Thursday, August 19, 2021

June 2021 Monthly Motif Reading Challenge: The Great Outdoors

June's monthly reading motif was "The Great Outdoors," which required reading "a book featuring a garden, nature, country, or harvest setting or plot. I belong to a Facebook group for children's books (partly because I have a kid, and partly because I just enjoy children's books), and they had recently been talking about The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I realized it had been so long since I'd read it that I didn't really remember it all that well. Thus, when I saw this prompt, I decided it would fit the bill perfectly. (Yes, I read two middle grade books in a row.) I remember really enjoying it when I was a child, and I still enjoyed it, though the book, having been written in 1911, definitely shows its age in some ways.

This book is all about magic, and not the Harry Potter kind. It's about the magic of being a child and discovering the way things grow and how the natural world works. It's about how caring for something and someone other than yourself can make you grow in ways you didn't expect. Mary Lennox, the main character, through caring for a garden, spending time outdoors, and learning to care about two other children around her age, grows from a sickly little child into a healthy young lady. The book definitely insinuates that it is the running around outdoors and the English countryside air that brings about this change, but I would argue that learning to care for things other than herself are part of that change as well. Obviously, that's an emotional and temperamental change, but I firmly believe that emotional and temperamental changes can affect us physically as well. At any rate, it really is delightful to watch the children in the book learn to love one another and the magic of the garden and remember what it was like to see magic in all sorts of things. For anyone who has ever been into gardening, they will also recognize the excitement the chilren felt of watching the garden awaken from its winter sleep. That is definitely one of my favorite parts of spring - going out and seeing which little bulbs are going to sprout first and which perennial plants are sticking up some new leaf stalks.

Now I guess I'll touch on the whole concept of "cancel culture" here for a minute or two. There are definitely books, movies, music, and television that contain themes we consider unacceptable today, most obviously, and possibly significantly, overtly racist terms and viewpoints. The Secret Garden does indeed have some of that content in it. Here's the thing, though: the fact that these ideas are in these various types of media does not mean that we need to erase these things from history. There is valuable stuff in them; otherwise, they wouldn't have become classics in the first place. Even beyond the stories that made certain books classics, though, the themes that don't fit with our current thinking provide opportunities for discussion with one another and our children.

Most of the terms used to describe darker skinned people (generally referring to people from the Indian subcontinent, where Mary was born) in The Secret Garden are not really acceptable nowadays, but if/when I let Junior Mate read the book, we can (and hopefully will) have discussions about why that thinking is out of date and unacceptable now. The answer to these issues is not to erase them or pretend they don't (and never have) exist. The answer is to have conversations with your children about how and why some of these ideas were acceptable in whatever time the media is set and why we don't think the same way now. We give our kids a chance to make the world better by letting them understand the mistakes of our past, as well as the good parts of our past. I mean, running around outside and loving nature are definitely worthwhile things, that many of us may have lost in our currently tech-heavy society. Parenting, and being a good human, honestly, requires work. It's easy to just get rid of things that don't work with our current values, but it's more enriching and valuable to examine them and figure out their place.

Anyway, I think this book is a worthwhile read, and if you are concerned about some of the classist and racist expressions in it, give it a read yourself and decide if you feel comfortable letting your child read it. You can always have the discussions about why we don't think the same way anymore, and you can also have delightful discussions about which flowers pop up first in the spring and the joys of watching the earth come alive year after year.

(This is my copy of the book from when I was a child!)
Buy it on Amazon here