The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I'm a great fan of late Victorian/Edwardian children's literature, and I recently remembered that for some reason I had always like A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy, but hated The Secret Garden (and didn't actually remember why). It turns out that even as a child I seem to have had good taste, this book is revoltingly wholesome. Actually, I really liked the first half, maybe even the first two thirds, but when it starts going on about health and outdoor exercise and Colin has a larger part to play, I was ready to die. What kind of children would actually voluntarily regularly do exercise? Since gym class was one of the most emotionally traumatic experiences of my life, the idea is ludicrous to me. What I think I hated most about this book though, are the class boundaries and the way Burnett appears to break them, while actually upholding them. Just as in A Little Princess, Sara's companion is suffering, Becky, at the end becomes her maid rather than her equal, so the characters here interact across social divides, but never disturb them. Mary and Dickon are perfectly willing to listen to and obey that horrid brat, Colin, who I don't think actually becomes a better person. He learns to walk, but all that means is that he has more strength and energy to order more people around and be nasty to them. I know that there's a whole branch of literary scholarship that studies animals in literature, and though I'm not too familiar with it, I seem to have heard somewhere that animals in children's books frequently act as 'stepping stones', helping to integrate children into the wider world. This seems to be what happens in The Secret Garden; Mary first learns to like flowers and the robin and then progresses to people. But it feels to me like the people are also 'stepping stones' for her to reach her ideal upper-class equals (Colin and his father), so that characters like Dickon, Ben Weatherstaff and Martha are sort of sub-human, not people in the way that the upper class characters are. They are constantly portrayed as comic, lacking in resource, ridiculous, stupid, weak, etc (except Dickon I guess). The thing I found interesting about the novel was that it's a sort of 'reverse Gothic' story; instead of the past coming to haunt the present, the past acts as a healing influence on the present (through the garden which preserves and enacts the lost maternal presence of Colin's mother), and where characters expect to find ghosts, they find living people (when Mary and Colin both think that they are ghosts on their first meeting). But overall, I wanted to wring Colin's neck the entire time and just found the ending horribly saccharine.