The novel implies that, if she had grown up as part of a poor family like the Sowerbys , she would never have been able to act out the way she does at the beginning of the novel. But Mary doesn't only come from a rich family—she comes from a rich Anglo-Indian family. That is, her parents are British people living high and mighty in colonial India. Frances Hodgson Burnett emphasizes the fact that a lot of Mary's insults have a specifically racist edge, since she is used to throwing them at her oppressed servants.
For example, Mary wants to call her nanny, "Pig! Daughter of Pigs! So Mary is doubly spoiled: she thinks she can treat people however she wants because she has lots of money and because she is a white English girl in British India. Now the novel is not at all on Mary's side in her awful behavior to her Indian servants.
But the novel still demonstrates some definite prejudices about India of its own. Mary Lennox starts out the novel "the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen" 1. Obviously, the thing that makes the difference in Mary's appearance—awful at the start of the book and pretty at the end of it—is all of her outdoorsy exercise. As Mary puts in physical work, she looks healthier and healthier, which does her looks a world of good. So Mary isn't only better looking, she's also better overall.
It's an important sign of how much she is improving as a person that, even though she's getting prettier, she also isn't obsessed with how she looks. Unlike Mary's mother, who was vain and shallow, Mary's prettiness comes second to who Mary is on the inside at least, by the end of the book. For more on Mary's beautiful but self-absorbed mother, be sure to read up on Mrs. Lennox elsewhere in this section. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. The servants must, however, obey her every whim, in this can be found the source of her imperiousness.
Mary's only pleasure, even at this early point in the novel, is play-gardening: she sits beneath a tree and idly places cut flowers in mounds of sound. After the death of her parents in the cholera epidemic, she engages in the same activity at the house of the clergyman and his family.
Throughout the first part of the novel, Mary remains standoffish and rude; however, the omniscient narrator consistently makes it clear that Mary is only so awful because of the wretched circumstances of her early childhood. The reader has access to the loneliness and displacement that Mary herself is not able to express, but feels deeply.
The instant her circumstances improve—that is, the instant that she arrives at Misselthwaite—Mary too begins to improve. She becomes active and interested in the world around her in India, she was always "too hot and languid to care about anything.
Mary develops real affection for her maidservant, Martha Sowerby, and for the robin redbreast that lives in the secret garden.
Read more about The Secret Garden. Search the site Search term is required. Return to the Secret Garden 2 reviews with an average rating of 1 out of 5. Author: Holly Webb Publisher: Scholastic. Holly Webb Holly Webb lives in Berkshire with her husband, three children and two cats.
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