Spatial Inscriptions of Childhood: Transformations of the Victorian Garden in The Secret Garden, Tom’s Midnight Garden , and The Poison Garden

Abstract

This article examines the spatial-semantic transformations of the Victorian garden in three novels for children: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958), and Sarah Singleton’s The Poison Garden (2009). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of “heterotopology” and Michel de Certeau’s notion of “spatial practices,” this article reconstructs the evolution of the garden from an intact pastoral setting to a sinister and alienating space. The primary concern of this article is to illustrate how this process of inversion can be read as a spatial mirroring of a gradual deconstruction of the Romantic concept of childhood.

Isolation in studio music teaching: The secret garden

“…The sub-title of the current paper is taken from a case study conducted by Young, Burwell and Pickup (2003: 144), who sought "insights to the whole field of instrumental teaching which, it could be argued, has been something of a 'secret garden', especially compared with the scrutiny currently experienced by classroom teachers in schools". The authors' reference evoked Frances Hodgson Burnett's The secret garden (1911), one of the canonical works of English children's literature (Dinter, 2015). Burnett's protagonist is Mary, a ten-year-old orphan who begins to visit and cultivate a walled garden where she feels "securely isolated, 'almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place'" (222).…”