#Painting the Garden: Noel Streatfeild the Garden as Restorative and Pre-1950 Dramatizations of The Secret Garden

[isfjmel-phleg]

In true [Marion] Fairfax style, her [1919] script of The Secret Garden is a model of creepy details and shifty, underhanded dealings. These include Mary's two forays into a bog, and Dr. Craven's plot to poison Colin so that the doctor can inherit the manor. The movie is designed to keep filmgoers in a state of pop-eyed anxiety, but it also gratifies the softhearted by interposing an especially doting Mrs. Sowerby, and by marrying off Colin and Mary, who in this version are not cousins. Fairfax's Mrs. Medlock is a punishing crone who forces Mary to hem towels as a penalty for having helped Colin remove a brace prescribed by the sadistic Dr. Craven. At the end of the picture, the garden is "full of bloom, and happiness reigns"; but an important function of this mysterious walled quadrangle on the grounds of Misselthwaite is to serve as a place of retribution in which the children bury Colin's brace, to even the score with the malevolent medic.

--Sally Sims Stokes, "Painting the Garden: Noel Streatfeild, the Garden as Restorative, and Pre-1950 Dramatizations of The Secret Garden," from In the Garden: Essays in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett, edited by Angelica Shirley Carpenter

The first film adaptation of The Secret Garden was made in 1919. It has since been lost, but its script and a summary do still exist, from which Stokes derives the above description. It is interesting how many elements not from the book that are part of this adaptation have continued to be used by later films, such as the villainization of the doctor and Mrs. Medlock, romance between the children, and sensationalized action sequences. Yet unlike many later versions, it includes Mrs. Sowerby in a significant role.