'You thought I was a native! You dared! You know nothing about the natives! They are not people, they are servants who must greet you. You don't know anything about India. “Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayFrances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (32)The Secret Garden is one of the books about India written for young people British citizens in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These books gave an idea of ​​British life in India, focusing on the adventures and exciting experiences children could have, such as riding an elephant, and the tales the children heard. Looking at The Secret Garden in comparison to other books in the genre reveals a vivid and clear picture of the views the British held about India and the view they expected of their children about the colony. These expressions included the rarely questioned idea that Britain should rule India, that the British were "better" than Indians, and that Britain itself was "better" than India . The British East India Company entered as a trading company, established in the early 1600s and gradually monopolizing trade between England and India. She benefited from special dispensations from the British government and was the main cause of the British presence in India for many years. Some other countries, notably France and the Netherlands, also had their own East India Companies. All trading companies competed, militarily and commercially, for influence and control of India. Robert Clive and later Lord Clive led the British East India Company to take European control of India against the French East India Company in the mid-1700s. The British East India Company essentially ruled India quite easily for England until the Indian Mutiny, an uprising of Indian troops. After the Mutiny of 1857, the British government made India an official colony of the British Empire, and it remained that way until independence was achieved in 1947. At that time, while the India was facing strong political pressures, Britain was also experiencing societal changes. including in education. The expansion of literacy and increased British involvement in India occurred at the same time. In response to the growing demand for books, publishing houses sold many books about the British Empire, including many children's stories. The Empire was an unexpected subject of interest for literature, as authors who had never traveled outside of Europe could find information about the colonies written by their fellow British citizens and use that information to fuel their novels. The colonies were exotic, but as they were under the auspices of the British Crown, children could, if they wished, easily imagine themselves traveling there. Additionally, the colonies provided an excellent setting for teaching imperialist culture to children. Studies show that fiction helps children retain information about distant places and times better than more traditional teaching methods (McGowan 204). For Victorian children, India was a faraway country and remained an exotic destination even under the control of the Empire. Fiction also teaches and reinforces norms of behavior and attitudes. However, allFictions do not show the ideology they teach in the same way. Finally, the interweaving - in a popular children's novel - of the British imperial project abroad and that at home rightly demonstrates how deep imperialism was (and according to Rushdie, is) embedded in all aspects of British culture. “I never saw spring in India because there was none” (Rushdie, 131-2). The Secret Garden deals extensively with the theme of the exoticism of Yorkshire to become for Mary a world not unlike India for British children in other stories. The parallels between Britain and India are more easily seen and Britain's superiority is proven by showing Yorkshire as an entirely different, rather better, world. The novel, from the first reading, does not guarantee lasting success. The story, compared to so many adventure novels for boys produced at the same time, is far from breathtaking: Mary Lennox, a ten-year-old English girl, born (and living since the beginning of the novel) in India, loses both his parents during a cholera epidemic. She survives by luck: a few days later, some gentle (but undeniably manly) English soldiers come across her and, after a few unpleasant weeks spent with the large family of a poor English clergyman, Mary returns (the word everyone uses unintentionally is telling because, of course, she has never been) to England or, as one of the novel's minor characters says, home. The house is in Yorkshire; a dark house on the edge of the moors, with hundreds of locked rooms, a locked garden and many harmless secrets waiting to be revealed. The house belongs to Mary's uncle, Archibald Craven, the man whose misfortune is matched only by his wealth - the widower perpetually mourning his beautiful wife (dead ten years) and the father who abandoned emotionally disabled son by the time the child is born. The Secret Garden is set in England, not India, and has as its main character a real Anglo-Indian girl, born and raised in India before moving to England to live in a closed manor on the moor. Mary discovers her imperious crippled cousin Colin, who, as everyone says, will never be able to walk, and the garden that her uncle closed when his wife died in childbirth. With the help of Dickon, a local boy who knows the moors and native animals, as well as the magic that Mary knows in India, Mary and Colin rehabilitate the garden and rehabilitate each other. The Secret Garden has a clear story and character growth. The beginning of the novel is quite illustrative: "When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everyone said she was the most unpleasant child ever seen." The first sentence states two facts: first, Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite, Yorkshire, to live with her uncle – so the beginning of the novel (the beginning of Mary's life proper) begins literally with all the world calls her return to England (and implied departure from India) – and, secondly, that she was considered "the most unpleasant-looking child". Only two sentences later, our trusty narrator informs readers that "her hair was yellow and her face was yellow because she was born in India and had always been ill in one way or another." The origin of her ugliness is therefore categorically (and remarkably early too) localized: Marie's face is yellow because she was very ill, and she was ill because she was born in India. From the first mention of India, it is immediately associated with disease; this association is ingeniously reinforced by the factthat Mary's parents, Captain Lennox and his wife, die in a cholera epidemic. India, dark, primitive and unhealthy, unlike England, makes you sick; moreover, if one is not vigilant enough, it literally kills, in its sly, groveling, profoundly un-English, unmanly and dishonorable oriental way - by disease. Rather, it is the classic example of the “motif of the Orient as something denoting danger” that Edward Said identified in a variety of Western discourses. Above all, Mary is extremely spoiled and disobedient – ​​for example, whenever she is angry, she slaps her Indian nanny, her ayah, and calls her "pig" and "daughter of pigs" ("because", she tells her). the young narrator). readers, in a calm manner, you may need it one day, "calling a native a pig is the worst insult of all."). She is physically stiff, thin and weak. Additionally, she is extremely hostile. But why should these rather unpleasant traits – repeatedly attributed to the fact that Mary was born and raised in or by India – suggest moral corruption? And why should this vision be of imperialist origin? Mary, although English and therefore, as the novel subtly asserts, is genetically superior, was born in India and raised entirely by Indian servants, who entertain her in every way possible, who dress up. she stands up, who bows to her, whom she can slap and insult. Mary has to come to England to hear the truth about herself for the first time, because in India people are too servile and lie. As a result, at the age of ten, she is totally unpromising material for an angel in the house – too tyrannical, too disobedient, too ugly. In other words, she too seems to have gone native. Burnett points out that, as M. Daphne Kutzer says, "India brought out the worst in Mary and her mother." (Consistent with this view, Colin is, in his most horrible tyrannical moods, constantly described as a "young rajah" – the implication is clear: his abnormally bad behavior is so un-English that no English term can be used to denote it. Despotism, tyranny, even small-scale tyranny like that which Colin exhibits, are, the novel asserts, somehow Indian, not British. Even Mary's unpleasant, authoritarian tone. used when she is angry, is described as "Indian") But the waywardness and insubordination of a young girl, printed on her yellow face, tolerated (or even encouraged) in India, are morally reprehensible in India. the context of England: Mary is no longer a “Missee Sahib”, whose very ethnicity (combined with the military power embodied by her father) gives her unlimited authority over “the blacks”; in Yorkshire, she is a young woman who must learn important lessons of self-sacrifice, obedience and respect. And here already we draw the parallel between the two empires: both are patriarchal and phallocentric, both built on subordination – but while the Empire subordinates the natives (imaginatively, economically, socially and culturally). A domestic empire is built on the subordination of lower social classes, as well as all “females of the species”. The perfect system must never be threatened by disobedient angels, inside or outside the home. Yet despotism, moral corruption, disease and death are not the only signifiers of demonic India in The Secret Garden. India, with its blazing blazing sun, its hot and humid climate and its lying people, is an evil foster mother worthy of a fairy tale: it affects (or better said, stops).