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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Burnett's style in The Secret Garden is, like many of her other books, evocative, confiding, and highly descriptive. She invests a great deal of time in describing the lives and cycles of the natural world, as so much of the novel is set in flowering moorland and manicured gardens. She often shows this most clearly in long, slow passages describing in detail the contents of the "secret garden," which "bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles." Her diction is highly ornamented and full of imagery, populating the novel with endless vistas of flower-studded and fragrant moors, forbidding dusty corridors and buzzing, bee-sprinkled flowerbeds. The novel takes a slow pace that aligns with the gradual personal improvement of its characters.
What's more, Burnett's diction attempts to appeal to a younger audience with its use of interjections and direct addresses by the narrator. The book also contains many moments of absolutely direct didacticism that echo the language of scripture and sermons. Burnett's simple, instructional diction in these moments extols Christian Scientist values to her readership, describes the way self-improvement moves characters forward, and explains the moral background to the choices Mary, Dickon, Colin, and the others make. She also quite literally explains phrases she feels younger readers might find too complicated at certain points, making the language feel deliberately directed to that audience.
