"Crippling Colin: Disability in Two Film Versions of The Secret Garden."

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C H A P T E R T W E L V E

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Crippling Colin: Disability in Two Film Versions of The Secret Garden

Martha Stoddard Holmes

Most analyses of The Secret Garden touch on disability in one way or another, whether they frame the novel’s depiction of it as handicap, hysteria, invalidism, sickliness, or any number of other terms associated with Archibald Craven, Colin Craven, or Mary Lennox.1 There has been little sustained critical analysis, however, of the novel’s represen-tations of the embodied physical, cognitive, and/or emotional distinc-tions classified as “disabilities,” or any interrogation of disability’s cen-trality to The Secret Garden and its immense and sustained popularity. Further, the novel’s extension and supplementation through two key film interpretations produced in 1949 and 1993 has received no atten-tion from disability studies scholars.

Just as The Secret Garden is a key contributor to twentieth-century cultural representations of disability, cinematic renderings of the novel remind us that disability is a dynamic concept whose social meaning in a particular historical-cultural moment both reflects and shapes people’s lived experiences. Two acclaimed film versions of the book

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made nearly fifty years apart—the 1949 MGM film directed by Fred Wilcox and the 1993 American Zoetrope Studios production directed by Agniezska Holland—reflect not only two interpretations of in The Secret Garden but also two sets of dramatic and technical strategies for enacting its meaning to film audiences in two historical eras, with ref-erence to contemporary fears, desires, and assumptions about disability. The films’ differences reflect both different eras of film technology and different approaches to literature-to-film translation.

While the 1949 production is arguably less “faithful” to Burnett’s vi-sion of disability—particularly in terms of Archibald Craven—its (also somewhat anachronistic) translation of Colin’s condition into familiar images of polio lends disability an immediacy and intimacy that the 1993 version lacks, until that disability is completely discounted as a question of conditioning and will. In partial contrast, the 1993 film, with both the technical means and the stylistic inclination to encour-age audiences to imagine disability treatments of the late Edwardian era, presents a historically plausible production while preserving the novel’s emphasis on psychological conditions, including those in peo-ple with distinctive bodies. While the novel and both films contribute to a larger landscape of cultural narratives about disability, all three fail—in interesting ways—to resolve the questions they raise about physical impairment and social relations.

Overdetermination of Disability in the Novel

Embodiment, particularly its visual aspects, is emphasized from the very first paragraph of The Secret Garden, where we learn that Mary Lennox was “the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen” at Misselthwaite Manor. What constitutes “disagreeable” in this context is anatomized: “She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or an-other” (3). As the narrative proceeds, the binaries of plainness/beauty, illness/health, and disability/ability are thematically overdetermined in the intertwined national narratives of India and England, as well as in those of the central characters. Mary’s sickliness is well established as a marker for both the environmental and social unhealthiness of


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mother India (encompassing both cholera and Mary’s abusive relation-ship to her ayah) and the disordered moral upbringing engendered by Mrs. Lennox, a beautiful but weak and foolish mother.2 Mary’s early “cure” at the hands of the Sowerby family and the wholesome natural environment of northeastern England keeps the first part of the novel focused on health and illness, but it also establishes embodiment as multiply anchored and culturally constructed, even if there are serious limits to how much the novel questions its own assumptions about the causes of anyone’s illness.

In addition to its early focus on “sickliness,” the novel incorporates visible physical disability into the plot, first as a way to create an af-finity between Mary and a new home she views as largely alien and unpleasant, but later as a feared outcome of “constitutional” weakness.3 Mary hears from children of the English clergyman she stays with be-fore sailing from India that her uncle Archibald Craven is “a hunch-back” who is “horrid” and “so cross he won’t let [people come near him], and they wouldn’t come if he would let them” (8). Partly because of the obvious link between their social identities (one “disagreeable” and the other “cross”), she is curious rather than frightened, wonder-ing “What would he be like? What was a hunchback? She had never seen one. Perhaps there were none in India” (9). Thus, one interesting outcome of Burnett’s disagreeable protagonist is Mary’s sense of affinity for her physically disabled uncle, and the reader’s invitation—through identification with Mary—to share this affinity for Archibald.

The novel further develops the concept of a hunchback, both on realistic social levels and in terms of imaginative cultural narratives, through Mary’s conversations with Mrs. Medlock on her journey to Misselthwaite Manor. Medlock’s frank (within limits, as we later real-ize) conversation with Mary about Archibald Craven’s history posits a disabled psychology for him based on his physical differences, narrates briefly how his situation was socially constructed (and how his mar-riage overturned those constructions), and develops Mary’s attitude toward the evolving concept of a hunchback in which she is increas-ingly engaged. Medlock explains that Craven’s “crooked back . . . set him wrong” until his marriage to a “sweet, pretty thing . . . people said . . . married him for his money. But she didn’t—she didn’t, positively” (11).4 Mary “had never thought of the hunchback’s being married and



she was a trifle surprised.” Her imaginative leap from this love story to the fairy tale “Riquet a la Houppe,” “about a poor hunchback and a beautiful princess,” makes Mary feel sympathy for Craven until Med-lock’s continued recounting of Craven’s misanthropy spurs her mind to a more gothic narrative of a “house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up and with their doors locked” and a “man with a crooked back who shut himself up also!” (12). Chastened to remember that she will not be able to roam freely in those rooms, “just as suddenly as she had begun to be rather sorry for Mr. Archibald Craven she began to cease to be sorry and to think he was unpleasant enough to deserve all that had happened to him” (12). The cumulative effect of all these impressions is to make physical disability a site of ambiguity and ambivalence—and to focus the reader on a range of cultural narratives about disability long before a disabled person enters the plot.

Mary’s first encounter with Craven forces a recalibration of her expectations, as she notes that he is “not so much a hunchback as a man with high, rather crooked shoulders” and “not ugly. His face would have been handsome if it had not been so miserable” (68). In shifting from “a hunchback” to “a man,” the novel enacts a version of “people first” language, normalizing Archibald’s disability by emphasizing his personhood, not his back, as the index of his identity. The novel thus sets up—both for Mary and for the reader—an awareness that it is difficult or impossible to establish one reality or “truth” of disability; its meaning is determined not so much by the body’s appearance or function, but rather by received cultural narratives and the assump-tions they engender, combined with actual encounters with disability in other people or (ultimately, since we will all be disabled if we live long enough) ourselves.

Her encounter with Archibald thus prepares Mary well for discover-ing Colin, a boy whose impairments are all anticipated rather than evi-dent. In fact, if the garden is the secret outside Misselthwaite Manor, the secret inside it is its powerfully damaging cultural constructions of disability. Colin’s feared and anticipated spinal deformity is the central concern of the estate, not only for Medlock and the other servants, who spend their lives catering to Colin or trying to keep him from Mary, but also for Archibald, who structures his life around forgetting Colin’s existence. The entire household, if we extend its reach to all



the staff, is in effect a disabled family: all are interlocked in the Craven men’s disability identity.5 Further, family and disability are inextricably linked in the imagination of Misselthwaite Manor and its environs, as all expect that even if Colin has not yet demonstrated inherited disability, it is just a matter of time, for “Mrs. Medlock had said his father’s back had begun to show its crookedness in that way when he was a child” (101).

With Mary’s discovery of Colin, the novel shifts its focus from Mary’s Anglo-Indian “sickliness,” “sallowness,” and selfishness to Colin and his father’s bodily conditions, which the novel ultimately establishes as mostly psychosomatic. As is the case in many well-loved children’s books, Burnett develops Colin into a lesser protagonist, including his inner life in the narration, mostly with a focus on his fears and beliefs about his propensity to disability and their sources in others’ behavior. If initially, from Mary’s perspective, Colin is a disabled object, by the end he moves to a subject position, actively rejecting the terms of ob-jectification Ben Weatherstaff (and others) have used about him:

Colin forgot that he had ever had a back. His face flushed scarlet and he sat bolt upright. “I’m not a cripple!” he cried out furiously. “I’m not!” . . .

“What’s tha’ been doin’ with thysel’—hidin’ out o’ sight an’ lettin’ folk think tha’ was cripple an’ half-witted?”

“Half-witted!” said Colin angrily. “Who thought that?”“Lots o’ fools,” said Ben. (129, 132)

In its move from Mary to Colin—a shift a number of scholars, particularly feminist ones, have noted and questioned critically—the novel also moves from generalized physical and moral illness to a more specific, if no less ambiguous, focus on disability, in the process (or maybe by design) raising the stakes of its claims about the power of nature to heal. If wholesome activity and the spiritual power of nature itself can cure “disagreeableness” in a child clearly sturdy enough to resist the pandemic disease of cholera, it may be able to cure a poorly diagnosed invalidism and hereditary predisposition to spinal disease. And indeed, by the end of the novel, the story fulfills these claims, as well as releasing Colin and his father from their hypochondria and melancholy. The only conditions it never attempts to ameliorate are cholera and Archibald Craven’s “crooked” shoulders.



Many Secret Garden scholars address Burnett’s imaginative develop-ment of the healing power of nature through Mary, Colin, and Ar-chibald; none addresses the way that her claims concurrently construct physical disability as something open to suspicion, however brightly it may be cloaked in encouragement and hope. The rehabilitation of all three main characters through fresh air, good food, effort, and a shift in perspective suggests that disability itself may be an issue of poor attitude. Attitudes—particularly those of nondisabled people toward those with disabilities—are certainly critical to the social construction of disability.6 At the same time, the idea one might simply “take up his bed and walk” bolsters suspicions that disabled people are malingering, a resilient social attitude.7 Further, along the way to the “cure” of Co-lin’s disability, the novel reinforces the idea that permanent disability is a terrible condition. Colin’s rejection of the insulting terms cripple and half-wit, followed by a display of his “straight” legs to Ben, suggests that having an atypical body or mind is itself something to be rejected. There is no remaining thread of affinity for Archibald, despite its ear-lier emergence.

One unexplored significance of representations of disability in The Secret Garden—whether in book or screen versions—is accordingly how, to what end, and to whose benefit the story articulates the cul-tural location of disability.8 The story’s recurrent focus on disability and attention to its cultural constructedness may produce an important nar-rative of the power of social stigma to create needlessly negative experi-ences of disablement. Alternately (or concurrently), The Secret Garden may reiterate that most disabled people could muster themselves into ability with the right amounts of faith, will, and fresh air.

Biographical ContextsWhile Burnett scholars have not explored these questions, several have suggested biographical sources for the novel’s focus on disability. Burnett’s own life (not surprisingly, but significantly) was multiply marked by illness and disability. Her first husband, physician Swan Burnett, “walked with a pronounced limp, the result of a childhood injury” (Gerzina 28). According to her sister Edith, the source of their early connection was Frances’s “tenderness for any sort of disability or disadvantage,” an assessment confirmed after their divorce by Frances



herself, who said, “He was lame . . . that was enough for me” (qtd. in Gerzina 203). She herself experienced “nervous exhaustion” from over-work throughout her life, as well as the aftereffects of serious injury. Finally, and for many scholars most significantly, ten years before writ-ing The Secret Garden, Burnett’s oldest son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis.

The impact of these life experiences on the novel is obviously impossible to gauge in any definitive way, and there are surely many reasons beyond biography to spur someone to write about disability. All the same, Burnett’s biographical details suggest ways to read Burnett’s construction of disability and critics’ handling of this element in the novel. For example, biographer Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina argues provocatively that The Secret Garden functions as “the resurrection of Lionel, the boy who rises from his sickbed to cure himself with the aid of belief and nature,” (263) an argument that reiterates the assertion by Foster and Simons that “the portrait of Colin Craven, lying patheti-cally on a sickbed, suggests consumptive symptoms, while his ultimate recovery can be read as a projection of her wish fulfillment, and even as an attempt to assuage [Burnett’s] guilt at having spent so much time away from her children during their formative years” (173). Reading the novel in this context reinforces the notion of continual interplay between the definiteness of death (by cholera, by a fall, by tuberculosis) and the indefiniteness that can characterize illness and disability, not just in the space in between death and cure, but in a more permanent sense in that many forms of illness or disability are invisible and neither curable nor fatal. Lionel’s own health seems to have been continually under discussion among almost everyone in the Burnett family, even after his death, as his mother attempted retrospectively to locate the first signs of the illness that would kill him and wondered if she could have done anything to change the outcome. His death, however, was immovable, except via the transformative power of fiction.9

Manuscript EvidenceEven without multiple biographical referents, disability was clearly central to Burnett’s vision for the novel. Perhaps the most pertinent or persuasive context is the manuscript itself, whose revisions actually reduce disability’s prevalence in fascinating ways. As Gretchen Rec-tor documents, in one draft, Dickon is disabled. When Martha first



describes him to Mary, she says that the animals “feel as if he was one of them when he goes swingin’ by on his crutches. . . . He broke his ankle once stepping into a rabbit hole an’ it was put together wrong An’ ever since he’s gone on crutches” (194). Rector theorizes nostalgic feelings for Burnett’s ex-husband, Swan Burnett, dead in 1906, as the origin of this characterization, then argues that “the image of strong and sturdy Dickon, the epitome of youthful vigor, hobbling over the moor on a pair of crutches is spectacularly dissonant” and speculates that Burnett’s similar reaction spurred her to dismiss forever “the notion of a handicapped Dickon” (194). Having said this, however, Rector does not seem resolved on either the reasons for disabling the character or reversing the disablement. She speculates, reasonably enough, that “a damaged Dickon, flawed on the outside at least, would be more inter-esting than a robust one,” then hypothesizes a list of possible reasons for Burnett’s revision:

She decided to make him whole again. Why? Her belief in the healing powers of the “Magic” might have required him to fling off his crutches sooner or later anyway. Or it may have been a question of logistics. For one thing, his ability to perform certain tasks undoubtedly would have been compromised. How would he have been able to push Colin’s wheelchair if he were on crutches? How would he get back and forth from the manor to the secret garden? Burnett must also have concluded that having one boy on crutches and another in a wheelchair was sim-ply too melodramatic. Colin, once he was on his feet, may have found himself supporting Dickon even as Dickon was supporting him. Finally, if Mary’s position had been stronger at the outset as the most mobile of the three, she might have been able to retain her commanding role and not to relinquish it later in the story. (194)

Curiously, Rector’s analysis both elides Burnett’s detail in service of her argument—Dickon is not “hobbling over the moor” but “swingin’ by on his crutches”—and fixates on her own assumptions about the mutual exclusivity of robustness and disability, developing at length her beliefs in various logistical and sociological imbalances cotermi-nous with a disabled Dickon. Rector also draws uncritically on con-ventions of representing disability (“too melodramatic”) that, critically examined, would raise interesting questions about how many disabled



protagonists can be in a plot before it becomes “too melodramatic,” and whether or not Burnett’s novel may work a sort of reverse “narra-tive prosthesis” in needing a nondisabled character to carry out certain metaphoric functions in the plot, while leaving the main action to the ill and disabled.10 One possibility Rector doesn’t fully consider is how plausibly Burnett could enact a cure in which Dickon “[flung] off his crutches,” or that a permanently impaired Dickon—especially if he is also a healthy and active boy who does not need to be cured—might complicate the novel’s already-ambiguous messages about the cultural location of disability, as well its much clearer ones about the power of nature and positive thinking to heal it. Clearly Burnett was invested in making The Secret Garden a novel promoting a particular version of hopefulness about disability whose messages and implications were—even with revision—difficult to manage.

Disability on Screen: Two Film Versions of The Secret Garden

The challenge of representing the ambiguity of disability in the story is incrementally more complex in the context of film translation, in which many ambiguities must be resolved as actors are cast and props and makeup specified, even if camera angles and distance, lighting, mise-en-scène, and other aspects of film language can contribute nu-ance and inflection to the representation of disability. The choices made in the two key screen versions of the story I analyze illustrate the degree to which disability in The Secret Garden seems to have spurred some cinematic interventions, and not others, and the mes-sages about the meanings of disability that have resulted. Julaine Gil-lispie has argued that because of The Secret Garden’s “chameleon-like ability to change to match its environment,” each American film adaptation of the novel “is radically different, reflecting the historical and sociological changes in American society” (133). What Gillispie and others have noted about the ways in which ideologies of family relationships, feminism, and colonialism emerge from both Burnett’s novel and its film interpretations can as readily be applied to the ways in which disability—one of the novel’s most protean and controversial themes—emerges from each version of the narrative. Specifically, the



1949 MGM film noir version directed by Fred Wilcox, with a screen-play by Robert Ardrey and cinematography by Ray June, responds directly to a well-developed public culture of fear of poliomyelitis, vi-sually contradicting Burnett’s message of psychosomatic illness (while plotting, script, and acting affirm both the stigma of disability and disability’s curability through correct attitude). In contrast, the 1993 American Zoetrope film directed by Agnieszka Holland, with a script by Caroline Thompson and cinematography by Roger Deakins, visually brackets Colin’s illness as late-Victorian hysteria (a term Burnett uses) by including scenes of electromagnetic and “water” cures, distancing disability from viewers with interesting period props while bolstering Burnett’s message about the disabling impact of Colin’s social envi-ronment with a supplemental characterization of Medlock as fixated on Colin’s illness and dependent on keeping him sick. Despite these differences, neither film actually disrupts the message that positive psychology can cure most illness and disability.

1949One of the most popular film interpretations, Fred Wilcox’s 1949 pro-duction uses atmospheric film noir techniques such as low-key lighting, dramatic sets in the grand MGM tradition, and memorable, if dated, cinematography to emphasize the psychological aspects of Burnett’s novel and particularly to cast Archibald Craven as the gothic figure of disability that Mary (in the novel) expects him to be. While Burnett corrects Mary’s assumptions about Archibald through their first meet-ing, Robert Ardrey’s script instead propels Herbert Marshall’s rendition of Archibald Craven as not simply “miserable” but dramatically melan-choly and erratic, a man prone to smashing his brandy glasses into the fireplace (even in front of children) and proclaiming his own situation (“I have my books . . . I drink.”). Director of photography Ray June shoots him first in an over-the-shoulder shot looking down at Mary on her first trip onto the moors, dramatizing his hunchback and presenting the audience with it as a looming dark reality available to their stare.11 Later, Mary (and the audience) views Craven through a shot sequence of increasing proximity that frames him in his chair, metonymically suggesting the wheelchair that comes to define the younger Craven later in the film. Archibald is thus presented as defined by his chair,



just as wheelchair users are often defined (as expressed by the extraor-dinarily resilient term wheelchair bound).

Further, in filming Craven with low-key lighting that presents him almost entirely in shadow and only obliquely open to view, June con-structs a sense of interiority, alienation, and mystery: the inner life of this disabled man, the film suggests visually, is inaccessible to Mary and the audience, as much as he displays it verbally through added dialogue. The combination of Ardrey’s screenplay and Wilcox’s direction seems to overload Archibald Craven with both a larger-than-life spinal dis-tinction and a chew-the-scenery-grade case of neurosis. The film thus contributes, in ways that Burnett does not, to a well-evolved stereotype of disabled men as permanently angry and embittered because of their social treatment. Ardrey includes a London specialist, Dr. Fortesque, to whom Craven snarls, “For ten years Dr. Fortesque, my sanity has been—shall we say—a case of touch and go? . . . You’re a normal man! Do you know what it is to be ugly? To be cursed and set apart? To live in fear? To be hated for things you can’t help? To be pitied? To see your curse in every mirror—prying eyes in every face?”

Archibald’s speech may remind us that we, too, have stared at his back in an earlier frame; in addition, rather than refuting, as the book does, Medlock’s comments about Archibald’s disabled psychology, it expands upon them, again alluding subtly to Shakespeare and Bacon.

While its focus on Archibald’s psychological situation cannot erase what it has already drawn as a dramatically visible physical disability, the 1949 film—like the book—has a more malleable subject in Colin’s inva-lidism. However, in visualizing Colin with leg braces, the film makes that malleability much more questionable. Colin’s reference to “a grand doc-tor . . . from London” who made them take the “iron thing” off his back and let him have more fresh air (75) becomes, in the film, Dr. Fortesque and leg braces that are dramatically revealed when Dr. Griddlestone pulls a sheet aside. While the novel makes it very clear that Colin’s fatigue, weakness, and anxiety are the products of being treated as ill, as likely to develop a spinal deformity, and as likely to die young, this film team’s decision to visualize Colin in a familiar mid-twentieth-century appliance calls that message into question, if in subtle ways.

To an early twenty-first-century audience, the resonance of leg braces may not be immediately apparent, but to anyone living in the



United States in the 1940s and 1950s, such braces functioned as a powerful cultural shorthand, saturated with a very specific fear of an illness that none would term psychosomatic. Just as the word cholera might evoke readerly fear in 1911, the image of braces would be likely to alarm viewers in 1949.12 As David Oshinsky summarizes,

By mid-century, polio had become the nation’s most feared disease. And with good reason. It hit without warning. It killed some victims and marked others for life, leaving behind vivid reminders for all to see: wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces and deformed limbs. In 1921, it para-lyzed 39-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, robust and athletic, with a long pedigree and a cherished family name. If a man like Roosevelt could be stricken, then no one was immune. . . . From 1940 to 1944, reported polio cases doubled to eight per 100,000, doubled again to 16 per 100,000 between 1945 and 1949, and climbed to 25 per 100,000 from 1950 to 1954, before peaking at 37 per 100,000 in 1952. (“Breaking the Back of Polio”)

Further, as frightening and increasingly familiar as polio was, media campaigns associated with prevention engraved anxiety more deeply into Americans’ public awareness of the disease: “Polio’s special status was due, in large part, to the efforts of a remarkable group, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which employed the latest tech-niques in advertising, fund raising, and motivational research to turn a horrific but relatively uncommon disease into the most feared affliction of its time” (Oshinsky, Polio 5). Daniel J. Wilson notes the impact of visual culture in the transformation of polio: “This fear was reinforced by the myriad images produced by the March of Dimes to raise funds for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. . . . The public rela-tions and fund-raising campaigns of the March of Dimes provided con-stant reminders in the forties and fifties of polio’s potential to cripple and imprison youngsters and young adults in braces, wheelchairs, and iron lungs” (174; see figure 12.1).13

Leg braces were thus a familiar and terrifying sight to audiences in 1949, adding a contemporary clinical component to the other supple-mental gothic elements of the film (the children’s suspicion that Cra-ven has killed his wife, for example, an Ardrey addition). Child actor Dean Stockwell’s Colin, an attractive boy with cute dimples (when he


Figure 12.1. 1946 March of Dimes Campaign Poster. March of Dimes Founda-tion



begins to smile) who eventually throws himself sturdily into walking, is uncannily reminiscent of the iconic polio boy in one of the more familiar posters of the day (see figure 12.2).

What is especially interesting about the deployment, through such images, of polio culture is the additional ambiguity about disability thus created: mixed messages that read back into the fictional narra-tive, but also outward, to viewers’ concepts of polio. Polio clearly did not have the status of a psychosomatic illness in 1949. One attempt at a vaccine had failed, and Jonas Salk was applying what he had learned from working with the influenza virus in World War II to attempts at a polio vaccine that would have positive results by the early 1950s.14 There was no suggestion that polio was a “hysterical” illness. But in the treatment era that immediately preceded that of the Salk vaccine—and the production of the 1949 film—Sister Elizabeth Kenny’s controver-sial approach to curing polio, which advocated “hot packs and muscle strengthening exercises” rather than the traditional practice of immo-bilizing affected limbs, and did include psychotherapy so that children were “willed to move paralyzed limbs,” was growing in visibility and acceptance (Golden and Rogers 189; Willis 32).15

The complementarity between Sister Kenny’s approaches to polio and Burnett’s novel’s ethos of sensible exercise and fresh air may have simply been a case of a serendipitous meeting between a fictional situ-ation and a real-life context for cinema, but its effects are potentially complex. By inviting viewers to see Colin’s psychosomatic illness in terms of polio, the film may communicate that Colin is truly physically ill and that the powers of nature’s magic are exceptionally profound. From another perspective, while Kenny did not suggest that the effects of the poliovirus were psychosomatic, the film may suggest to viewers that polio is actually more easily cured than imagined, and that despite the absence of a vaccine (in 1949), there is still the possibility that common sense and a healthy psyche may overturn polio’s damage. Burnett’s novel’s characterization of Colin’s disability as psychoso-matic, then, becomes much more ambiguous in the 1949 movie, and Burnett’s ultimate normalization of Archibald’s spinal disability and grief are replaced by a Gothicized portrayal of a violent, nervous, and mysterious disabled man.


Figure 12.2. Dean Stockwell as Colin Craven in the 1949 MGM film The Secret Garden. MGM/The Kobal Collection



1993Agnieszka Holland’s compellingly beautiful 1993 film has been justly acclaimed for the strong performances of its child actors, its carefully detailed sets, and the spectacular beauty of its location filming in Eng-land (particularly the garden, whose evolution is dramatized through director of photography Roger Deakins’s time-lapse photography seg-ments). Its representations of Archibald’s spinal disability and Colin’s invalidism are shaped by these elements of production design (as well as by the evolution in cinematic technology over the nearly fifty years that separate the films).

Archibald’s physical disability is normalized for Mary and the viewer, following Burnett’s narrative: as played by John Lynch, he is a hand-some but miserable man. While Deakins (like Ray June) includes a series of shots of Craven’s back, including one in shadow, listing down the halls for an abortive peek at “[his] poor little boy” sleeping, the soft-ness of the lighting and the emphasis on Lynch’s open, miserable face in several close shots make him a far more visually appealing Craven than Herbert Marshall. As well as presenting his physical atypicalities as more visually subtle, the film handles Archibald’s psychological state as Burnett does, presenting him as unhappy rather than angry and never connecting his misery to his disability. More strikingly, there is no Dr. Fortesque or any overt suggestion of psychiatry; the implication is that Craven’s sadness is something that can be readily diagnosed by the viewer, with a little supplementation in the form of comments from Dickon about Archibald’s likely fear of losing another loved one and Mary’s voiceovers about her “poor uncle” fleeing the arrival of spring.16

The 1993 film’s representation of the social construction of Colin’s illness is particularly full and effective. Heyden Prouse, a very slender, large-eyed boy who recalls Burnett’s description of a boy with a “sharp, delicate face” whose eyes seem “immense” is a visually convincing Colin (73). Further, the film develops in detail the novel’s discourse of hysteria and hypochondria. Facemasks and fears of spores signal the still-emerging status of germ theory of disease; treatments for neur-asthenia such as hydrotherapy and electromagnetism are handled in careful detail with period props; and caregivers’ attachment to invalids, not a part of the novel, rounds out the story of sickness, as housekeeper Medlock (played by Maggie Smith) is developed as staking her identity



on Colin’s illness and an obsessive quest to cure him through modern treatments.17 Medlock (who in both films is much harsher to Mary and much more invested in Colin’s treatments) almost entirely replaces the doctors that people the novel (and the 1949 film); she is virtually the sole medical figure.18

These choices have a distinctive effect on this production, making it a classic grand-scale BBC location drama. Just as Misselthwaite Manor has morphed into a much larger estate that is a composite of a number of National Trust locations, Colin’s situation is more defined by its at-tention to rendering historical treatments of ambiguous illness than by any connection to a twentieth-century viewer’s ideas about disability. The elaboration of some of the more unpleasant treatments, such as Colin’s immersion in an ice bath, has the effect of building viewer sym-pathy for Colin (as well as potentially frightening younger viewers). In addition, the details help develop Medlock into a character who is not simply dependent—albeit to a lesser extent than Dr. Craven—on Co-lin’s illness for her livelihood, but also for her sense of purpose in life.

The filmic development of Colin as a subject is noteworthy. Char-acters who only appear in scenes with other characters may seem less developed as subjects in their own right. In the 1949 film, for example, we never see Colin by himself. The way we see characters when they are on their own matters as well; are we inclined to see things with them, through a camera angle that shows us what they see, or are we only invited to look at them? Again, in the 1949 film, when the frame emphasizes Archibald Craven’s back, rather than a subtler over-the-shoulder shot that invites us, as it were, to perch on a character’s shoulder to see what he sees, Archibald’s status is that of object or uninvolved “staree.”

In contrast, the 1993 film allows us to both see Archibald observing his son, unnoticed, and also share his view of his sleeping child, and thus invites us to sympathize with his longing for his son as well as perceive his fear of attachment. It also includes a brief shot sequence of Colin alone in his room, after Mary and Dickon have removed the boards from the windows (a scene not in the book) and Mary has run out to join her Dickon. Not wanting her to leave, Colin, visibly dis-tressed, rises up from his wheelchair to call out to her, and then falls. It is thus Mary’s departure from the room to be outside with Dickon, not



Ben Weatherstaff’s calling him a cripple, that first spurs Colin to try to stand in this film. More to the point, this scene, brief as it is, establishes Colin as a character with a distinct subjectivity and point of view (one we share, briefly), rather than a disabled object. Here the 1993 film creates what it cannot gracefully do with voiceover—our sense of who Colin is when he is not narrating himself, before he falls—and we view him from a slightly high angle-shot that breaks identification.

This fuller development of the plot surrounding Colin’s expected disability retains Burnett’s emphasis on psychology: the psychological effects of being told to be afraid of spores, activity, and other people, and the difficulty of overcoming such fears. Because Colin does leave the house, does grow strong, and does walk to his father, however, the 1993 film’s greater attention to rendering Colin’s treatments in his-torically plausible fashion, oddly enough, has the effect of making dis-ability—actual or psychosomatic—even more distant than in the 1949 version. Though the 1993 film strains to revise the novel’s culturally insensitive representation of India in terms of Orientalist stereotypes, it does little to disrupt the able-bodied fantasy that disability is a distant phenomenon that only happens to other people and can be “cured” with the right attitude.

Conclusion

The two most popular film versions of The Secret Garden traffic distinc-tively in disability culture from two different time frames. The 1949 production portrays Colin Craven’s illness in terms of iconic visual messages that were part of the polio prevention culture of the 1940s and ’50s, making disability in The Secret Garden immediate and terrify-ing, and then providing viewers not only with a happy ending of cure, but also with the more perplexing alternatives of reading Colin’s dis-ability as real as polio or else reading polio as as psychosomatic as Colin’s disability. In contrast to the visual immediacy of the earlier film, the 1993 film marks itself as a historically informed period piece in which Colin’s hysteria is paralleled by the equally frenzied treatment methods enacted by Medlock. A curiosity of the Edwardian past that can be eas-ily cured with sensible treatment, Colin’s situation bears few reminders of the situation of people with disabilities in 1993 or the present. Nei-



ther film problematizes Burnett’s rendering of all disability as primarily a question of personal and social psychology.

Notes

1. Greater attention to disability in the novel is strikingly limited. Keith includes a chapter comparing The Secret Garden and Johanna Spyri’s earlier novel Heidi (1880). Phillips’s multilayered essay, while its focus is not on dis-ability, offers a richer approach in attending to both the novel’s symbolism of bodily weakness/deformity and to potential historical referents for the mean-ings associated with weak and hardy bodies. The novel’s association between Mary’s “sickliness” and imperialist/Orientalist concepts of India as inherently diseased has sparked more sustained attention than disability representations (see Price). Máire Davies, author of an effective analysis of film adaptations of The Secret Garden and their treatment of sexuality, makes the fascinating claim in a more recent letter to the editor of The Psychologist that Mary is “near-autis-tic but does not follow up on this claim (see Davies, “Freeing the Mind” 513).

2. Mrs. Lennox’s foolishness recalls an earlier fictional mother, Mrs. Rothe-say in Dinah Maria Mulock Craik’s 1850 novel Olive, whose eponymous hero-ine is born premature and disabled because of her lovely, frivolous mother’s inability to forgo a party despite her pregnancy. While Mary’s mother and Ar-chibald Craven are unrelated—Captain Lennox was Mrs. Craven’s brother—the generalized sense of family weakness, exhibited in a range of physical and moral symptoms, tend to blend and blur, so that Caroline Thompson’s revision to the story for the 1993 film screenplay, in which Mary’s mother and Colin’s mother are identical twin sisters, is not entirely at odds with the allusions to hereditary disease circulating in the novel.

3. While chronic illness is considered a form of disability by many disability studies scholars, I am not arguing that Mary is disabled, because her putative “sickliness,” like her “disagreeable” nature, does not limit any major life activi-ties.

4. Medlock’s psychology of disablement builds not only on common stereo-types but also on notable literary precedents, such as essays by Montaigne and Bacon and (of course) Shakespeare’s Richard III.

5. By disabled family I mean neither that their attitudes are disabling, though of course, they are in this case, nor that their disabilities are hereditary, though arguably the novel suggests that this is the case as well. Another way of con-ceptualizing the disabled family is as one who experiences, through interrela-tions, a disability identity, with all the features, benefits, constraints of that identity—and these are as myriad in their variety as disabilities themselves.



6. The Americans with Disabilities Act includes social perceptions as a defining factor for disabled status. Many people with disabilities cite other people’s attitudes, not impairment itself, as the most negative aspect of living with disability.

7. Despite the differences in their circumstances, then, The Secret Garden is similar to Johanna Spyri’s 1880 novel Heidi in its conclusions about the power of fresh air, activity, and belief to mobilize invalids (see Keith 95).

8. By cultural location of disability I mean its grounding in both individual impairment and social relationships and ideologies. Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell argue for an “interactional space between embodiment and social ideology” given that environment and bodily variation (particularly those traits experienced as socially stigmatized differences inevitably impinge upon each other) (6–7).

9. Lionel himself was not part of the conversation; notably, Burnett would not tell him he was dying.

10. In David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s concept of narrative prosthesis, disabled characters often function “as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (39). Indeed, disfigurement in particular—or a disabling incident—works a “material metaphor,” to use Mitchell and Snyder’s useful term, functioning as a handy sign of moral damage (63).

11. Otto Heller would use similar techniques in the 1956 Richard III starring Sir Laurence Olivier. In terms of the staring dynamics that Rosemarie Gar-land-Thomson analyzes in her book Staring: How We Look, the initial framing of Archibald permits only the audience’s unrestricted stare, not Archibald’s control—as “staree”—of the situation of looking. His face-front position in his chair allows him greater control of the dynamic, as does (of course) his tossing of brandy glasses. The film does not encourage a mutual, more ethical scene of looking, in which “a staring exchange can . . . beget mutual recognition, however fleeting” (Garland-Thomson185).

12. Burnett’s first readers were most likely very aware not only of the sixth cholera pandemic at the turn of the century, whose ravages struck mainly In-dia, but also of the earlier pandemics, some of which had killed many people in Europe and America.

13. For more on these media campaigns, see Longmore.14. See Oshinsky, Polio.15. Kenny’s methods for rehabilitating polio were publicized in popular

media such as Readers’ Digest and even in a 1946 biopic starring Rosalind Russell, but were treated with suspicion by some professional organizations (see Golden and Rogers). Her method of involving the person with polio in a



muscle-strengthening plan is uncannily evoked by Colin’s investment in the “carefully practical but simple series of muscle exercises” Dickon brings him from wrestler Bob Haworth (Burnett 150).

16. Understandably, because long explanatory voiceovers tend to deaden the dynamic of film, neither Thompson’s nor Ardrey’s script make use of Bur-nett’s summary diagnoses of Archibald and Colin, or her passages of how they change and why.

17. For a discussion of invalid identities and social relationships in Victo-rian Britain, see Frawley.

18. This development of Medlock as dominant but harsh, combined with the near erasure of Susan Sowerby in both films, means that neither film pro-vides the orphans with the surrogate mothering the book offers them in the pervasive influence of Susan Sowerby, who is universally respected, including by Archibald Craven and Mrs. Medlock (see Silver).

Works Cited

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden. 1911. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. New York: Norton, 2006. Print.

Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock. Olive. 1850. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.

Davies, Máire Messenger. “Freeing the Mind through Meaningful Work.” Let-ter to the Editor. The Psychologist 16.10 (2003): 513. Print.

Foster, Shirley, and Judy Simons. What Katy Read: Feminist Re-readings of Clas-sic Stories for Girls. Iowa City: University of Iowa P, 1995: 172–91. Print.

Frawley, Maria H. Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chi-cago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. Print.

Gillispie, Julaine. “American Film Adaptations of The Secret Garden: Reflec-tions of Sociological and Historical Change.” The Lion and the Unicorn 20.1 (1996): 132–52. Print.

Golden, Janet, and Naomi Rogers. “Nurse Irene Shea Studies the ‘Kenny Method’ of Treatment of Infantile Paralysis, 1942–1943.” Nursing History Review 18 (2010): 189–203. Print.

Keith, Lois. “Take Up Thy Bed and Walk”: Death, Disability, and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.


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