“Tha'lt Be like a Blush-Rose When Tha‘ Grows up, My Little Lass”: English Cultural and Gendered Identity in The Secret Garden

Abstract

Although gardens as cultural landscapes have been examined within geography in relation to class, the ways in which gardens are constitutive of and constituted by gender relations have been largely ignored. Feminist geographers are now engaging with the gender implications of landscape representation and this paper, in which the multiple significances of the garden in Frances Hodgson Burnett's (1911) children's story The Secret Garden are explored, is a contribution to this field. Using an approach informed by feminisms and poststructuralisms I draw attention to intersections of late-19th and early-20th century discourses on Englishness, gender, class, and nature, gravitating around three children and set within an old abandoned garden. The garden is the site for a critical reading of the bodily regeneration of gendered and classed English identities whilst it is also a space of other possibilities.