I found myself extremely confused by the authorial intent behind Dickon Sowerby while reading the Secret Garden. I couldn\u2019t help but contrast him in my mind with the equally impoverished yet in no way romanticized Indian servants of Mary. While I understand that, at that point in the story, Mary was not yet fully capable of loving, as she did not understand love, the different ways Dickon and the servants are treated both by other characters and by the writing itself are striking to me. In our last class, we all made clear our presuppositions of the racism in this story, with the treatment of the Indian servants, and the fact that India itself is described as a place of illness. However, until Dickon Sowerby was introduced, I had thought that the text was equally classist; that in associating India with poverty, that was what fueled the racism. However, Dickon is described as being dressed in patchwork clothes, with ragged hair, constantly smelling like the forest. He is a picture of poverty, and yet he is romanticized to an extreme degree, referred to as an angel by Mary and associated with the Greek god Pan with his flute playing and animal charming. I found myself reminded of the story behind the writing of the Lord of the Flies; it was written in argument to the 1858 novel The Coral Island, which depicted young British men crash landing on an island, forming a functional society, and \u201ctaming\u201d the \u201csavage natives\u201d. Golding understood when writing Lord of the Flies that British youth were no different from any other race or ethnicity in that scenario, and the Secret Garden\u2019s treatment of poverty seems close to The Coral Island. The Indian servants go unnamed, and are killed by the same disease as Mary\u2019s parents because they can\u2019t afford to flee, while Dickon is a godly child who can literally talk to animals. The racism is not subtle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I found myself extremely confused by the authorial intent behind Dickon Sowerby while reading the Secret Garden. I couldn\u2019t help but contrast him in my mind with the equally impoverished yet in no way romanticized Indian servants of Mary. While I understand that, at that point in the story, Mary was not yet fully capable … Continue reading “Dickon Sowerby and the Fetishization of White Poverty”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[141,139],"class_list":["post-1864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-racism","tag-the-secret-garden"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcJhts-u4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1864"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1865,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1864\/revisions\/1865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dislit2020.chris-foss.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}