Shame, Enchantment and the 'There-ness' of Disability in The Secret Garden

Cooper, Harriet ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0510-2669 (2025) Shame, Enchantment and the 'There-ness' of Disability in The Secret Garden. Literature and Medicine, 43 (1). pp. 52-74.

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Abstract

Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden has been a repugnant object for contemporary scholars of disability studies because of the equivalence it draws between able embodiment and morality. While scholars have remarked on the novel's linguistic register of rectitude, few have focused on what it might mean to analyze The Secret Garden through the prism of shame. I attempt to develop such a reading here, exploring shame's textual and historical multivalence. I will ask: what is at stake—affectively and critically—in the practice of re-reading a novel that one experienced first in childhood? What is created, and what is effaced or over-written, in the temporal distance of adulthood and the critical distance afforded by a theoretical framework unavailable to the child?

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Norwich Medical School
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Mental Health and Social Care (fka Lifespan Health) Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Media Equality Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Epidemiology and Public Health Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Gender and Its Intersections Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Medical Humanities Research Network
Related URLs:	https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975543
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	01 Sep 2026 14:35
Last Modified:	01 Sep 2026 14:35
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/104401
DOI:	10.1353/lm.2025.a975543

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