants and the employers are only hinted at. The servants in Victorian novel are mostly shadowy presents. But in Burnett's book, they are well-developed characters. Now, all of them, including Mary, end up working for the final rejuvenation of the white, aristocratic patriarchal authority. And it seems from reading the book, that white aristocratic women and the white working class, men and women alike, exist to assist and facilitate the smooth functioning of the white, aristocratic patriarchal order. But it's not that ideological thrust that fascinated me in this book. What fascinated me was, how a writer can have interesting portrayals of marginal characters, and still end up in an extremely problematic place. Yes, this book is making me think a lot about the relationship between craft and ideology. I don't have any answers yet, but I am trying to think about certain things which are avoided both in literary criticism and creative writing pedagogy.