Burnett consistently describes Mary Lennox's mother using imagery of the ephemeral, the insubstantial, and the delicate. This woman, who is largely absent from Mary's quotidian life and is not caring or maternal, is as "full of lace" and as lacking in substance as her clothes. She cares only "to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people." Every part of her body is light, pretty and floating:
Her hair was like curly silk and she had a delicate little nose which seemed to be disdaining things, and she had large laughing eyes. All her clothes were thin and floating, and Mary said they were “full of lace.” They looked fuller of lace than ever this morning, but her eyes were not laughing at all.
This delicate imagery, evoking brightness and transience, foreshadows the light touch Mary's mother eventually has on her life. The lace is light in texture and mostly air, like her character. On the day she catches cholera, Mary observes that she is "more full of lace than ever," although she is not as cheerful as she usually appears.
The sensory images provided for the reader here create a feeling of something almost like absence. The textures of her clothing and body are central to her characterization, as there is little else to go on, and both "feel" so delicate. Burnett makes the reader aware of Mrs. Lennox's physicality but not of her interior world. She is a woman made entirely of surfaces.
Every time other characters mention Mary's mother, they refer to her beauty and not to her character. Mary is constantly compared to her in language that opposes Burnett's descriptions of the "Mem Sahib" (a term for white upper-class women, especially colonizers, living in India); her face is "dark," "glowering," and "heavy." Mrs. Lennox dies of cholera, as do the rest of Mary's family, a disease that wastes away and dehydrates the body before eventually killing the victim. Like the lace that Burnett associates with her, Mary's mother's beauty lies in the fact that she is more "gap" than "fabric:" lace is, after all, an artistic arrangement of holes. Mrs. Lennox quite literally fades away from the illness that kills her, becoming more and more like the lace she wears until she "disappears."
Burnett uses dark, gothic imagery and language with a sense of enormous size to convey the strangeness and the frightening first impression Misselthwaite Manor makes on Mary Lennox in Chapter 3:
The entrance door was a huge one made of massive, curiously shaped panels of oak studded with big iron nails and bound with great iron bars. It opened into an enormous hall, which was so dimly lighted that the faces in the portraits on the walls and the figures in the suits of armor made Mary feel that she did not want to look at them. As she stood on the stone floor she looked a very small, odd little black figure, and she felt as small and lost and odd as she looked.
The house is initially described as being like a fairy-tale castle or a mausoleum, which makes the reader feel how oppressive and unsuited it is to raising a 10-year old child. In comparison to the "massive" doors and walls that surround her, Mary's "small, odd" little figure looks and feels smaller and odder than ever. All of the adjectives in this section refer either to largeness or to a lack of clarity. The hall is "enormous," and the light is so "dim" that Mary cannot see the faces in the hanging portraits.
The corridors and halls of the house are later also described as being long, winding and echoing, confusing and scaring Mary and heightening her sense of loneliness. When Mary gets to know the Manor better, its sense of largeness no longer overwhelms her. At the beginning of the novel, however, the emotional enormity of the change in Mary's situation is echoed by the literal enormity of the house she comes to live in.
At the beginning of The Secret Garden the harsh and wintry weather of Yorkshire seems hostile to the young and intractable Mary Lennox. It is so different from the India of her childhood that it is actively frightening. In Chapter 13, she is especially unsettled by the wind blowing around the house:
She did not cry, but she lay and hated the sound of the heavily beating rain, she hated the wind and its “wuthering.” She could not go to sleep again. The mournful sound kept her awake because she felt mournful herself. If she had felt happy it would probably have lulled her to sleep. How it “wuthered” and how the big raindrops poured down and beat against the pane! “It sounds just like a person lost on the moor and wandering on and on crying,” [...]
The word "wuthering" describes the sound of strong gusts of wind shrieking and blustering. It's only now in common parlance from the acclaimed Charlotte Brontë novel also featuring Yorkshire weather, Wuthering Heights. The tumult Mary feels inside is echoed in the weather, and their mutual "mournfulness" preoccupies her.
Earlier, in Chapter 5, Burnett uses a simile to describe Misselthwaite Manor as being shaken and embattled by the wind in a threatening way, as if an unseen giant is "buffeting [...] and beating at the walls and trying to break in." Burnett makes the reader feel the enormity of the sound and the force of the wind with this language. Mary seems very small, and the forces around her comparatively huge.
However, later, when Mary feels more comfortable and at home, the sound of the wind becomes familiar to her. When she learns the word "wutherin'" from Martha (when it had previously only been used by the narrator), she is able to contextualize the sound in a way that now feels familiar and comforting rather than oppressive and foreign. She feels that it is "nice" to be inside and protected from it. The house's strength makes her feel "safe and warm" by comparison, "in a room with a red coal fire."
Burnett uses lush sensory language to describe the green and living insides of things that might otherwise seem dead—in both Misselthwaite Manor itself and in the "secret garden." In Chapter 11, when Mary and Dickon (a "magical" and green-fingered boy from the local community) first go into the garden she has "discovered," Mary is very frightened that everything in it is dead. Dickon shows her that it is not:
“There!” he said exultantly. “I told thee so. There’s green in that wood yet. Look at it.” Mary was down on her knees before he spoke, gazing with all her might. “When it looks a bit greenish an’ juicy like that, it’s wick,” he explained. “When th’ inside is dry an’ breaks easy, like this here piece I’ve cut off, it’s done for. There’s a big root here as all this live wood sprung out of, an’ if th’ old wood’s cut off an’ it’s dug round, and took care of there’ll be—” he stopped and lifted his face to look up at the climbing and hanging sprays above him—“there’ll be a fountain o’ roses here this summer.”
Underneath the "hard, dry gray" of the dead wood in the garden is the "greenish and juicy" stuff of life. Images of the hard earth and brittle trees are set against language that invokes moisture and liveliness. Even words that are normally used to describe plant and animal life take on double meanings: the roses "spray" above Dickon, and live wood "springs" out of the old wood. The garden is so alive and so juicy that, it seems, a "fountain" of roses and wet bursting life will emerge from the dryness by the summer if the garden is tended.
The Yorkshire word "wick" in the novel denotes this living greenness, indicating wherever it occurs that life is still pulsing below the surface of whatever dead-seeming thing is under discussion. Colin Craven himself is described as "wick" when he emerges from the confines of his sickroom. These bold images allow the reader to feel, as Mary and her companions do, the sensual joy and excitement of discovery and of life emerging from under the ground.
At the beginning of The Secret Garden the harsh and wintry weather of Yorkshire seems hostile to the young and intractable Mary Lennox. It is so different from the India of her childhood that it is actively frightening. In Chapter 13, she is especially unsettled by the wind blowing around the house:
She did not cry, but she lay and hated the sound of the heavily beating rain, she hated the wind and its “wuthering.” She could not go to sleep again. The mournful sound kept her awake because she felt mournful herself. If she had felt happy it would probably have lulled her to sleep. How it “wuthered” and how the big raindrops poured down and beat against the pane! “It sounds just like a person lost on the moor and wandering on and on crying,” [...]
The word "wuthering" describes the sound of strong gusts of wind shrieking and blustering. It's only now in common parlance from the acclaimed Charlotte Brontë novel also featuring Yorkshire weather, Wuthering Heights. The tumult Mary feels inside is echoed in the weather, and their mutual "mournfulness" preoccupies her.
Earlier, in Chapter 5, Burnett uses a simile to describe Misselthwaite Manor as being shaken and embattled by the wind in a threatening way, as if an unseen giant is "buffeting [...] and beating at the walls and trying to break in." Burnett makes the reader feel the enormity of the sound and the force of the wind with this language. Mary seems very small, and the forces around her comparatively huge.
However, later, when Mary feels more comfortable and at home, the sound of the wind becomes familiar to her. When she learns the word "wutherin'" from Martha (when it had previously only been used by the narrator), she is able to contextualize the sound in a way that now feels familiar and comforting rather than oppressive and foreign. She feels that it is "nice" to be inside and protected from it. The house's strength makes her feel "safe and warm" by comparison, "in a room with a red coal fire."
