Secret Garden II; or Lady Chatterley's Lover as Palimpsest

Abstract

Secret Garden II; or Lady Chatterley's Lover as Palimpsest Judith Plotz (bio) Juliet Dusinberre's Alice to the Lighthouse convincingly demonstrates that a number of key modern texts are underwritten by 19th-century children's books. Just as a palimpsest reveals an earlier script beneath a later one, so the image of a children's book may lie beneath an exigent and sophisticated modern work. Yet contemporary literary studies still tend to separate children's literature from serious adult texts so that, at first blush, it may even today seem peculiar to juxtapose Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) with D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). In terms of popular cliché, The Secret Garden is known as a charming, escapist, and safely canonical book for girls and nostalgic women, while Lady Chatterley's Lover remains notorious as a sexually scandalous and culturally bellicose monument of modernism. In terms of more exigent readings, Burnett's work appears a powerfully feminist and Lawrence's a phallocentrically apocalyptic work. Under neither interpretation, however, do the two novels show much obvious affinity. Though there is some chronological overlap between these two English writers (Burnett lived from 1849 until 1924, Lawrence from 1885 until 1930), they seem to belong to different moral, political, and social universes. Antithetical in every way, the middle-class Burnett yearns after what the working-class Lawrence despises. Burnett's enormously successful Little Lord Fauntleroy romanticizes the very aristocratic glamour Lawrence derides as the evidence of a dying civilization. Most of Burnett's popular children's novels—Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, The Lost Prince—axe tales of making good in quite a worldly way, while most of Lawrence's fictions—Women in Love, The Plumed Serpent, The Woman Who Rode Away, The Man Who Died—are tales of breaking out and away from social norms. Burnett is an a-political writer, largely content with the status quo; her "Boy Who Became a Socialist," for example, treats as comedy a child's yearning for social justice. Lawrence, on the contrary, is an apocalyptic writer ready to junk the entire apparatus of human civilization. Burnett is most successfully a children's writer, especially a girls' writer, for whom she writes fables of accommodation to adulthood. Lawrence writes for adults and often even against children in the sense that adult individuation demands an escape from the dreary norms of the child-centered middle-class family. Whereas Burnett writes in a traditionally minor genre, children's fiction, Lawrence writes in the major modern English genre, "the bright book of life." Burnett belongs to the traditionally minor gender; she's a "Lady Novelist" like Annie S. Swan and Mrs. Ewing (Lawrence in Zytaruk 76). Lawrence belongs to the major gender which he inhabits as a self-conscious Prophet and Sage in the tradition of Blake and Carlyle. Despite the antithesis between the two tellers, Burnett's The Secret Garden and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover show striking resemblances in the configuration of characters, in the individual characters themselves, and in the dominant themes. I will consider patterns common to the two works and speculate on the reasons for the congruence.1 The principal resemblance is obvious. Both The Secret Garden and Lady Chatterley's Lover are organized around triangular relationships of a female character—Mary Lennox or Connie Chatterley—in an intense and formative relationship with two different male figures. Each of the three main characters in each book represents a different social class. The female figure is middle class and deracinated. Mary Lennox, a landless poor relation of the Cravens, is an Indian-born outsider in both Yorkshire and England. Connie Chatterley, of Scottish stock, a daughter of the artistic bourgeoisie, also lacks any real roots (or real estate) in England and has received "an aesthetically unconventional upbringing"(6) in France, Holland, Italy, and Germany. Mary and Connie are also parallel as displaced, rootless beings, literally outsiders in England and metaphorically outsiders alienated from their own bodies. Each, however, is restored to her own body moving from thinness to plumpness, from rigidity to pliancy by means of eroticized touch. Two male figures, one upper-class and...